the eofftv review on Nightmare Neighbourhoods
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.
There had been precedents of course - American television had already dallied with the notion that beneath the homely veneer of picket fences and all-American values lay something much nastier, more rancid and unwholesome. Satanic cults seemed to have set up shop in small towns all over the States in early 70s TV (Black Noon (1971), Journey to the Unknown: The New People (1969), Ghost Story: Legion of Demons (1973)) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - itself a classic of small town paranoia - has proved to be the template for many shows and TV movies, among them Jerry Sohl’s Night Slaves (1970).
But it was Twin Peaks that really got city folk in a paranoid panic about those strange sorts living out in the country as surreal supernatural shenanigans replaced the hooded Satanists and alien doppelgangers. Lynch had already explored small town nastiness in Blue Velvet (1986) and one can only imagine the pitch meeting between Lynch and the suits at ABC as he tried to sell them on the idea of a surreal soap opera murder mystery about demonic visitors from a parallel dimension being investigated by a psychic FBI agent. Presumably he didn’t mention the dancing dwarf who spoke backwards…
ABC were clearly not sure about what they were getting and instructed Lynch, his co-creator Mark Frost and production company Spelling Entertainment to shoot an alternate ending for the pilot that would wrap up the story in the event that they chose not to commission a full series, allowing them to sell it on as a film. The ‘film’ version was released on video in Europe and the pilot was sufficiently enticing to calm ABC’s nerves. They were rewarded with a massive hit as the first series of 8 episodes - ostensibly about the hunt for the killer of Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer - became the most talked-about show of the year. An even weirder second season followed but the increasingly odd storylines (which culminated in a possessed Dale Cooper trapped inside the otherworldly Black Lodge) and dead-end subplots involving minor characters (brought to the fore when a major plot involving Cooper’s love affair with high school girl Audrey Horne was scrapped) led to declining ratings and the show ended after 30 episodes, with the much under-rated feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) filling in the back story of Laura Palmer in the days leading up to her death.
Twin Peaks may have been dead but its influence lived on. Though nothing that followed went to quite the extremes that Twin Peaks did (particularly that nightmarish, Lynch-directed final episode, still as unsettling today as when it was first broadcast on 10 June 1991), there were many shows that picked up some of the weirdness of Twin Peaks and twisted it in different directions.
First out of the gate came Northern Exposure (1990-1995), its first episode airing just three months after Twin Peaks debuted. Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s creation was a much gentler affair than Lynch and Frost’s but was no less odd. Rob Morrow starred as Dr Joel Fleischman, a young New York doctor who finds himself forced to relocate to the eccentric Alaskan town of Cicely to pay off his student debts.
Brand and Falsey were both members of the Esalen Institute in California, which promoted a humanistic alternative to mainstream education, drawing heavily on Eastern philosophies and the writings of Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner who was an early leader at the institute. Many of the teachings of Esalen found their way into the scripts for Northern Exposure which also drew on the ‘magical realism’ of authors like Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez et al and the show frequently diverted into strange fantasy and dreams. It even spoofed Twin Peaks in the 9 August 1990 episode, Russian Flu which sent-up the music and look of Peaks and made mention of the enigmatic Log Lady as well as explicitly referencing the coffee and cherry pie that most of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks seemed obsessed with.
Northern Exposure was less outré than Twin Peaks, less concerned with surreal horror and much happier to play with surreal light comedy, and the characters were generally more likeable. This may explain why it outlived Twin Peaks, running to six excellent seasons packed full of intelligently written essays on the eccentricities of life in a remote, cut-off community. During the early run of Northern Exposure, producer Joshua Brand was involved in a similar series, Going to Extremes, which sent a group of American medical students to a Caribbean island, again meeting an odd assortment of characters. It proved to be just a bit to much like going over old ground and the show lasted a single season.
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.
Picket Fences (1992-1996) was the brainchild of David E. Kelly, later to bring us more small screen weirdness in the shape of Ally McBeal (1997-2002). Picket Fences was set in the seemingly idyllic small town (aren’t they all?) of Rome, Wisconsin where the cows give birth to human babies, mayors invariably meet sticky ends, a serial bather is on the loose, breaking into residents homes and leaving unsightly soap rings in their baths, and Sheriff Jimmy Brock (Tom Skeritt) struggles to make sense of it all.
