TV Review: Happy Town

For weeks now, ABC has been hyping its new horror/mystery series Happy Town, and I can't say I blame them. With the clock rapidly ticking down on Lost, I'm sure that network executives have been just as stymied as to how to fill the void left by that franchise as its many fans have been.

For the network, the answer to that question seems to have come by way of tapping into the weirdness of another noteworthy cult classic. So, in the same way that Lost plays like what Gilligan's Island might be like if it took place in The Twilight Zone, Happy Town has been hyped as sort of a modern take on Twin Peaks.

This has of course been tried before. Anybody remember Eerie, Indiana? How about Push, Nevada? Didn't think so.

In its attempt to out-Peak David Lynch, Happy Town works on some levels, and doesn't on others. There's plenty of weirdness here, some of which is genuinely intriguing. A sheriff played by M.C. Gainey (who Lost fans will recognize as that fake-beard guy from "The Others") goes into a trance every so-often and starts muttering about someone named "Chloe" while interrogating suspects. Sam O'Neill also does a nice job of making you go "hmmm" as a mysterious shop owner who could have walked right out of the script for Stephen King's Needful Things.

At other times however, things border on being cliché. There's a nasty bird that seems to hover around whenever bad things are about to happen (think of the owls from Twin Peaks or the crow from another King small-screen adaptation for The Stand). There's also kind of a glut of distracting oddball characters — from the boarding house full of spinster widows to the town drunk/tweaker, to the inbred redneck brothers who run the town landfill.

I'm assuming that at some point all of these characters will figure into some kind of larger significance to the overall plot. That's the hope, anyway.

But for now, it just seems to be a case of trying to cram too much quirkiness into a single hour. One of the things which gave Twin Peaks its allure, was the way Lynch drew you into its hallucinatory mysteries. For now at least, Happy Town seems to be more about clobbering you over the head with it.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blog The Rockologist. Glen is also the author of Neil Young FAQ, published in May 2012 by Backbeat Books/Hal Leonard Publishing.

Visit Glen Boyd's author page — Glen Boyd's Blog