M. Night Shyamalan Redeemed 

Comparisons of Fox's new miniseries Wayward Pines to Twin Peaks and Lost are fair enough, but for me, I'm thinking Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" and The Eagles song "Hotel California." Specifically, the line, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

The story begins with a rather sepulchral-looking Matt Dillon — hey, sorry, but his eye sockets are like Dia De Los Muertos sugar skulls these days. He plays a Secret Service agent who arrives in a small Idaho town to investigate the disappearance of two of his colleagues. It's a sort of Northern Exposure-style town, with Old West rooming houses and probably a wandering moose. The Gem State was a good choice for conjuring up weirdness, though, as on a per capita basis, Idaho has to have the highest number of right-wing lunatics in the Lower 48 —not to mention off-the-gridders stocking up on ammo for Obama's impending FEMA camp internments. Dillon's character soon realizes he's trapped in a real-life diorama, surrounded by a huge wall — he can't escape, and everywhere is wired for surveillance.

But since the miniseries is only 10 episodes long, and since M. Night Shyamalan was pegged to direct the first one, the strangeness is neatly packaged. Good ol' Shyammy has been riding on the success of The Sixth Sense for 15 years now while releasing tripe like After Earth and The Last Airbender 3D. This is his first foray into TV, and I guess we're supposed to be really impressed that he's slumming it with the little people.

I did not want to like this show. Before I watched it, it smacked of a gigantic Twin Peaks knockoff, complete with nods to nature in the title, a dapper agent, and an obvious attempt at the absurd. I was still smarting from the bad news that Showtime had called off the reboot of Twin Peaks, but now it's apparently back on the roster again, with 18 episodes ordered. Once armed with that knowledge, I was open to whatever Fox wanted to throw at me — doughnuts, log ladies, midgets, hookers, or any other David Lynch plundering. Could be good for a laugh, right?

Happily, Wayward Pines has cultivated its own brand of strangeness. I haven't seen every episode, but apparently it just gets weirder and weirder, with big plot twists that you won't see coming. That's saying a lot, considering the entire show is based on constantly spinning the plot in disparate directions — and we are immune to plot twists by now, no? Especially in a show that has been developed around the idea that up is down and down is up, and whose tone shifts from dramatic to comedic. Maybe the only real way to surprise us any more is to do something entirely expected.

I found the casting a bit odd, but maybe that too was the plan. Terrence Howard plays the town sheriff admirably, though his character is no one to admire. He's violent, even slitting a woman's throat with rapacious formality after she breaks a Town Rule. I couldn't help but remember when Howard was in the news awhile back for allegedly sucker-punching and otherwise brutalizing his ex-wife, who claims he threatened to throw her off a balcony. (Howard denies the charges). Did the producer know about the rumors that surround this guy? And he already appears on the other Fox show Empire, so why did they cast him here? Strange. Weird, even.

Maybe Wayward Pines is being deliberately meta with its formula. Make every single aspect of the show just a bit off — an off theme for a show about being a bit off. Have an obvious salute to Twin Peaks but then abandon that idea by the third episode. Hire a director who's lost his former glory but still has pull. Make the whole thing one amorphous ball of incomplete, nonlinear storytelling. Kill off the person you think is going to be a major character by the second episode. It's a weird show done weirdly.

Weird.