Picket Fences differentiated itself from other Twin Peaks derived dramas by pretending to be a crime series - every week, some sort of misdemeanour would be committed and Sheriff Brock would dutifully investigate, but invariably the crimes were never quite the sort of things other small screen cops would be expected to deal with. Violent shoot-outs with crazed drug lords? Organised crime on your tail? Bent cops giving you grief? That’s nothing compared to the catalogue of bizarre cases investigated by Brock and his deputies, the gung-ho Maxine and former big-city cop Kenny. Murder by steamroller, a Tin Man murdered on stage during an amateur performance of The Wizard of Oz, a mercy-killing nun, a possible UFO abduction and the messy fates of that seemingly never-ending string of mayors were all in a days work for the Rome PD.
Much more in the Northern Exposure vein than of eccentricity rather than the dark surrealism of Twin Peaks, Picket Fences wasn’t afraid to tackle ‘big’ issues (foetal tissue transplantation, the Holocaust and AIDS were just some of the issues it turned its hand to) and as you’d expect from a writer of Kelley’s calibre the scripts were intelligent, witty and crammed full of characters that are not easily forgotten. Indeed for some of us, this remains his best work.
Kelley managed to work in a couple of crossover with another of his shows, Chicago Hope (1994-2000) - in the 1994 Picket Fences episode Rebels With Causes, two of the residents of Rome travel to Chicago Hope Hospital, while in the Chicago Hope episode Small Sacrifices (1995), one of the Rome residents again seeks medical assistance at the hospital. More intriguingly, Kelley pulled off a sort-off crossover with The X Files (1993-2002), another show that benefited from the space opened up by Twin Peaks and which itself featured any number of creepy small towns (Red Museum (1994), Die Hand die Verletzt (1995), War of the Coprophages (1996), Home (1996), Bad Blood (1998) et al). Kelley and X Files supremo Chris Carter had discussed the idea of a full-on crossover but as the shows were on rival networks, it simply wasn’t going to happen. Instead, they managed to sneak a much more subtle crossover under the noses of the suits - the Picket Fences episode Away In a Manger involves strange goings-on involving the local cows, and one character specifically mentions that something similar had happened recently in the nearby town of Delta Glen. It’s absolutely no coincidence whatsoever that the X Files story Red Museum was set in the fictional Wisconsin town of Delta Glen and also featured odd happenings with cows. The Picket Fences episode even name checks the very same Dr Larsen who appeared in The X Files - and amazingly no-one at CBS, home of Picket Fences and the network most against the idea of a crossover, noticed!
Sticking much closer to the Twin Peaks formula was the wonderful American Gothic (1995-1996), another criminally short-lived show, this one created by Shaun Cassidy and exec produced by Sam Raimi. The Evil Dead director was busy on the small screen for some while from the mid-1990s (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999), Young Hercules (1998-1999), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2001)) but American Gothic was by far and away the best TV show to bear his name.
Gary Cole, hitherto best known for his role of late-night radio presenter Jack Killian in the excellent Midnight Caller (1988-1991) puts in a terrific and terrifying turn as Sheriff Lucas Buck, the corrupt and possibly demonic lawman of Trinity, South Carolina who starts to pursue his estranged young son Caleb as the town’s twisted network of sometimes unfathomable relationships starts to unravel. Caleb is watched over by his dead sister Merlyn (whose repeated cry of “there’s someone at the door!” remains the show’s most chilling memory) but even her motivations are called into question in a show where the line between Good and Evil is extremely hazy.
Blessed with an excellent cast (which also included Paige Turco, Brenda Bakke, Sarah Paulson and, in the episode Meet the Beetles, the great Bruce Campbell), directors who knew how to work up and sustain an atmosphere of dread and unease (among them TV veterans James Frawley, Bruce Seth Green and Mel Damski) and clever, sharp scripts (from the likes of Miracle Mile‘s (1988) Steve De Jarnatt and Stephen Gaghan, future Oscar winner for Traffic (2000)), American Gothic should have been the one that broke the Nightmare Neighbourhoods duck and joined Northern Exposure in enjoying a long lifespan. Sadly it wasn’t to be - network CBS seemed to have no idea what they’d been given by Cassidy and Raimi and constantly moved it around the schedules, pre-empted new episodes and finally pulled the plug with four episodes still unshown.
American Gothic deserved a better hand than the one it was dealt - today it’s still creepy as hell, it’s multi-layered scripts ensuring that it remains repeatedly watchable over a decade later. The characters are the best drawn of any of the post-Twin Peaks shows and the eternal story of Good vs Evil is given enough new wrinkles to ensure American Gothic a devoted cult following who are still prepared to fly the flag for a show that deserved so much more from a network who simply didn’t seem to understand what it was trying to do. Shaun Cassidy - a former musician, half-brother of pop star David Cassidy - returned to small town America in 2005 for Invasion which saw a small community under threat from aliens who infiltrate the town in the wake of a hurricane.
