Harper's Island: One by One

Summer of 2009.
Broke.
Bored.
Lazy.
After one of the most strenuous academic years of my life, it was finally July. After working 14-20 hour days in the theatre building, I finally had time to kick back, sleep, and drink. Problem: Turns out lazy summers are hideously boring. Needless to say, this led to some serious online television-watching. Netflix insta-play was my new best friend!

That is when I discovered Harper's Island, a series consisting of a single season and more creative deaths than Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm St, and The Ring combined. A die-hard horror fanatic to the end, I was ecstatic to see a series whose plot was driven by killing all of the characters one by one.
Let me rewind: Harper's Island is the story of Henry Dunn and Trish Wellington's wedding. They grew up on an Island off the coast of Seattle (Harper's Island) together along with the rest of the wedding party. These locals are returning to the island after avoiding it for 7 years following a group of murders by a man named John Wakefield. Though the series is about a destination wedding, the main character is not the bride or the groom. Abby Mills, Henry's best friend since childhood also grew up on the island, and her mother was one of John Wakefield's victims. She moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and avoided contact with anyone from the island until the wedding. Now that everyone is trapped on Harper's Island, a killer attacks. One by one, all but four of the characters in the show are killed. Mostly in strange and brutal ways.

I found that when I'm in a bad or bored mood, I just need to be reminded of how nice it is to have such small problems seem so big. That is why Harper's Island saved my summer. Turns out, given the choice between watching all of my friends die brutally before it's my turn or lying around my un-airconditioned house catching up on my reading list...I'd much rather take the reading list.
Harper's Island is an excellent example of a series that 1. knew when one season was enough and 2. developed characters and story very well very quickly, making a season feel like ten seasons worth of information. Given its compact nature, Harper's Island had to move past pilot episode stock characters quickly to give depth to the show so you would care when the character eventually dies. At the beginning of the series, these seem like hypothetical character deaths, where you have no connection to their back story or relationships to each other. As each episode progresses, however, and you have a chance to understand more subtleties of each character, you begin the mourn them in their passing.
In short, Harper's Island is the perfect way to kill about 13 hours on a lazy summer weekend.