Great Performance, indeed; Happy Town? Not so much

ELLIE KURTTZ / ILLUMINATIONS Enlarge Image

Head’s up: Stewart (front) and Tennant in Hamlet.

Oh, dear. Oh, my. There's darkness and dastardly deeds afoot.

Whether your tastes run toward the classically tragic or the modern-day macabre, there's something to satisfy your appetite for blackhearted drama on television this evening.

Those of a more theatrical bent will want to tune in the new PBS/Great Performances production of Hamlet, which stars David Tennant (lately of Doctor Who fame) in the title role and features Sir Patrick Stewart (erstwhile commander of Star Trek: The Next Generation) as the murderous king Claudius.

It's fitting that these two former sci-fi stars lead a cast from Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company in a brilliantly time-warped adaptation that brings a recent stage production of the Bard's epic tragedy to the small screen. Set in something resembling the present, with its characters in modern dress, this Hamlet is an intense and elegantly performed drama that runs three hours but maintains a gripping momentum throughout.

Tennant's version of the doomed prince is more calculating than crazed -- in this interpretation, Hamlet's antic disposition is a decidedly crafted madness, and the choice gives Tennant much more latitude to explore the Dane's other emotions.

The spinoff effect of Hamlet's feigned insanity is that the characters that surround him -- particularly Claudius and Hamlet's duplicitous mother, Gertrude (Penny Downie) -- are driven farther and faster down the path to their own kind of madness.

There are no weak links in this large cast; every syllable of the dense and complex text is delivered with precision and passion, and the result is a Hamlet that might just turn some who've never sampled Shakespeare before into true believers.

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If your taste for prime-time mischief leans toward more modern murder and mayhem, you might want to plan a visit to Happy Town, the sinister small-town mystery that premieres tonight at 9 on ABC. It's another in a long line of shows that seems to draw its inspiration from the more-legendary-than-it-deserves-to-be Twin Peaks, mining intrigue from the oft-visited notion that the innocence and bliss found in backwater towns is nothing but a thin veneer that conceals a foul, evil reality.

In this case, the happy hamlet in question is Haplin, Minnesota, a town so outwardly pleasant that it even smells good -- the main local industry is a bread factory called Our Daily, which means the airs in Haplin is forever filled with the aroma of fresh baked goods.

In tonight's opener, however, we quickly learn that all is not well in the place nicknamed Happy Town -- a grisly murder takes place in an ice-fishing shack on the lake, and news of the killing immediately sparks memories of a serial killer -- known thereabouts as the "Magic Man" -- who preyed on locals for several years but was never caught.

All of this is going on just as a fresh-faced stranger named Henley Boone (Lauren German) arrives in town, having sought out Haplin because her late mother had such fond memories of the place. She intends to open a candle shop; while she's sorting out the details, she takes up temporary residence at the Meadows Boarding House, a creepy old three-storey structure inhabited mostly by gossip-inclined widows but also home to another newcomer, Merritt Grieves (Sam Neill), a dashing foreigner whose reasons for being in Haplin are a bit unclear.

As Sheriff Griffin Conroy (M.C. Gainey) and son/deputy Tommy (Geoff Stults) investigate the murder, it quickly becomes clear that each layer of nastiness they uncover conceals an even deeper evil.

It's sinister stuff, but of an offputtingly convoluted fashion. And recent history has shown that TV watchers have little patience for such slow-unfolding mysteries. Happy Town won't gain the cult infamy that Twin Peaks did; rather, it'll soon end up like last summer's similarly themed Harper's Island -- gone, soon, and forgotten.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 28, 2010 d3