Referring
to The Curse (2023), movie director Christopher Nolan said: “It’s
an incredible show, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen on
television before. There are so few shows that come along that have
genuinely no precedence. You’re going back to things like Twin
Peaks, or The Prisoner, or Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective and
things like that, so you’re in an amazing space...”
These
are also the three shows I see brought up most often when discussing
when so-called peak TV began.
The
beginning of appointment television, the golden age, where you had to
pay attention, is also where weird TV first really took off.
The
Prisoner was what might be called a limited series today. It's a self
contained single season story that aired in 1967. It wasn't insanely
mainstream, nor was it unpopular. The gap between The Prisoner and
the next peak TV show is almost twenty years. To me that rules it out
as launching this era. It's only in retrospect that it fits the
criteria. It didn't spark immediate and noticeable change.
The
Singing Detective is a miniseries from '86 and depending on the
setting, can be considered somewhat obscure. Co-creator of Twin
Peaks, Mark Frost is a fan of Dennis Potter's work (namely Pennies
From Heaven and The Singing Detective) and considers Potter perhaps
the most major influence on his own writing. Parallels can be seen in
the complex blending of reality with fantasy through layered
storytelling, peppered with occasional musical numbers.
Twin
Peaks, which began airing in '90, is a full fledged show with a known
name in film at the helm. It was big enough to get its own movie, and
also be brought back 25 years later as prophesized for what
functioned as both a spinoff and finale to the story.
Because
the third season was decades later, directed entirely by Lynch
himself, and on a premium network, it feels much darker and tonally
different than the first two seasons. Some people separate the shows
into Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. For the purposes of this,
I'll be treating Twin Peaks as an umbrella term for the entirety of
the series.
It's also worth noting that the two earlier shows,
The Prisoner and The Singing Detective, are both British. Examples
furthering the theory that it was Europe who originally sparked
interest in a deeper, more peculiar television experience include:
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and The Decalogue (1989), bookending the
eighties as part of a wave of theatrical arthouse miniseries that
lended crediblity to the medium and expanded people's ideas of what
could be done within it.
Bizarreness
being traded from the UK to the US and back again is a common
occurrence throughout this list. In fact, Twin Peaks began with a
failsafe in place in case the series wasn't picked up. There was a
contractually imposed alternate ending Lynch had to film to wrap up
the story of the pilot. (These alternate scenes were later reworked
into a dream sequence.) This version, now called the International
Pilot, played in cinemas throughout multiple countries and first
released on VHS in Europe, years before it came to the US.
Monday, September 8, 2025
420 Weird Shows: 61-120
Sunday, September 7, 2025
420 Weird Shows: 1-60
“I
like weird shit. I enjoy it. I like it, a lot. And because I talk
about it a lot... it finds me.” ~ Josh Wolf
The
idea for this list was inspired by (and created as something of a
companion piece to) 366 Weird Movies.
However,
there's obviously major differences between those two mediums in the
way that strangeness can be handled, depicted, and progress.
TV
is episodic by nature. So for that reason, singular pieces such as
made-for-TV movies, standalone specials, and pilots for shows that
never got picked up (or were canceled after one episode) were not
considered for this project. Those are more akin to films or at least
short films. So that means no: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, the
1990 anti-drug special. And same with Heil Honey I'm Home!, the axed series from the
same year.
A full season (which for a miniseries is the complete
run, for a canceled show, what's available) has to have been released before September 2025 in order for me
to count it, otherwise I could add Alien: Earth based off the first
four episodes or Women Wearing Shoulder Pads from just the first
three.
Public
access shows were not included, national broadcasts only. Neither
were webseries, unless it was a webseries that also made it to TV or
streaming at some point. The barrier to creation with those is slim to
nonexistent, the fanbases too regional, and the possibilities that open
up are too vast to delete all gatekeepers. Which unfortunately made me rule out '94's Concrete TV [NSFW] and Weird TV, David Lynch's Rabbits (2002) and The Show About the Show
(2017).
Best-of compilations that
cherry-pick from different shows didn't make the cut either. That
removes Night Flight (1981) and the volumes of TV Carnage (1996). Plus it had to air on TV or a
paid streaming service. That takes out direct-to-video stuff like
Peppermint Park (1987).
This is all put together by me. No, I
haven't seen all these. Then how do I know if something is truly odd?
Clips, screenshots, the synopsis, the track record of the people
involved, the title being brought up in comparison to other off the
wall material...
Each part will alphabetically list the next
sixty shows. Starting today, one part will be posted a day over the
next week. Without further ado...