Eerie, Indiana

“My name is Marshall Teller. I knew my new home town was going to be different from where I grew up in New Jersey but this is ridiculous. Nobody believes me, but Eerie, Indiana is the center of weirdness for the entire planet. Item, Elvis lives on my paper route. Item, Bigfoot eats out of my trash. Item, even man’s best friend is weird. Still don’t believe me? You will.”

This short blurb spoken as a voice-over by the main character during the introduction sums up the back-story quite nicely. A boy, by the name of Marshall Teller, moves from New Jersey to the seemingly picturesque and apparently normal town of Eerie, Indiana, but things aren’t what they seem.

The show was originally broadcast from 1991-92 on NBC, but was cancelled before it had the chance to gain a decent sized audience. I remember catching the odd episode on Channel 4 here in the UK and instantly liking it, so when I heard about a Region 2 DVD release, I snapped it up.

The show itself can really be described as a cross between The X-Files and Malcolm in the Middle, with story-lines dealing with dogs who conspire to take over the world, the Eerie wolf (which is in fact a Werewolf), an obsessive housewife who preserves her youth by sleeping in a giant vacuum sealed container and an old mill haunted by the ghost of the worse (as in rubbish) bank-robber east of the Mississippi, all the while being original enough not to insult its audience.

Arguably, the best episode is “Reality Takes A Holiday“, in which Marshall discovers an Eerie, Indiana script in his mailbox, and suddenly finds himself on a TV set, where his family are actors and he is destined to be written out of the show! This is probably the most original concept for a TV episode I’ve ever come across.

More information can be found on the Wikipedia article, of course.