The thread of American ‘Small Town Weirdness’ shows largely petered out after American Gothic, though their influence could still be detected years later - the bizarre Carnivalé (2003-2005), though set mostly in a travelling circus, has some of the same sense of all not being well beneath the smiley veneer of small town America and the Sci-Fi Channel’s Eureka (2006-2012) (A Town Called Eureka in the UK) revived the formula to great success. Jericho (2006-2008), although much more concerned with post-9/11 fears of terrorism, also had some of that ‘Small Town Weirdness’ about it.
Even British television got in on the act, though given that it’s a smaller country and towns tend to be less remote than some of those in the States. Springhill (1996-1997) was a 26 episode/two series show shown on satellite/cable channel Sky One. Set not in a remote town but a suburb of Liverpool, it featured the Freeman family whose already complicated lives (here of their five children were actually mothered by Eva Morrigan with who Jack Freeman had once had an affair) were made even more convoluted when Eva returns and seems to be a witch and angels seem be watching over the family as a full scale war between Good and Evil threatens to tear the family apart.
Much later, the ITV soap opera Night and Day (2001-2003) transplanted the basic premise of Twin Peaks (the tragedy of a young resident, in this case 16 year old Jane Harper who vanishes without trace, and its devastating effects on a community) to Greenwich in south east London. It featured a mysterious stranger who could stop time and, in the last episode, a ghost and drew heavily on the “guilty-secrets-uncovered-by-tragedy” theme that had run through Twin Peaks but the inner city setting worked against it and it simply wasn’t as creepy, effective or memorable as Lynch and Frost’s original.
In more recent years, the folk horror of Mayday (2013) borrowed much from Twin Peaks, including its opening murder of a popular young local woman whose spirit continues to disturb the troubled town long after her death. But surely the most nightmarish of British small screen neighbourhoods has been the northern town of Royston Vasey with its coterie of grotesque inhabitants as seen in the extraordinary The League of Gentlemen (1999-2017). It’s repeated refrain of “you’ll never leave” manages to sum up both the appeal and horror of small town life more than just about anything else.
There had been precedents of course - American television had already dallied with the notion that beneath the homely veneer of picket fences and all-American values lay something much nastier, more rancid and unwholesome. Satanic cults seemed to have set up shop in small towns all over the States in early 70s TV (Black Noon (1971), Journey to the Unknown: The New People (1969), Ghost Story: Legion of Demons (1973)) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - itself a classic of small town paranoia - has proved to be the template for many shows and TV movies, among them Jerry Sohl’s Night Slaves (1970).
But it was Twin Peaks that really got city folk in a paranoid panic about those strange sorts living out in the country as surreal supernatural shenanigans replaced the hooded Satanists and alien doppelgangers. Lynch had already explored small town nastiness in Blue Velvet (1986) and one can only imagine the pitch meeting between Lynch and the suits at ABC as he tried to sell them on the idea of a surreal soap opera murder mystery about demonic visitors from a parallel dimension being investigated by a psychic FBI agent. Presumably he didn’t mention the dancing dwarf who spoke backwards…
ABC were clearly not sure about what they were getting and instructed Lynch, his co-creator Mark Frost and production company Spelling Entertainment to shoot an alternate ending for the pilot that would wrap up the story in the event that they chose not to commission a full series, allowing them to sell it on as a film. The ‘film’ version was released on video in Europe and the pilot was sufficiently enticing to calm ABC’s nerves. They were rewarded with a massive hit as the first series of 8 episodes - ostensibly about the hunt for the killer of Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer - became the most talked-about show of the year. An even weirder second season followed but the increasingly odd storylines (which culminated in a possessed Dale Cooper trapped inside the otherworldly Black Lodge) and dead-end subplots involving minor characters (brought to the fore when a major plot involving Cooper’s love affair with high school girl Audrey Horne was scrapped) led to declining ratings and the show ended after 30 episodes, with the much under-rated feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) filling in the back story of Laura Palmer in the days leading up to her death.
Twin Peaks may have been dead but its influence lived on. Though nothing that followed went to quite the extremes that Twin Peaks did (particularly that nightmarish, Lynch-directed final episode, still as unsettling today as when it was first broadcast on 10 June 1991), there were many shows that picked up some of the weirdness of Twin Peaks and twisted it in different directions.
