To whom it may concern

Small American towns have longed played an important role in science fiction and horror film and television – where would most of Jack Arnold’s films be without them – but in the 1990s, American television transformed these sleepy little hamlets into something altogether more sinister. Kicking off with Twin Peaks (1990-1991), there was a bit of a fad for ‘Small Town Weirdness’ that continued throughout the decade and which occasionally pops up even now.

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Director Joe Dante was just one of the talents involved with Eerie, Indiana (1991-1992) a short lived but brilliant comedy that saw young Marshall Teller and his family relocate from New Jersey to the eponymous town which turns out to be “the centre of weirdness for the universe.” Among the inhabitants are Elvis Presley, twins who retain their youth by sleeping in Tupperware, a pack of dogs conspiring to take over the world, Mr Chaney the werewolf and many other often borderline-dangerous eccentrics.

Although Eerie, Indiana mostly played it for laughs, it had a more direct line of descent from Twin Peaks than Northern Exposure – it was weirder for a start and despite the jokier tone and feeling that the show was being pitched at a much younger audience, there was still a palpable sense of unease running through the show. The terrors were mostly those that would trouble the under tens (a lot of the creepiness centres around the local school and adults are certainly not to be trusted) but the humour and unpredictability of the scripts proved enough incentive for adults to stay with the show during its criminally short run. It even got decidedly post-modern when, in the episode Reality Takes a Holiday, Marshall (played by Omri Katz) finds a script for a TV show in his mailbox. Suddenly he’s in a television studio, playing a character called Marshall, and everyone thinks his name is Omri…

As alluded to above, Eerie, Indiana is similar to Twin Peaks in one main respect – it didn’t last very long. A single season of just 19 episodes in fact – a twentieth, The Jolly Rogers, was written by Will A. Akers but was never filmed. It was something of a hallmark of these ‘Nightmare Neighbourhood’ shows with only Northern Exposure managing to stay the course. Eerie, Indiana was sort-of revived in 1998 with the equally short-lived (it too lasted only a season) Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, shot in Canada and starring none of the original cast.

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