There are no normal small towns on TV. You might have to go back to The Andy Griffith Show to find an innocuous TV hamlet, and even Mayberry no doubt had its dirty laundry. While big cities are acceptably generic settings for shows that aren't about their locales, almost any show that emphasizes its location as a character of its own ends up set in a small town. From Northern Exposure to Twin Peaks to Desperate Housewives, TV has taught us that no small town is complete without a complement of oddball residents and dark secrets.
So as soon as federal marshal Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his delinquent daughter Zoe (Jordan Hinson) find themselves stranded in tiny Eureka (which, like Desperate Housewives' Fairview and My Name is Earl's Camden, is identified only as somewhere in the U.S.), you know that the residents aren't going to be boring everymen and -women whose biggest excitement comes from city council meetings. It also helps that before we see Jack and Zoe's car skid off a rain-slicked road, we've already watched a presumably mad scientist tinker with some unidentifiable gizmo in his basement.
Eureka (Sci Fi, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.) reaches for the oddball charm and off-kilter tone of Twin Peaks, but ends up far too straightforward for such a comparison to be valid. Although the pilot starts with all sorts of mysterious, unexplained goings-on in the small town, soon Carter and the audience discover that the reason there are so many supergeniuses living in the unassuming little burg is that it's a cover for a secret government research facility. The straitlaced Carter naturally clashes a bit with the eccentric town residents, but you know that once he ends up in town, he isn't leaving, and sure enough, by the end of the pilot, he's the new sheriff.
Unlike Twin Peaks' FBI agent Dale Cooper, who was as quirky as the town residents he investigated, Carter is a rather bland lead character, and his relationship with his daughter is your standard father-daughter TV conflict stuff. What makes Eureka work, when it does work, is the supporting cast filled with the likes of Joe Morton, Matt Frewer and Maury Chaykin, who could populate their own offbeat small town without even playing characters. Every time the requisite romantic tension between Carter and the female government liaison threatens to bore you into unconsciousness, Morton's character appears to blow something up.
Strangely for a show on Sci Fi, Eureka's sci-fi elements are actually its most pedestrian and conventional. Everything ends up with a suitably scientific-sounding explanation—everything, that is, except the characters' odd personalities. If things were left a little more ambiguous, Eureka would seem a little less safe and a little more exciting. The writers do make a token effort to craft a serialized storyline, with one of the town's residents secretly a double agent for some nefarious faction looking to sabotage the work being done in Eureka. That could bring some more urgency to the show, but in early episodes, it's more of a slow burn in the background.
Even if Eureka isn't as unconventional as it could be, it's still refreshing to see lighthearted science fiction on the air in an environment thick with serious, complex and portentous shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and The 4400. Eureka is neither as original nor as clever as it would like you to think, but it's pleasant and easygoing, just like the most inviting small towns.