First out of the gate came Northern Exposure (1990-1995), its first episode airing just three months after Twin Peaks debuted. Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s creation was a much gentler affair than Lynch and Frost’s but was no less odd. Rob Morrow starred as Dr Joel Fleischman, a young New York doctor who finds himself forced to relocate to the eccentric Alaskan town of Cicely to pay off his student debts.
Brand and Falsey were both members of the Esalen Institute in California, which promoted a humanistic alternative to mainstream education, drawing heavily on Eastern philosophies and the writings of Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner who was an early leader at the institute. Many of the teachings of Esalen found their way into the scripts for Northern Exposure which also drew on the ‘magical realism’ of authors like Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez et al and the show frequently diverted into strange fantasy and dreams. It even spoofed Twin Peaks in the 9 August 1990 episode, Russian Flu which sent-up the music and look of Peaks and made mention of the enigmatic Log Lady as well as explicitly referencing the coffee and cherry pie that most of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks seemed obsessed with.
Northern Exposure was less outré than Twin Peaks, less concerned with surreal horror and much happier to play with surreal light comedy, and the characters were generally more likeable. This may explain why it outlived Twin Peaks, running to six excellent seasons packed full of intelligently written essays on the eccentricities of life in a remote, cut-off community. During the early run of Northern Exposure, producer Joshua Brand was involved in a similar series, Going to Extremes, which sent a group of American medical students to a Caribbean island, again meeting an odd assortment of characters. It proved to be just a bit to much like going over old ground and the show lasted a single season.
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.
Picket Fences (1992-1996) was the brainchild of David E. Kelly, later to bring us more small screen weirdness in the shape of Ally McBeal (1997-2002). Picket Fences was set in the seemingly idyllic small town (aren’t they all?) of Rome, Wisconsin where the cows give birth to human babies, mayors invariably meet sticky ends, a serial bather is on the loose, breaking into residents homes and leaving unsightly soap rings in their baths, and Sheriff Jimmy Brock (Tom Skeritt) struggles to make sense of it all.
Picket Fences differentiated itself from other Twin Peaks derived dramas by pretending to be a crime series - every week, some sort of misdemeanour would be committed and Sheriff Brock would dutifully investigate, but invariably the crimes were never quite the sort of things other small screen cops would be expected to deal with. Violent shoot-outs with crazed drug lords? Organised crime on your tail? Bent cops giving you grief? That’s nothing compared to the catalogue of bizarre cases investigated by Brock and his deputies, the gung-ho Maxine and former big-city cop Kenny. Murder by steamroller, a Tin Man murdered on stage during an amateur performance of The Wizard of Oz, a mercy-killing nun, a possible UFO abduction and the messy fates of that seemingly never-ending string of mayors were all in a days work for the Rome PD.
Much more in the Northern Exposure vein than of eccentricity rather than the dark surrealism of Twin Peaks, Picket Fences wasn’t afraid to tackle ‘big’ issues (foetal tissue transplantation, the Holocaust and AIDS were just some of the issues it turned its hand to) and as you’d expect from a writer of Kelley’s calibre the scripts were intelligent, witty and crammed full of characters that are not easily forgotten. Indeed for some of us, this remains his best work.
Kelley managed to work in a couple of crossover with another of his shows, Chicago Hope (1994-2000) - in the 1994 Picket Fences episode Rebels With Causes, two of the residents of Rome travel to Chicago Hope Hospital, while in the Chicago Hope episode Small Sacrifices (1995), one of the Rome residents again seeks medical assistance at the hospital. More intriguingly, Kelley pulled off a sort-off crossover with The X Files (1993-2002), another show that benefited from the space opened up by Twin Peaks and which itself featured any number of creepy small towns (Red Museum (1994), Die Hand die Verletzt (1995), War of the Coprophages (1996), Home (1996), Bad Blood (1998) et al). Kelley and X Files supremo Chris Carter had discussed the idea of a full-on crossover but as the shows were on rival networks, it simply wasn’t going to happen. Instead, they managed to sneak a much more subtle crossover under the noses of the suits - the Picket Fences episode Away In a Manger involves strange goings-on involving the local cows, and one character specifically mentions that something similar had happened recently in the nearby town of Delta Glen. It’s absolutely no coincidence whatsoever that the X Files story Red Museum was set in the fictional Wisconsin town of Delta Glen and also featured odd happenings with cows. The Picket Fences episode even name checks the very same Dr Larsen who appeared in The X Files - and amazingly no-one at CBS, home of Picket Fences and the network most against the idea of a crossover, noticed!
