Those who love Halloween and the spooky-scary autumnal energy surrounding it will be well-acquainted with the concept of the Halloween TV Special. Airing like clockwork every year since 1966’s genre-defining It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, these seasonal events included both unusually haunted episodes of regularly-airing shows such as Garfield, Scooby-Doo, and SpongeBob SquarePants, and fully original live-action or animated features. While there are far too many Halloween Specials in existence to list here, the seasonal genre’s more iconic offerings include Halloweentown, Hocus Pocus, Dr. Seuss’ Grinch Night, and the still-running Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror. However, as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s, it seemed that Halloween itself was— as has always been the fate of holidays that exist across decades and centuries— changing, with its late-20th-century focus on childhood wonder gradually giving way to teen and young-adult perspectives. Add to this the fact that TV itself was undergoing its own changes as Streaming took over, and it felt like the concept of the Halloween TV Special was fading as well.
Meanwhile, though, something new was brewing— in the late 2000s, animator and screenwriter Partrick McHale approached Cartoon Network short with a strange, charming series pilot that followed two brothers and a talking bird stuck in a sepia-toned world of vegetable people. By late 2013, the project had been greenlit would for a 10-episode miniseries, releasing from November 3-7, 2014 and gaining an instant and lasting place among the Halloween Special classics. Not only would this quaint, unassuming piece of hand-drawn animation enter the yearly-rewatch itineraries of Halloween enthusiasts of all ages, receiving multiple comic-book spinoffs and a stop-motion animated special, it would also be proven a trendsetter in the long term, with the 12 years since having seen its tone, aesthetics, and general energy echo down through the following decade’s evolutions in Halloween vibes.
On its surface, the premise of Over The Garden Wall is a simple one— two brothers, Wirt and Greg, traverse The Unknown, a mysterious and whimsical landscape trapped in a fantasy version of the 18th to early 20th centuries and populated by an eclectic variety of people, talking animals, monsters, and miscellaneous entities. Accompanied by their talking bluebird guide Beatrice and Greg’s pet frog, Greg and Wirt encounter strange places and even stranger people as they search for a way to leave the Unknown and return to their home. All the while, they must avoid the clutches of a mysterious figure known only as The Beast, who lurks somewhere in The Unknown’s endless forests.
Each episode follows roughly the same format, with the brothers’ travels leading them to a new location within The Unknown. There, they must navigate the strange— and often perilous— social niceties of whatever people or creatures inhabit this place, relying on improvisation, imagination, and empathy to learn the rules of their new surroundings. These places, people, and challenges are all united by a sense of cozy, autumnal nostalgia, sepia-tinted and charmingly strange with a darkness and spookiness that hovers around the edges of the scenery like the first gusts of winter rattling at a window-frame. Wirt and Greg wander in and out of idyllic villages inhabited by pumpkin people with jack-a-lanterns for heads, riverboats of sentient frogs dressed in 1910s formal attire, monster-stalked cabins with pale and anxious residents, sprawling mansions home to lonely eccentrics, and many other such atmospheric locales.
The brothers themselves are a wonderfully written pair. Elder brother Wirt, pensive, serious, poetically-inclined, and insecure in his early-teenage identity, is the proverbial straight man of the duo, approaching The Unknown’s strangeness first with skepticism, then with self-serious determination to get himself and Greg home with as few quaint shenanigans involved as possible. In stark contrast, his much younger brother Greg is a comedic ray of sunshine in every situation— wearing an upside-down teapot on his head for reasons that are not explained until the series’ penultimate episode, Greg tumbles, dances, spins and sings his way through every episode with unflappable cheer and a tendency for non-sequitur statements that are instantly quotable.
Greg fits effortlessly into The Unknown’s strange and dreamlike logic, often clashing with Wirt’s practical goal-oriented nature as the younger brother chooses to enjoy each locale they pass through to its fullest. Together (and with the fairly constant presence of the snarky and world-wise Beatrice) the brothers add a human touch to a show otherwise totally ungrounded in reality, with their clashing reactions to the situations they encounter often being the driving force of each episode.
It is that same dynamic between the brothers that serves as the driving force behind the darker tone of Over The Garden Wall‘s latter half. All is not entirely well in The Unknown, as the uncanny Beast seems to stalk just out of sight, his eerie singing echoing through the trees. The weather grows colder and The Unknown’s denizens get creepier, and what was previously a manageable tension between the brothers grows into something restless and angry as Wirt grapples with the growing fear that he may not be able to lead himself— and more importantly, his little brother Greg— home after all. This tension turns to catastrophe at the end of the show’s eighth episode, and while there will not be any major spoilers for Over the Garden Wall in this article, suffice to say that what is revealed in Episode 9 immediately overturns everything you think you know about the story, The Unknown, and Wirt and Greg, leading into an unexpectedly high-stakes and pulse-pounding series finale.
For those looking to be left comforted, mildly spooked, and vaguely existential, Over the Garden Wall is the perfect for binge-watch for cold fall nights. Coming in at a manageable 100-ish minutes total, there are few better shows to watch with warm blankets, hot cider, baked goods, a few friends and maybe a pumpkin or several laid out for carving (and, yes, for those concerned about their Halloween watch party turning into a downer, there is a happy ending). While it is currently hard to find on streaming, check in with your local library and your local friend group to grab a digital or DVD copy of the 21st century’s best Halloween TV masterpiece so far.
