TV Review: Eerie, Indiana (1991)

Eerie, Indiana (1991-1992), starring Omri Katz, John Astin, and Justin Shenkerow.

Photo courtesy of the IMDb.

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This shortlived anthology series was heavily influenced by horror legend Joe Dante (director of Gremlins; The Howling). It’s aimed at middle-schoolers, but adults won’t be bored, either, as many of the stories are smart and wry. Dante also directed five of the episodes, and acted as a consultant for the other teleplays.

Each half-hour episode is a self-contained story about some weird event or person who is ruffling the cosmos in a small town in Indiana called Eerie. The tone is overall gentle irony, but there’s plenty of dark undertones too. Eerie is an intriguing place where all-American wholesomeness meets weirdness and creepiness. As Marshall, the 13-year-old main character says, "Eerie is the center of weirdness for the entire planet."

This show is in the same vein as Bradbury’s Green Town stories, or some of King’s Castle Rock tales, or a lot of Serling’s small-town Twilight Zone scripts, such as Walking Distance. It also plays like a forerunner of the Netflix series Stranger Things, with pre-Internet "Kids on Bikes" zipping around battling the forces of weirdness under the noses of their clueless parents.

The two Kids on Bikes here are Marshall and Simon, played by Katz and Shenkerow, respectively— two former child stars who unfortunately haven’t done much since. They make a great pair, with great chemistry. The pilot episode, Foreverware, directed by Dante, focuses on a group of Eerie housewives who swear by a Tupperware-like product that supposedly keeps things fresh forever. And “forever” isn’t an exaggeration, as many of the housewives sleep in it and have been "preserved" for decades. This includes the Foreverware inventor's widow, who has been keeping her twin sons in the containers since the early 1960s, with the result that they have never grown up.

Like a lot of shows that have since been acknowledged as being “ahead of their time,” Eerie never found an audience. Changes were made mid-season in hopes of attracting more eyeballs. First John Astin (The Addams Family) joined the cast as the proprietor of a store that sells weird artifacts, called “World O’Stuff.” Then, a mysterious, punk-like character called “Dash-x” showed up, and the stories became more arc-like rather than episodic. These changes were too late, however.

Eerie bit the dust after only 19 episodes. I mourned its passing, as someone who grew up in the old, weird, small- town America where stores like World O’ Stuff actually existed. Eerie fortunately lives on in DVD form as a “cult series.” (A late 90s reboot didn’t go anywhere.) A more recent series, streaming on Amazon Prime, called Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, seems to be inspired by Eerie, but of course it doesn't quite duplicate the older series's magic. I'd love to see a big-screen reboot of this series.