Sticking much closer to the Twin Peaks formula was the wonderful American Gothic (1995-1996), another criminally short-lived show, this one created by Shaun Cassidy and exec produced by Sam Raimi. The Evil Dead director was busy on the small screen for some while from the mid-1990s (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999), Young Hercules (1998-1999), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2001)) but American Gothic was by far and away the best TV show to bear his name.
Gary Cole, hitherto best known for his role of late-night radio presenter Jack Killian in the excellent Midnight Caller (1988-1991) puts in a terrific and terrifying turn as Sheriff Lucas Buck, the corrupt and possibly demonic lawman of Trinity, South Carolina who starts to pursue his estranged young son Caleb as the town’s twisted network of sometimes unfathomable relationships starts to unravel. Caleb is watched over by his dead sister Merlyn (whose repeated cry of “there’s someone at the door!” remains the show’s most chilling memory) but even her motivations are called into question in a show where the line between Good and Evil is extremely hazy.
Blessed with an excellent cast (which also included Paige Turco, Brenda Bakke, Sarah Paulson and, in the episode Meet the Beetles, the great Bruce Campbell), directors who knew how to work up and sustain an atmosphere of dread and unease (among them TV veterans James Frawley, Bruce Seth Green and Mel Damski) and clever, sharp scripts (from the likes of Miracle Mile‘s (1988) Steve De Jarnatt and Stephen Gaghan, future Oscar winner for Traffic (2000)), American Gothic should have been the one that broke the Nightmare Neighbourhoods duck and joined Northern Exposure in enjoying a long lifespan. Sadly it wasn’t to be - network CBS seemed to have no idea what they’d been given by Cassidy and Raimi and constantly moved it around the schedules, pre-empted new episodes and finally pulled the plug with four episodes still unshown.
American Gothic deserved a better hand than the one it was dealt - today it’s still creepy as hell, it’s multi-layered scripts ensuring that it remains repeatedly watchable over a decade later. The characters are the best drawn of any of the post-Twin Peaks shows and the eternal story of Good vs Evil is given enough new wrinkles to ensure American Gothic a devoted cult following who are still prepared to fly the flag for a show that deserved so much more from a network who simply didn’t seem to understand what it was trying to do. Shaun Cassidy - a former musician, half-brother of pop star David Cassidy - returned to small town America in 2005 for Invasion which saw a small community under threat from aliens who infiltrate the town in the wake of a hurricane.
The thread of American ‘Small Town Weirdness’ shows largely petered out after American Gothic, though their influence could still be detected years later - the bizarre Carnivalé (2003-2005), though set mostly in a travelling circus, has some of the same sense of all not being well beneath the smiley veneer of small town America and the Sci-Fi Channel’s Eureka (2006-2012) (A Town Called Eureka in the UK) revived the formula to great success. Jericho (2006-2008), although much more concerned with post-9/11 fears of terrorism, also had some of that ‘Small Town Weirdness’ about it.
Even British television got in on the act, though given that it’s a smaller country and towns tend to be less remote than some of those in the States. Springhill (1996-1997) was a 26 episode/two series show shown on satellite/cable channel Sky One. Set not in a remote town but a suburb of Liverpool, it featured the Freeman family whose already complicated lives (here of their five children were actually mothered by Eva Morrigan with who Jack Freeman had once had an affair) were made even more convoluted when Eva returns and seems to be a witch and angels seem be watching over the family as a full scale war between Good and Evil threatens to tear the family apart.
Much later, the ITV soap opera Night and Day (2001-2003) transplanted the basic premise of Twin Peaks (the tragedy of a young resident, in this case 16 year old Jane Harper who vanishes without trace, and its devastating effects on a community) to Greenwich in south east London. It featured a mysterious stranger who could stop time and, in the last episode, a ghost and drew heavily on the “guilty-secrets-uncovered-by-tragedy” theme that had run through Twin Peaks but the inner city setting worked against it and it simply wasn’t as creepy, effective or memorable as Lynch and Frost’s original.
In more recent years, the folk horror of Mayday (2013) borrowed much from Twin Peaks, including its opening murder of a popular young local woman whose spirit continues to disturb the troubled town long after her death. But surely the most nightmarish of British small screen neighbourhoods has been the northern town of Royston Vasey with its coterie of grotesque inhabitants as seen in the extraordinary The League of Gentlemen (1999-2017). It’s repeated refrain of “you’ll never leave” manages to sum up both the appeal and horror of small town life more than just about anything else.