Happy Town: Series Premiere

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.

— Elvis Costello, “Watching the Detectives”

Tommy Conroy (Geoff Stults) knows he’s in trouble when the Stiviletto brothers arrive at the sheriff’s office in suits and ties. Or, as the deputy puts it, “sort of suits and sort of ties.” As their name suggests, the Stivilettos are bad news: gnarly, cocky, and fashion-backwards. Back in school, they used to run with Tommy. Now they just resent him — not least because he’s been made the acting sheriff in Haplin, Minnesota. And oh yes, he’s recently paid the Stivilettos a visit and beaten the crap out of them. All of them.

Tommy has his reasons, of course. And at the start of Happy Town, he’s pretty sure those reasons are righteous, as they have to do with manly-man bravado. He thinks he’s following in the footsteps of his dad, Griff (M.C. Gainey), longtime sheriff and imposing figure, dedicated to keeping the peace in a town that’s frankly creepy, where the main industry is bread and where citizens sometimes go missing.

Local lore attributes these crimes to the Magic Man, a story suggesting that, even as the regular men in Haplin presume they’re in charge, they’re probably not. The men do a lot of tough guy posturing — from Tommy and the Stivilettos to Handsome Dan Farmer (Peter Outerbridge), the state cop who’s supposed to solve a new murder case in town, specifically, a man with a railroad spike in his forehead. Dan’s feeling especially ready: “Homicides,” he says, “We don’t get a lot of them and when we do we are snap sharp.” Mm-hmm. His very eagerness suggests that he’s like other men who actually live in Haplin, not quite as smart or in control as they imagine, and not quite aware of the irony they embody. In fact, the presiding power seems to be Peggy Haplin (Frances Conroy): she owns the bread factory and more or less runs local politics. She names Tommy the acting sheriff, rather than the actual next-in-line, Detective Hobbs (Robert Wisdom), and she mostly dismisses her son and heir apparent, John (Steven Weber), as too weak to manage the family’s affairs.

Granted, John’s preoccupied by the disappearance of own young daughter. He spends most of his time in the first few episodes of Happy Town putting up “Remember to Never Forget” banners emblazoned with the faces of the missing and demanding action by law enforcement. For his part (at least until he loses his mind and chops off his hand with a hatchet), Griff tamps down the agitation, assuring unhappy relatives of the missing that his department is doing all it can, and that really, it’s better not to “dwell on the past.” When he submits there must be reasonable explanations for why folks have disappeared, however, John objects. “My eight-year-old daughter,” he growls, “did not just skip town.”

John’s upset mirrors that of a few other locals, including resident drug dealer and addict Carl Bravin (Stephen McHattie) and Big Dave (Abraham Benrubi), and has something to do with the secret investigation being conducted by new arrival Henley (Lauren German) (“My mother used to vacation here as a child,” she doesn’t quite explain). Pretty and persistent in the Nancy Drew mode, Henley’s staying at the boarding house run by Dot (Lynne Griffin), along with a bevy of swoony widows and waistcoated Merritt Grieves (Sam Neill). A collector and purveyor of Hollywood memorabilia, he’s not a little like Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, simultaneously charming and unsettling. Henley seems to think she can match him, wits-wise, but it’s plain right away that she’s in over her head.

Obviously drawing plot points from Twin Peaks, Happy Town mostly eschews the Lynch show’s weirdness. That’s too bad, because the basic tensions — insiders versus outsiders, upper crusters versus workers, young versus less young, curious babysitters versus mysterious visitors with a taste for tapioca — are probably too familiar. If the Magic Man sounds a little less crude than Bob (one ostensible witness says he’s tall and thin and carries a cane), his legend has a similar effect on local mood swings, inciting dips of dread and sporadic hysteria.

Even as Haplin residents are preparing for the annual Thaw Fest, a large, loud bird shows up — repeatedly. Grieves suggests it’s a “harbinger,” but you’re kind of ahead of him by then. Happy Town‘s rhythm is like that, pitching between the obvious and the obscure. It’s not yet clear where it’s “snap sharp.”