How do you make a gentle comedy? In 'Small Prophets,' it requires nostalgia and handmade creatures

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Set us as preferred The story of “Small Prophets” — the gentle, magical, nostalgic British comedy streaming on Apple TV — begins and ends in a garden shed.The show’s creator, writer and director, Mackenzie Crook, and the animator Ainslie Henderson have been friends for at least 20 years.

One day, Henderson went to visit Crook in the shed at the end of his garden.It’s “a big mess of a creative little place,” Henderson said, where Crook makes things.He writes in there, but it’s a workshop too: he illustrates and he crafts.

He made many of the props in the show by hand.Both the shed and his house are peppered with his “beautiful little objects.” “If I’ve got a whole day with no other interruptions, that’s where I am,” Crook said.When Henderson walked into the shed that day, a weird, white, papier-mâché creature on the shelf caught his eye.

It was, as Crook told Henderson, a homunculus: one of a set of tiny prophets, or magical spirits, who lived in glass jars full of water.They could answer any question, and they had to answer truthfully.“Small Prophets” follows Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley), who works in a DIY store (a British term for a home improvement store), visits his dad Brian (Michael Palin) in a retirement home, and yearns for his girlfriend Clea to come home.

Clea vanished seven years ago, and Michael’s dad suggests that the homunculi — which he learned about from an Italian alchemist in Egypt — might be able to tell him what happened to her.The show premiered on BBC Two in February, when it quickly became the BBC’s biggest new scripted launch of the year.(It was renewed for a second season in September, this time on BBC One.) In the U.K., Crook is well-known for playing Gareth Keenan in the original British version of “The Office” (Gareth’s an analogue to Dwight Sc...