Tuesday, November 18, 2003
I Can See Eerie Now The Rain Has Gone
Some TV shows are good. Some, such as Grandstand, make it very easy for schedulers to plan Saturday afternoon entertainment. Some are quite frankly an abomination and make you weep for the state of television, and Coupling, we're looking at you here. Only a very few, however, make it into the list of The 117 Acest things of all Time... Ever. Eerie, Indiana is just such a show.
Set in a small town that just happened to be the centre of weirdness for the country, it's hero was a 13 year old paperboy called Marshall out to expose this to the world. This was marketed as a kids comedy series, but it was so much more than that. It was incredibly well written and with a sense of invention and humour that is lacking in most 'adult' programmes, we say, without any overexaggeration or hyperbole, that this is the greatest TV series of all time (Please note that TiaPL is prone to both overexaggeration and hyperbole, as we've told you a million times in the past.) And while we're sure you're agreeing with us about just how fab it was, we want you to forget such classic episodes as the one where the kid got a massive brace and could hear what dogs were saying, he capitalist satire of the one where the whole town turns into shopping zombies, singing the World of Stuff jingle over and over again and the surreal brilliance of the one with the twins being kept in tuppeware boxes. The one we want to focus on is an episode entitled Reality Takes a Holiday.
In this episode Marshall wakes up to find a script in his mailbox. This script is for an episode of a TV series called Eerie, Indiana. The episode is called Reality Takes a Holiday and is about the character of Marshall finding a script in his mailbox for an episode of a TV series called Eerie, Indiana... etc, etc. This whole concept is clearly one of the most fantastic ideas ever and the execution was flawless, everyone else, other than Marshall, was happily aware it's a TV show and played themselves, rather than the characters. Marshall was naturally confused by this, particularly as everyone called him Omri, and his best mate Simon, was now an obnoxious twat of a child actor. Although quite why this was confusing I'm not sure as Simon was an obnoxious twat in the show as well. As half hours of television go, this was as perfect as Nicola herself, and has yet to be bettered by anything, except possibly the episode of Sooty and Sweep where Sweep dreamt he was on Stars in their Eyes and did Pavarotti.
So, for that, and for the episode where the guys brain gets replaced by My Sharona, Eerie, Indiana gets awarded the coveted position of The Third Acest Thing in the World... Ever!.
