ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 25, 1996 TAG: 9610250029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
In last season's paranoia thriller ``Nowhere Man,'' protagonist Tom Veil, having beaten back the latest offensive in the all-encompassing conspiracy against him, would shuffle dejectedly into the sunset with only his duffel bag and his gumption.
This was no metaphorical sunset of optimism, though. Dusk fell over a rather malevolent horizon of spacious skies and amber waves of grain - an uneasy landscape where small towns hold secrets, the hills have eyes and Main Street is filled with unsmiling, unemotional potential enemies.
Television in recent years has moved away from depicting the American outback as friendly, wholesome heartland and smiling farmers. Instead - be it ``The X-Files,'' ``Picket Fences,'' ``Nowhere Man,'' ``Twin Peaks'' or, by all appearances, ``Millennium,'' which debuts tonight - the 1990s version of Grover's Corners and Bedford Falls has become an apt backdrop for stories about paranoia, conspiracy and the supernatural.
``Your average urban audience thinks, `Be careful when you go out into the sticks, because you never know what's waiting for you out there,''' says Richard Allen, a TV script writer and assistant professor of television at Texas Christian University
``People think there's scary stuff going on between the exits on the highway,'' he says.
For television, this is more of a resurgence than a new idea. It dates to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when ``Route 66,'' ``The Outer Limits'' and especially Rod Serling's ``The Twilight Zone'' all proffered desolate images of rural America.
Serling had a real love-hate relationship with the areas outside the cities. On one hand, they were places where innocence could be recaptured. One episode, ``A Stop at Willoughby,'' featured a beleaguered urban commuter who watched from his train seat as he passed an idyllic small town. Finally, he decided to get off at that stop, with interesting - but ultimately happy - consequences.
But Serling, whose show was filmed in black and white, also often used the corners of the land as metaphors for human loneliness. Even the very metaphor of the show was the lonely road of the mind with ``the signpost up ahead - next stop, The Twilight Zone.'' Understandable, given that Serling spent much time in small-town upstate New York during the show's run.
In one episode, he put a sad young woman in an empty small-town bus station and made her face her mirror image incarnate. Then there was the man who returned to the village of his childhood and saw himself as a boy, only to have his father tell him to leave because ``there's only one summer to every customer.''
``Route 66,'' too, though it dealt with more tangible uneasiness, often put its protagonists, Tod and Buzz, in remote areas populated with shadowy threats. The unsettling premiere episode in 1960 focused on a small Southern town where everybody hides a horrible secret.
Today, in a revisitation of that metaphor, many new shows are playing on extraurban suspicion. In ``Twin Peaks,'' rural bizarremeister David Lynch created one of the weirdest small towns imaginable, and ``Picket Fences'' offered Rome, Wis., as a sort of lightning rod of odd circumstances.
In ``The X-Files,'' the writers and creator Chris Carter do much of their filming in British Columbia, which doubles as a variety of American rural areas. Similarly, ``Nowhere Man'' was largely filmed around Portland, Ore., which offers an assortment of city, small-town and rural settings in a small area.
More often than not, an ``X-Files'' episode will journey into the belly of outpost America, whether it be a weird Wisconsin religious cult, a strange southern carnival or a desolate West Virginia train yard.
It's an understandable instinct for producers and directors - though often their portrayal plays to the stereotypical expectations of city folks, the target viewing market.
``I think the idea of open space, noncentered space is what they're playing on - the imagination of extraterrestrial life, the otherworld thing is much easier to believe in those places,'' says Al Luloff, a rural sociologist at Penn State University.
``It makes sense to film where there are trees, mountains, lakes, dramatic scenery and less populated areas,'' he says. ``A sighting of a UFO or something else unusual is more likely to occur with less lights, less activity.''
Today, too, in the post-Oklahoma City landscape, there exists a perception of rural and small-town environments as landscapes of cheap motels and dying storefronts where dim, anti-establishment conspiracies are building to undermine the government and the American Way.
So - whether true or based on the stereotypes of tabloid TV - today's Middle America is perceived as full of broke farmers and poor trailer parks, and the premise is ripe for dramatic pickings.
``If you make it happen in some rural, unidentified area, it's them rather than us,'' Allen says. ``So it's pretty safe to say the bad guys are located in a distant, remote area where none of the viewers live. We're saturated with so much media coverage of the city that it's more interesting to look at what's out there in the corners.''
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB