In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.
Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.
Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.
A loose almost anti-translation of the French title Zone Blanche, or “White Zone,” Black Spotrefers to the dead zone (that one’s taken) of cellular coverage in which the grim little town of Villefranche and its surrounding forest are located. If the pilot episode for this Netflix import proves anything, it’s that that particular zone is pretty roomy. Opportunities to color within the lines drawn by both Davids, Chase and Lynch, abound. You may not score any points for originality, but you can still paint an engaging picture.
(Note: I’m playing catch-up here so these review descriptions will be minimal moving forward. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)
Tags: black spot, decider, horror, reviews, TV, TV reviews