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The booby-trap board game where you inherited a fortune by making sure everyone else met an 'accident' first. A tipping portrait, a falling chandelier, a trap door — you sprang them on your rivals' characters and hoped the detective arrived to find you holding the winning card.
Four orphaned Alden siblings turn an abandoned boxcar in the woods into a home — and when their kindly grandfather finds them, he just moves the boxcar to his backyard. Gertrude Chandler Warner's 1924 classic became a 90s classroom juggernaut after ghostwriters revived the series in 1991, on the way to more than 160 titles.
Wisteria Lane looked perfect — the lawns, the casseroles, the cul-de-sac waves — and every bit of it was a cover story. Narrated by a neighbor who takes her own life in the show's first minutes, ABC's suburban satire-soap made Sunday night appointment television again and turned four housewives into the biggest stars on TV.
The ABC serial drama that turned network TV into a mystery box for six seasons. When Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, survivors discovered that their new home held impossible secrets—a smoke monster, a hidden hatch, a shadowy group called "the Others"—and a mythology so complex that fans spent years theorizing about every detail.
In April 1990, a logging town in the Pacific Northwest became the mystery the whole country was trying to solve. An FBI agent, a damn fine cup of coffee, and one question — "Who killed Laura Palmer?" Twin Peaks proved network television could be genuinely strange, elegantly cinematic, and popular all at once — at least until the answer came, and the spell broke.
You'd see the preview for Unsolved Mysteries and know you wouldn't sleep that night. Robert Stack in a dark trench coat, a synth theme that still echoes, re-enacted crimes and missing people and things that made no sense — and Stack's voice promising you could call in with a tip. A generation learned to fear its own hallway from this show.
Kristen Bell as a teenage private eye working her dad's cases in the corrupt seaside town of Neptune. Critically adored, barely watched, canceled in 2007 — and then its fans paid $5.7 million to bring it back.