Review – Happy Town Makes us Happy

Tonight, ABC unleashes another would-be cult show with the dark mystery Happy Town. We’ve had the chance — with a lot of other press — to take in the first three episodes of Happy Town. I’ll admit I came into Happy Town with a lot of cynicism because the early marketing cheekily dropped the phrase ‘from the network that brought you Twin Peaks.’ I worship Twin Peaks. When all was said and done though, Happy Town made me a believer.

The first thing you need to do before you watch Happy Town is get all of these Twin Peaks allusions out of your head. Both shows start with similar subject matter , an overarching mystery playing out in an isolated hamlet populated by typical small-town types with dark pasts, but that is where they part ways. Happy Town is far less in the realm of Théâtre de l’Absurde than Twin Peaks; Happy Town rather spends its time building an intricate mystery that resonates the bizarre while managing to subscribe to some consistent internal logic — a pleasing pace of storytelling for mystery fans who get frustrated easily.

The gist of Happy Town is this: The bucolic rural town of Haplin, or ‘˜Happy Town‘as the local’s call it, was once the scene of serial abductions thought to be perpetrated by ‘The Magic Man,’a character whose ability to make people disappear seemingly ‘…bordered on the supernatural,’to quote Sam Neill’s Merritt Graves. The abductions stopped, and over time the events became the substance of hushed remembrances. Flash to the present. Guess who’s back?

The show features an array of charismatic and purpose charged characters; from the affable pizza slinger Big Dave (Abraham Benrubi), to the Sheriff driven to the breaking point (M. C. Gainey), to his deputy son Tommy Conroy (Geoff Stults), and his wife played by Amy Acker, who is suddenly called upon by the town matriarch Peggy Haplin (Frances Conroy) to fill in for dad after he catches a case of the crazies, to her petulant and powerful son John (Steven Weber). Neill’s Grieves is a thinly veiled homage to Stephen King’s Leland Gaunt (Needful Things), as a new outsider who seems to be in town for a little manipulation, while fellow outsider Henley Boone (Lauren German) seems to be in town to get to the bottom of… something.

The magic man’s presence in the subtext of the town is punctuated in practically every scene by his ‘˜logo,’a question mark with a halo over it. Having a cool symbol is definitely a must have for any cult show, and in this case the symbolism is major win for Happy Town. For the time being the symbol makes for an interesting sub textual sort of connective tissue, letting us know who is connected to what — but not how.

As a mystery, Happy Town functions on an episode by episode scheme with the overarching story of Haplin’s past and present predicaments gathering shape in the periphery. You get answers, and you get development, without anything that feels like forced or intentionally vague story fodder. Happy Town is light on the tease and deny.

Describing Happy Town after seeing three episodes is a lot more difficult than describing it after seeing one. The thing you need to know about Happy Town is that it separates itself from the world of the predictable one episode at a time. There really is no way to sum up the story thus far other than to say that you should never feel safe in your assumptions as to where it is going — not in the dizzying ‘WTF is going on’sense of show’s like LOST, but more in the sense that there is a current of exhilaration running through Happy Town that keeps the boredom on mute. Sort of like… um… LOST.

If I had to complain about anything, and since I’m reviewing Happy Town I suppose I’m obligated to, it is that I don’t feel like I know the characters enough yet. That said, here is why I think the show will get over that hurdle: First of all, at three episodes in you shouldn’t feel like you know these people anyways. Do we learn things about them? Check. I wouldn’t condemn the show for lagging character development at episode three. Given the size of the cast of characters, I believe it is very on par.

More importantly, the characters do possess what I consider the number one attribute any good character MUST possess to be interesting: they are engaged in, or flat out representing archetypal struggles and characteristics that we encounter every day. From the frustration of class and social struggles, to the more fine grained domestic stuff, Happy Town‘s residents are real people we can relate to. Not everyone will relate with all of the characters, but somewhere there is someone that is going to speak to you.

Of course the characters are one thing, the ‘˜story’is another. The thing to remember there is what I’ve already said: Happy Town is not edging into a bigger story in hectic and bizarre beats, but rather arriving there in carefully constructed chapters, episode by episode. Sam Neill told me in an interview we’ll publish later that the show is like ‘Peyton Place on acid,’a reference that may shoot straight over a lot of people’s heads but rings truer and truer the more I think about it.

Happy Town may be the first honest success in nailing the serial mystery formula in some time. I, for one, am transfixed on the mystery of The Magic Man — and becoming more and more intrigued by the shifting tone of the characters every episode. Once these characters set in their molds, at least partially, I’d be prepared to declare Happy Town a complete success. Now all it needs is viewers.

We hear the term ‘no-one is who they seem to be’so much in today’s film and TV world that the phrase seems quaint and ineffective – Happy Town restores its power, completely. If the unexpected is what you crave, Happy Town has what you need.

Happy Town — ‘In This Home on Ice’premieres tonight, April 28^th, at 10pm EST on ABC.