Happy Town

Some viewers will wrongly believe they need this absorbing and thoroughly entertaining show like a hole in the head.

All the doom and dread is diverting enough, but the real mystery is this: Will "Happy Town" turn out to be something original -- or just a medley of Freddy Krueger's greatest hits?

More accessible than “V” or “FlashForward,” “Happy Town” shows a sure hand with pacing and knows how to end an hour with a powerful cliffhanger.

Even as you may be tempted on occasion to roll (or close) your eyes, it’s hard not to be drawn in at least partway.

A cut above "Harper's Island," which started off amusingly, but ended badly, "Happy Town" boasts some serious mojo in Sam Neill.

I snickered through about half of the premiere of this dark-doings-in-a-small-town show from some of the folks who brought you October Road. But by the end, it had earned its florid melodrama.

If you're a sucker for tangled mysteries--and are in need of a few heebie-jeebies--the show has enough oomph to its early episodes to suck you in.

While it's nowhere close to brilliant, Happy Town's unpredictability makes it watchable--at least for now.

Not so happily, "Happy Town," is even more clichéd -- like "Scream."... [But] after you sit through a few episodes, it does get better, and the first-rate cast is a pleasure to watch.

Town's premise remains an enigma at the end of its first episode; there are a lot of introductions to be made and not so much time for plot.

The episodes are certainly watchable, but as constructed by writer-producers Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg, the train also takes its time getting out of the station.

Rather than suspense, Happy Town appears to be going for the goofball irony of its ABC ancestor Twin Peaks.

Happy Town‘s rhythm is like that, pitching between the obvious and the obscure. It’s not yet clear where it’s “snap sharp.”

After watching the first three episodes, I'm not sure if "Happy Town" will deliver on its promise. Let's just say that I'm cautiously optimistic.

There are legitimately chilling, funny and suspenseful moments in the early episodes of "Happy Town," but the many fine performances are battered to death by a welter of plot twists and cheesy revelations that come speeding out of the sky like those murderous crows in "The Birds."

Naturally, Happy Town is excessively sudsy in its soap-opera aspect, just as its atmosphere is a bit too atmospheric.

There’s no sign yet that “Happy Town” deserves the “Twin Peaks” comparisons that it so badly wants.

The pieces are here. They just feel messy and unfocused, which means the show's fate may depend on whether the audience will hang around long enough to sort it all out. That may take a little sprinkling of magic.

The show is so self-conscious of everything it’s doing that nothing has quite the effect its creators want it to have.

Great TV always flows from the specificity of a show's characters; "Happy Town" traffics in banal generalities.

Now, ma'am, no need to bolt like a horse-unless you're scared of cliches. You aren't, are you?

The problem is that the show is strewn with an unironic, overwrought sense of portentousness and constant, blunt hints that the town is Not What It Seems.

The show is so overstuffed and dancing so fast in its effort to achieve cultdom that it forgets some basic things, like making us care about the characters in the middle of this whole mess or drawing some clear stakes for what happens.

The main thing you've got to remember is, the scripts for this show have to beat the audience over the head with exposition.

You start with the minor annoyances, like their fondness for silly nicknames ("Big Dave" and "Root Beer" standing in for Road's "Big Cat" and "Physical Phil"), and move on to the really big sins, such as their inability to create interesting characters or their habit of writing dialogue that either hits us over the head with exposition or pulls us out of the story through ridiculous, artsy flourishes.