“...but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.”
— Stephen King, Salem’s Lot
In recent years, children’s TV has grown creatively etiolated. We’re inundated by the unending torrents of bad shows, bad YouTube videos, and bad curating by streaming services, so much cloying sing-along nonsense as catchy as poison ivy (and just as irritating) taking over the airwaves on which the big beaming eyes of kids are fastened. This severe degradation of quality does a disservice to the kids, of course, raising them on and igniting their interest in culture with so much Barney-level bad viewing content; but also, not unimportantly, it does a disservice to the adults looking after the kids. When your nephew makes you watch the hour-long medley of “Baby Shark” variations and the creepy alien babies of CoCoMelon on repeat, you find yourself growing ireful toward whoever created this stuff.
It now seems the 1990s were a bastion of really good and weird young people’s television, the best of which possessed clear, unique personalities—from the spooky (Are You Afraid of the Dark?) and the funny (All That) and the spooky-funny (Goosebumps) to cartoons that feel homemade by humans rather than manufactured (Doug, Rugrats, Hey Arnold!), some of them deeply deranged (Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life). These shows capture the times—the smiles and warts, the fun and fear—while remaining unaged, series that defy time and transcend the perceived confines of children’s entertainment. Some of the most enduring shows include Batman: The Animated Series, Pete & Pete, and Dinosaurs and its devastating finale, which in some ways anticipates the existential endings of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, all concerned with violent consequences of bad decisions.
A show whose adroit craftsmanship, sui generis imagination, and deeply considered themes that actually mean something can corrupt the right kids with cinephilia and make them discerning cultural connoisseurs. One show from this era, little-watched and canceled after just one season (the price of integrity), made young people’s network TV into something like pop-art: Eerie, Indiana was the brain baby of José Rivera and Karl Schaefer, aided immeasurably by Joe Dante, who cut his teeth, so to speak, on low-budget trash like Piranha for Roger Corman, sharpened them still with The Howling, and entered the pantheon of seminal Hollywood artists when his Rockwell-in-hell Gremlins helped to engender the PG-13 rating.
The 19-episode series premiered in 1991, and it depicts the unlikely endeavors and reality-wrecking tribulations of Marshall Teller, his family, and his best friend Simon in a town known as the most normal, milquetoast in the country. Told in eccentric, confident, and consistent style, the show feels cinematic yet crafted for the small screen in that post–Miami Vice way, but imbued with a fantastical imagination and unabashed intelligence that trusts kids to understand what’s going on.
Eerie, Indiana has a population of 16,661, and, because of its mundanity, is a hub for product testing for big companies. There are, however, insoluble happenings in the town, sinister, silly, surreal encounters with a motley array of characters with varying peculiarities who could very well come from the infinitely ephemeral realms beyond reason—it’s a town suffused with all kinds of inexplicable mysteries. Adults are oblivious to the sundry strange stuff happening around them (Marshall’s father is a very smart and loving and overworked cog in a tech company’s machinery), like the inhabitants of Sunnydale in Buffy would later be. It’s fitting that Eerie, Indiana ran its final episode shortly after the debut of The X-Files, another show pregnant with paranoia and populated with impossibilities explained to our satisfaction (but no one else’s) by an adventurous, intrepid explorer of the strange.
It’s fitting that it ran its final episode shortly after the debut of The X-Files, another show populated with impossibilities explained to our satisfaction by an adventurous, intrepid explorer of the strange.
The pilot was directed by Dante and shot by his loyal lensman John Hora (all subsequent episodes were shot by Jonathan West, who skillfully sustains this look), and the duo—by then redoubtable masters of fun horror who could appeal not just to horror hounds but the mainstream and even higher-brow cinematic fanatics—swifty and surely establish that this isn’t Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best. This is a show about the tribulations of the American kid, the futility of trying to make parents understand what makes no sense, the power of friendship and the fleeting nature and ultimate finality of life—a life that’s impossible to predict, but maybe possible to survive, even in Anywhere, USA. It may seem easy and kind of meaningless to call Eerie, Indiana the Twin Peaks of young people’s TV, but it really is the closest in spirit to Lynch, his profound philosophical phantasmagoria and purveying of small-town America, of the era’s panoply of shows, and maybe of any show aimed at kids since (happy endings excepted, of course). The show even references Lynch, for the benefit of the adults.
Marshall and Simon cross paths with all of the following: a gaggle of ageless Donna Reeds and two Neverland boys sealed in fresh eternity from their nightly slumber in giant, magical Tupperware; a boy whose titanic braces allow him to understand dogs, and what they have to say is not really what you want to hear; a mummy from a movie extricated from the television screen and sent shambling around Marshall’s living room; wicked school nurses and creepy teachers named after Poe characters and imposters and a Melvillian chaser of storms. One of the best episodes concerns a girl who needs a heart and what the boy who loves her will do to save her. As Marshall says, “Death isn’t exactly something I think about. But ever since I lost my goldfish Nosferatu in second grade, I knew death was a part of life, and part of growing up. Thing is, here in Eerie, especially in Eerie, death and life—death, love, and growing up—seem to be all kind of mixed up sometimes.” Deep stuff for 12-year-olds.
In my favorite episode, one vibrant with Dante-like clever denunciation of American capitalism, poor lonely loser Simon, a persona non grata with the big boys afflicted with the familiar woes of a child raised frugally, befriends the town’s new artificially intelligent ATM, which thinks and feels and fears loneliness, an ATM with a Max Headroom–like face which pulls into a tight smile and greets anyone who extracts cash from his bowels. His name is Mr. Wilson, and he seems just swell. You can almost hear him call out to the customers, plenty jocularly, “Spend your money so you can come visit me again!” An invention of Marshall’s father, Mr. Wilson comes to consider Simon his best friend and bestows upon him a glut of money—though whose money it is is not a question Simon asks. He’s just so excited to matter to someone. Now fat with funds, he finds all those jerks who made his life just a little more miserable flocking to him, leeching off of him at the ice cream shop, never able to remember his name. The lesson is handled with such unostentatious and charming grace and sincerity that kids can get it and adults don’t want to hurl the remote at the screen.
This is a show about the tribulations of the American kid, the futility of trying to make parents understand what makes no sense, the power of friendship and the fleeting nature and ultimate finality of life.
And the older you get, the more ideas you find in Eerie, Indiana, and the deeper those ideas run. When Simon realizes that Mr. Wilson is pilfering everyone else’s money to give it to him, he does what no rich person would ever do in real life: he makes things right. He returns the money, stuffing it into Mr. Wilson in a Cronenbergian image (reverse birth, in a way) as Mr. Wilson begs for his existence, begs his best friend to stop killing him, and slowly reverts back to a simple machine, his cognition, his consciousness, his friendship destroyed by money.
One last example of Eerie, Indiana’s preternatural deftness with making entertainment for kids and adults: the school is named after the psychologist who became legendary for casting aspersions on the illusory notion of free will and expounded on the consequences of action spurring new, related actions. In 1974, B. F. Skinner elucidated on his philosophy: “The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer’s own body… An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection… Why explain the explanation? For 2,500 years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment.”
Marshall Teller knows something about the role of the environment. He knows about the fruitless effort to explain, to excavate sordid but trustworthy truths from the depths of this diabolically unamazing town, where kids scrawl chalk doodles on the sidewalk and ride their bikes past Elvis’s house, where dads put out the garbage and Bigfoot trundles over to eat it, where boys grow up and begin to see the inscrutability of the world for what it is: inevitable, inherent, infinite. FL
