Pilot Season - Nightmare Cafe

    Conflation is one of my low-key favorite words. It’s great conceptually, it somehow has my brain folding balloons through dimensions into each other. I’m sure I use it far more than I need to in everyday conversation. It’s also a very useful term when dealing with how the subconscious weaves together fragmentary parts of memory to come up with a useful if very patchy blanket.

    For years I’ve had a vague kind of memory of my barely-teenage self watching a tv show about Freddy Kreuger running a diner adrift in space-time. He was a secondary character to the main characters, a man and a woman who used the diner to deliver vaguely horror-tinged O. Henry lessons to the guest star of the week. I never watched any of the Elm Street movies until adulthood so I knew it wasn’t from any of those. I had a vague idea there was a tv series based on The Nightmare on Elm Street property so always assumed it was that. Imagine my surprise when I looked it up on Wikipedia and found the one-season wonder that was Freddy’s Nightmares that indeed had Freddy in it but was actually a horror anthology with no recurring characters and no diner.

    After vaguely clicking on a bunch of links and being reminded of shows I never quite got around to watching (oh yeah, “Forever Knight’ was a thing) the title of the actual show just popped right into my head: ‘Nightmare Cafe.’ One video search and a Dailymotion download later and there it was. No Freddy but Robert Englund as the proprietor of the titular cafe and it was a Wes Craven production, so there’s your conflation right there. A grand total of six episodes were produced for NBC in 1992 before being halted by a writer’s strike after which it just never started production again. Everything else I remembered was accurate down to the diner setting and the shots of opening the diner front doors onto space vistas. Somehow almost 30 years later this is one of the things just lodged in my brain.

    Television pilots are, at their best, efficient machines. They are there to do a job of work and it oftentimes shows. You can get introspective and do a bottle episode maybe late season two, early season three, you can do the ‘in a coma’ episode around season six, seven or eight if you’re a crime procedural, fulfilling a backstory tease works great as the season four mid-season cliffhanger, but you don’t get to any of these without that pilot grinding it all out in the first place.

    A tv pilot has roughly three things to do, in this order: establish the premise, demonstrate how it would function as an ongoing series, and establish the characters (a fourth is to also to show that the people running the show are competent enough to actually produce a broadcastable episode of television, but a good producer usually makes that just a formality). Generally speaking, and maybe not so much with sitcom pilots but definitely for high-concept fare like this, the least important of the three is the characters and especially the actors portraying those characters. That’s why so many actors are replaced between the pilot and initial broadcast: you build a good enough pilot machine and the cogs and screws are easily    replaceable. This, of course, all before the “Golden Age of Television,” back when ‘Cheers’ was sophisticated viewing.

    ‘Nightmare Cafe,’ in my opinion, establishes the premise just ok, pushes hard on how it would function as an ongoing series, and whiffs more or less completely on the characters. Nutshell time: a man and a woman are swimming in a harbor (she jumps to her death, he’s just kinda already there), end up ashore, wander into a nearby cafe, find the place strangely deserted, and through cheap editing and special effects are shown how they got to the harbor in the first place, realize they’ve already died, right the wrongs that led them to said deaths, then Robert Englund comes in and explains that the Cafe is a special place and they now work there, giving people second chances at life.

Low-res Robert Englund judges your viewing choices.

    The first problem is that the rules the Cafe operate under are completely vague and it’s left unclear what exactly happened to the man and woman and why. There’s a tv in the diner that will randomly cut to flashbacks of the characters. Sometimes they’ll vanish from the cafe and wind up in the tv for the other characters to watch. Sometimes the other characters can help, sometimes they can’t, sometimes they know they’re in the tv, sometimes they don’t. Doors will also sometimes open into real world locations, sometime onto dream-logic vistas, it all seems rather random. This is waved away as ‘you’ll get used to it,’ which makes me think they didn’t bother thinking it through at all.

    Having the Cafe be a mystery is not a problem, having the two newcomers learn the rules of the place could be a good through-line for the first season, but you need to put the effort in. The easiest fix would have been to have the Cafe as a de facto fourth character. Give it little quirks and eccentricities: show the characters putting down cups directly on the counter, turn away, then turn back to find them on coasters that get further and further away as the episode progresses until they learn to use the coasters themselves, or maybe a character tries to go into the opposite sex bathroom and finds themselves repeatedly back in the main room, or we see a character in one scene cook an egg then not clean the pan and the pan keeps inexplicably showing up in other scenes until they finally get the hint and wash it. The Robert Englund character clearly is in the know on what’s going on, have him argue quietly with the cafe when he thinks no one is watching (he breaks the fourth wall and talks to that audience, cut that out). These are not mind-blowing ideas but they give us something to latch onto. As it is the cafe just does stuff because the plot needs it to happen.

    How it functions as an ongoing series of television is stronger. By way of the diner being a kind of ‘afterlife way station’ adrift in time and space they can basically intersect with about any story they want. The logistics don’t really have to make a whole lot of sense, you can tune the tv or open a door to whatever set you have access to that week. Basically they stole the premise of Doctor Who and gave it a supernatural twist. Which is fine, lots of shows do that (looking at you, ‘Librarians’). It’s a solid premise.

    The best thing you can say about the characters is that they have names and are introduced. I realize this is a pilot and things gotta move but they both realize they are dead and adjust to it in about three total minutes of screen time. They bring justice to a sleazy businessman/mafia type guy by using the cafe with absolutely no hint of how they learned to do so. Meanwhile far too much screen time is given to ‘banter’ and shenanigans. The financial realities were likely such that it was nearly impossible but this entire thing would have really benefited from a two-hour pilot.

    So is Nightmare Cafe worth a look? Not on any level that the show intended, though there’s a version floating out there that didn’t have the commercials cut out before being uploaded so if you want to really wallow in how shit tv used to be this would not be a complete waste of time. I don’t resent this getting lodged somehow in my memory but I do realize it’s like the terrible Care Bear quasi-dolls my mom sewed herself when I was around seven: not exactly unpleasant but certainly nothing I need to hold on to.