Juliette Lewis as Natalie (left) and Christina Ricci as Misty in Yellowjackets. Photo / Showtime
Take a few strangers, strand them in a time or place beyond comprehension, add a conspiracy … Here are TV’s greatest “mystery box” shows.
Everyone loves a good mystery.
But what if that mystery arrived neatly packaged with a bow on top? A mystery in a box, you could say.
A box that might, on a good day, collapse outwards to reveal smoke monsters, dancing dwarves and psychotic teenage girls massively into Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.
These are some of the raw ingredients of the “mystery box” genre that has ebbed and flowed across TV schedules since the first season of J.J. Abrams’s Lost in 2004.
What goes into a good mystery box? Typically, there will be a cast of likeable and hateful characters, all marooned in a time or place beyond their immediate comprehension. There will be hints of a vast and complicated conspiracy unfolding just out of eye-shot – and the audience will initially be every bit as baffled as the protagonists. They may be just as baffled by the end, too.
In a way, all filmed entertainment is a mystery box. When the opening credits start, you never quite know what’s in store.
As Abrams said during a 2008 Ted talk: “What are stories, but mystery boxes?... What’s a bigger mystery box than a movie theatre? You go to the theatre, you’re just so excited to see anything – the moment the lights go down is often the best part.”
Abrams knew what he was talking about – at least, he did in those early years of Lost before the producers ran out of storyline and started making it up as they went. But he isn’t the only maestro of the mystery box – as the following list demonstrates.
An everyday American family is sucked through a time portal in downtown LA (close to the Pleistocene La Brea tarpits) and back to a prehistoric era of woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth cats. Their only way to get home is to discover who orchestrated the temporal anomalies and their agenda. La Brea finished its three-season run last year, and the good news is that all the loose ends were tied up, the mystery satisfactorily explained. See, Lost – it is possible to wrap things up with a flourish.
An aeroplane carrying a New Jersey girls football team crashes in the Canadian wilderness in 1996, stranding the survivors for 19 months. Back in the present day, these now middle-aged women refer darkly to what they had to do to make it through – but the full, awful truth is merely hinted at in the first two seasons of this ongoing series starring Sophie Nélisse and Samantha Hanratty as teenage survivors and Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci as the same characters in 2021 (Ella Purnell pops up too). Cannibalism, religious visions, and psychosis feature in flashbacks, while the soundtrack is spruced up with 1990s favourites such as Fiona Apple and Tori Amos. A third season arrives this February.
A young Elle Fanning stars in this sadly forgotten 2006 thriller about a haunted room in a New Mexico motel that exists outside of time and space. Joel Miller plays a detective who acquires a key to the chamber – which is filled with supernatural objects. When his daughter (Fanning) vanishes, he must discover how the room came to exist in order to bring her back.
A group of comic book nerds believe a cult graphic novel, The Utopia Experiments, has predicted several epidemics – including BSE. But a rumoured second volume contains even more valuable information – details of a mysterious organisation, The Network, that they’re determined is not to fall into the wrong (or any) hands. Ignore the slick, soulless 2020 Amazon remake and go straight to the 2013 original, written by playwright Dennis Kelly (who had collaborated with Tim Minchin on Matilda the Musical) and which blends kitchen sink grit with sci-fi wonder.
A commercial airliner mysteriously reappears five and a half years after it vanished en route from Jamaica to New York. Passengers and crew have no recollection of those missing years and struggle to reintegrate into society as visions of future events haunt them. A sort of Lost-in-reverse, where the mystery takes place after the passengers return to the real world, the show struggled for ratings and was cancelled by NBC in 2021 with the story incomplete. Fortunately, Netflix came to the rescue, green-lighting a final series that answered most of the audience’s questions.
From the creepy, clockwork mind of The Sixth Sense’s M. Night Shyamalan comes a twisted tale of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class couple in suburban Philadelphia who hire a sinister nanny (Nell Tiger Free) to look after their infant – only for it to emerge she is connected to a supernatural conspiracy that has designs on the child. Watch out for a bizarre extended cameo from Harry Potter star Rupert Grint as the baby’s dysfunctional uncle.
A Marvel spin-off with a twist (or three). Kathryn Hahn returns with a more sympathetic portrayal of WandaVision villain Agatha Harkness. Having lost her witching powers she must team up with a coven of her sisters (including Aubrey Plaza’s Green Witch) to puzzle out where her magic has gone, and how the disappearance connects to a Seventies power ballad, The Road.
Mystery box meets Cormac McCarthy in a modern day wonky Western about a Wyoming rancher (Josh Brolin) who discovers a black hole-like void on his territory shortly after a female drifter shows up. He also has to deal with the disappearance of his daughter-in-law and an attempt by a rival family to take over the land, temporal anomaly included. Brolin puts in a powerhouse performance, and you can’t fault the show’s eerie atmosphere – but, with Apple cancelling the series after two seasons, many storylines are left unresolved.
Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons plays an office worker at a Berlin-based United Nations agency. The division has the hugely suspicious title of Office of Interchange and, unbeknown to Simmons’s Howard Silk, stands guard over a portal between two parallel dimensions created during the Cold War. In the second, alternative world, Silk is a ruthless secret agent – and when he crosses over into “our” universe, the two Howards become locked in an existential struggle.
We’re firmly in Twin Peaks territory as Matt Dillon plays an FBI agent tracking the disappearance of two fellow field officers in the eponymous small town in Idaho. Early on, he is in a car accident, and when he wakes, finds he cannot contact the outside world or leave Wayward Pines, which is ruled by ruthless Sheriff Arnold Pope. Step out of line, and the pugilistic Pope will publicly slit your throat in a ceremony referred to as The Reckoning.
Two percent of the world’s population vanishes in an incident called the “Sudden Departure”, and those left behind are plunged into a crisis of faith in an eerie mystery from Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler and Margaret Qualley are among the “Leftovers” attempting to make sense of a world where many of their loved ones have simply ceased to exist. Ratings were never stellar, and the sombre script wasn’t exactly packed with laughs, though the pace picked up in the transcendent final season, when Theroux’s police chief, Kevin, goes to Australia for answers.
Lost producer J.J. Abrams’s take on The X-Files, Fringe stars Anna Torv as an FBI agent recruited to a new “Fringe” division investigating supernatural occurrences and the possible existence of a parallel universe. Watch out for cameos by Mr Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, as a helpful biotech entrepreneur and Lance Hendrick as Torv’s superior in the bureau.
A neurotic computer programmer (Rami Malek) is drawn into an internet conspiracy to clear the debts of millions of people by hacking an evil multinational. The leader of the insurrectionary anarchist “fsociety” is known only as Mr Robot and played by, of all people, 1990s bad boy Christian Slater. He has great fun as a relatively grounded premise sprouts into a surreal tale of split identities and alternative reality.
A remote American town is sealed off from the outside world and stalked each night by demon-like lost souls. A newly arrived family (Catalina Sandino Moreno and Eion Bailey) are determined to escape – but the harder they try, the more disturbing are the secrets they uncover. Lost’s Harold Perrineau, playing the town’s long-suffering sheriff, reunites with the earlier show’s producers, Jack Bender and Steve Pinkner – but relax; this time, they promise they’ve worked out the ending ahead of time.
In a remote German town, children go missing once every 33 years. That fateful day has come around once again – and the friends of one of the vanished kids are convinced it is connected to a tunnel in the woods and a local power plant. Meanwhile, older citizens who remember the previous disappearances are reluctant to confront the evil at the heart of their community. Dark’s creators, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, would come unstuck with their over-wrought follow-up series 1899 (swiftly cancelled by Netflix), but Dark is a first-rank time travel thriller with a gripping sting in the tail.
A Wild West theme park populated with intelligent, autonomous, trigger-happy robots – what could go wrong? Anthony Hopkins plays the deluded creator of Westworld, while Evan Rachel Wood is a robot with a heart of gold, a killer aim and a burning desire to discover who created her and why. Westworld fell off badly in its later seasons – in hindsight, abandoning the theme park setting was a huge error – but the first wove a spell-binding mystery.
The mystery box goes Bowie. It’s 2006, and Detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) is struck by a car and knocked unconscious. He wakes in 1973 when men were men, cars came with fluffy dice as standard, and lunch was four pints and a packet of roasted peanuts. Partnered with the geezer-ish Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), Sam investigates a string of murders that resemble similar crimes in 2006. Is he caught in a temporal vortex – or are these the dying thoughts of a man who has suffered catastrophic brain damage? All is revealed ... gradually. In the meantime, there is lots of 1970s banter (courtesy of the scene-stealing Glenister) and a soundtrack that includes Bowie, The Sweet, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd.
Employees at a cutting-edge biometrics company have their minds scrubbed at the beginning and end of each work day. But who is playing God with the memories of the white-collar schlubs (including Adam Scott’s Mark and Britt Lower’s Helly) – and what dreadful secrets are the mysterious forces determined to cover up? Ben Stiller’s dystopian thriller has dropped breadcrumb after breadcrumb across its first and (just released) second season – but with the director/producer promising a third series, much is left to unpack.
David Lynch’s haunting tale of wickedness pulsating in the heart of a small American town (with bonus dancing dwarfs) is arguably the very definition of mystery box TV. At one level, it’s a week-to-week whodunit in which Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper attempts to solve the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer. But, as that straightforward (ish) police procedural plot unfolds, Lynch is busy gradually drawing back the curtain to reveal a sprawling mediation on evil – one that is revealed, in 2017 spin-off Twin Peaks: The Return, to extend back to the creation of the atomic bomb.
The original of the mystery box species, Lost, started as one of the most fascinating TV shows ever – and ended as one of the most frustrating. Springing from the convoluted imaginations of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, this tale of the survivors of Flight 815 stranded on a shadowy island had it all – smoke monsters, time travel, underground tunnels. Everything that is, aside from a satisfactory ending – though widespread disappointment over that damp squib concluding episode from 2010 has receded with time. Today, Lost is appreciated not for its final destination but the journey that took us there.
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