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Notes for Episode 25: "Happy Town"
🕑 Added 2025-07-01 21:18:54 +0000 UTCHi everyone! It's Esther this time, filling in for Hannah on Note Duty. By which I mean she still did all the work of assembling this stuff, I'm just posting it. Town Stuff returns, as it will for the rest of this block of shows. What does Hannah normally put here? Something cute? I've no doubt that's the case. Anyway, enjoy our notes!
PATREON NOTES – HAPPY TOWN
Plot / Structure Stuff:
I’m gonna go ahead and say it, this early on: follow the clues
Henley’s not just following the clues… she IS the clues!
This went nowhere
This is the SECOND show we’ve watched where a Lost veteran playing a well-liked sheriff fucking eats it at the end of the pilot. Why is that?
By the last aired episode half the town will have killed the other half and Henley will still be working on that locked room on the third floor
Okay, I’ll say it really works for me: Henley’s flirtation with the handsome stranger who saved her from a car wreck
I like that the Magic Man had an evil bird as his second in command
It seems like Thaw Fest is a multi-day event. It’s episode 3 and we’re still mired in Thaw Fest concerns
He’ll cover for his friend who’s a murderer but unapologetically arrest the teenager who just got stabbed lol
He seems to hold to the principle that goofs and dunces should be held to a different moral standard
Like Big Dave does seem to be portrayed as a bit on the slow side but Tommy’s treating him like he’s not mentally competent to stand trial. Just because he likes pizza a lot
This show keeps doing reveals that would normally provoke a gasp but instead I’m just like “huh??”
When they discovered a human hand at the bread factory, Esther said “ohhhh… in the bread, really?”
I also feel like there’s so little of a sense of what it’s… building up to? Like I guess they’re gonna discover who the Magic Man is eventually, and what’s causing the old sheriff’s visions, and maybe what Henley’s doing? But I just have so little of a sense of what anything is adding up to so far. How anything is getting from point A to point B
I feel like a big part of this is that there are no suspects. Like we’re in episode 5 and there’s no Magic Man candidates
What’s even worse is that the Jerry Friddle + Big Dave stuff is just framed as a joke. Like episode one you see this guy getting slaughtered in a remote cabin and then immediately it’s like “the Pizza Dunce did this because he wanted to solve the crime. If you are interested in the mystery you’re a Pizza Dunce.”
Happy Town is a humiliation ritual for Lostalike fans
They take your heroes and reduce them into Pizza Dunces. If this show had gotten a second season they would’ve brought in Henry Ian Cusick to play an absolute NIMWIT always seen munching on smack barm pey wet
This PD is unbelievably stupid. They have only two moves and they spam them over and over again: you’re the Magic Man, and you’re Jerry Friddle’s killer. Every episode they bring someone in and accuse them of both of those
The last minute revelations with Griffin and Tommy are really, really weak. There had to have been a more artful way to tie things together than a little monologue that was completely disconnected from the station shootout setpiece
Town Stuff:
The town is called Haplin, you see. Haplin = Happy
Well the bread factory is delightful. It’s bread town. You breathe in the bread
A QUESTION MARK GRAFFITIED ON A CHURCH YEAH THAT’S LOST ALIKE
Tommy’s kinda a violent thug about this whole vigilante justice situation
This whole TOWN is violent thugs. It’s not at all happy!
Character / Performance Stuff:
The main girl, Henley, is kinda like if Milla Jovovich was Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Steven Weber is kinda like if Kevin Bacon was William Fichtner
DAVID CRONENBERG ?????????
There’s something classical about Greggy being the one handsome brother and the rest of the clan being hideous dunces
Imagine being that sexy and having a brother named Womper. This show is a humiliation ritual for Greggy Stiviletto
The Stivilettos are like minibosses in a Mario game. You fight Womper at the end of Chocolate World
The Magic Man is gonna stomp on each Stiviletto’s head in turn, doubling his points with each fatality
Nobody’s called him Handsome Dan Farmer yet, but he IS credited as that. We’re running out of time, people
He was never called that on the show
Technical / Aesthetic Stuff:
We’re leading off with the Howie Scream. That’s a statement
EXTREMELY corny from the jump. Remains to be seen whether it’s good corny or bad corny but like… this has PRE-Lost vibes if anything
I love that they play a little mysterious sound every time a clue is mentioned
Everyone in this town has Detective Vision prompts but nobody’s ever figured out how to actually activate it
They’re always referencing movies! Their references are out of CONTROL!
There’s a mysterious character we haven’t met yet who holds all the real power in Haplin: an 80’s movie guy
This might be the first and last Riverdalelike
The Dan Farmer pudding interrogation scene is one of the least technically competent things we’ve watched for this entire podcast. It’s not a bad show necessarily but man that was rough to watch
This show loves the idea of needle drops that are about little happy towns. It’s fucking obsessed. Something uncouth about it
This show is so bizarre to watch because unlike any other Lostalike I feel like I can’t ground myself in a sense of what it’s trying to rip off. Like the iconography is familiar but the vibes are so alien
The Amy Acker hypnosis scene is unbelievably low rent. Humiliation ritual for the whole concept of speculative fiction
Esther says it’s like a Neil Breen movie
Did they just like, as of episodes 5 and 6, decide they were a B show now?
It’d be interesting to see if the critical reception to the first run episodes was “these are cheesy” so they just tried to lean into it
Notable Quotes:
“Welcome to Haplin, or as some call it… Happy Town! Because they know. Oh, they know.”
“It’s a small town, everyone gets a nickname!”
The show did not end up living to this promise
“Look at you… cuter than a mouse’s pocketbook!”
“Look who it is! Straight from the government-subsidized development of Cook’s Ridge!”
Y’know we knocked Wayward Pines a bit for not having the Shyamalan Juice in its dialogue sensibilities but like… this one’s not nearly as good as a Shyamalan, but… I mean… some of these sentences?
“I love you so much…..sometimes I don’t even know what day it is.”
“The sense of touch… is the most unappreciated of the five sense.”
“Then my girlfriend Kissy came over”
My girlfriend Kissy. Jerry Friddle. This is the E1 Joe Biden podcast
“It’s not the money. It’s just that all of my plans centered around having a car.”
“I followed you to the hospital cafeteria. I messed up my potion.”
“Dan Farmer, State Police.” “You’re a cop??” “I’m maybe… the best cop… ever.”
Dave the Pizza Dunce’s last words: “It’s okay… thanks for everything… I loved being your pal…”
Line that most directly encapsulates how they decided midway through that they were making a B movie: “They call me Gazpacho. Because I like my soup cold.”
“I’m not a gardener’s son, I’m a sheriff’s son. No… no. I’m the son of the man I thought the sheriff was.”
“Don’t blame this on Haplin. Or the darkness, or some lady named Chloe.”
Cute Things We Said:
They showed a picture of a murdered child and we immediately said “Oh, disgusting” and “No wonder she had to be killed!”
I think Henley should ruin her friendship with Sam Neill by quoting like, gauche movies. Like she quotes Knocked Up and he’s just like LEAVE at ONCE
Hold up… if they close the bread factory… what does the town eat?
When Mr. Haplin said he was the president (of the bread company) we had QUITE A LAUGH imagining that in this setting, Haplin is the nation’s capital. And its largest city. It just doesn’t get bigger than bread
The piece of art that this most closely resembles is Bas Rutten’s self defense video. “Dan Farmer is the Magic Man. Baung, baung, baung, no he’s not.”
