Eerie, Indiana
Marshall Teller's family moved to a town of 16,661 where the neighbors stayed young inside giant Tupperware, the dogs were plotting and Elvis lived down the street. NBC cancelled it after one season; Fox Kids reruns in 1997 turned it into a cult.
Eerie, Indiana premiered on NBC on September 15, 1991, created by José Rivera and Karl Schaefer, with Gremlins director Joe Dante as creative consultant and the director of the pilot. Omri Katz, fresh off eight years as John Ross on Dallas and two years from Hocus Pocus, played Marshall Teller, a teenager whose family relocates to Eerie, Indiana, population 16,661, where he and his friend Simon Holmes are apparently the only people who notice that the town is wrong. The pilot, "Forever Ware," introduced a chipper neighbor selling Forever Ware, Tupperware-style containers that kept food fresh — and had kept her two sons boys since 1964. Later episodes brought a conspiracy of intelligent dogs, a tornado hunter modeled on Captain Ahab, Bigfoot and a very much alive Elvis Presley.
Critics liked it immediately. Entertainment Weekly praised its "absurdist suburban dread," USA Today called it "Stephen King by way of The Simpsons," and The Hollywood Reporter saw "the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands"; Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone were the obvious reference points. NBC never figured out how to sell a show with kid leads written for a wider audience. It was shot on film and expensive, and after thirteen episodes it was retooled with Jason Marsden's Dash X and a reveal that Mr. Radford had been an impostor all along, with John Astin stepping in as the real one. The last episode produced, "Reality Takes a Holiday," broke the fourth wall entirely, with Dash X trying to take over as the star of the show. Eighteen of the nineteen episodes aired before NBC pulled it.
The afterlife made the legend. The Disney Channel reran the series from October 1993 to early 1996, airing the final episode for the first time, and then Fox Kids put it on Saturday mornings from January to September 1997, where a new audience found it and the cult formed. That revival was enough for Fox Kids to commission a one-season spin-off, Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, in 1998, and for Avon to publish a run of paperback adventures starting with Return to Forever Ware. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch has named the show as an influence.
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