Maine TV: Which of these 10 fictional television towns would you want to call home?

Maine’s wild — in many cases, mysterious — landscape has provided fertile ground for imaginations for decades. So it’s perhaps no surprise that when television producers have wanted to locate fantastical or supernatural stories someplace on Earth, they’ve often turned to the Pine Tree State.

Even when the subject matter isn’t science-fiction, Maine offers the types of small, quaint towns where so often scandalous secrets are imagined to be simmering just below the surface.

Maine author Paul Doiron put it well when he said: “Maine just seems scarier than it is. People are fascinated by wild, dramatic places, and Maine has everything you want in a suspense story: fogbound islands, impenetrable forests, remote villages where everyone seems to be keeping a dark secret. The mystique is real, and readers looking for escapism don’t care whether the image lines up with the latest crime statistics.”

Author Richard Russo, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 novel "Empire Falls" was made into a two-part HBO miniseries. (BDN file photo)

Author Richard Russo, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 novel “Empire Falls” was made into a two-part HBO miniseries. (BDN file photo)

And it doesn’t hurt that so many highly regarded authors — whose works are often used as the base material for television shows — either live here or have connections to the state.

As former Maine assistant attorney general-turned-crime writer Kate Flora once told me, “Everything on the surface [in a small Maine town] is really nice and neighborly, but underneath the surface there are grudges and secrets and rivalries that nobody wants known.”

The following is a list of the top 10 fictional Maine towns used on television shows — ranked unscientifically based on how prominent the towns are in the programs and in popular culture.

(There are many more fictional Maine towns used in movies, and there are even more real Maine towns used as settings for stories across all media. While many of the towns listed below appeared in books or movies as well, the list is based on the merits of their television appearances, in part to keep the list manageable.)

Which of these 10 places would you want to call home?

10. Sunrise, Maine — from the TV show “Murder in Small Town X”

This short-lived reality show-crime drama mashup placed 10 contestants in the seaside town of Sunrise, where they tried to catch a fictitious killer. Clue-dropping actors were scattered among the real residents of Eastport, where the series was filmed. It was sort of like playing a real, live version of the board game Clue, and although it was a neat idea, the show didn’t catch on. The show was cancelled after one season on FOX in 2001.

9. Crabapple Cove, Maine — from the TV show “M.A.S.H.”

Crabapple Cove isn’t the primary setting for the beloved and long-running television series “M.A.S.H.,” based on a novel and subsequent Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. But as the fictional hometown of protagonist Army doctor Capt. Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce, this wistfully recalled location played a key role in making Hawkeye the man he was. Pierce was played memorably on the television show by Alan Alda, and the series’ final episode — in 1983 after 11 years on air — was the most-watched single episode in U.S. television history at the time, with 125 million viewers. “M.A.S.H.,” most people know, was set overseas in the Korean War. As an interesting side note, the “M.A.S.H.” TV series was launched only after attempts to organize a film version of the book sequel fizzled. That book? “M.A.S.H. Goes to Maine,” in which Hawkeye returns to Crabapple Cove.

8. Cleaves Mills, Maine — from the TV show “The Dead Zone”

Unsurprisingly, we have Maine’s best-known author, Stephen King, to thank for a few of the fictional towns on this list, starting with Cleaves Mills. “The Dead Zone” starred actor Anthony Michael Hall and lasted for six seasons on the USA Network. It started auspiciously in 2002, but was abruptly cancelled in 2007 in response to a ratings dropoff, and fans of the show were left without a series resolution. The gist of the program, based on a 1979 King book by the same name, follows small-town teacher Johnny Smith, who gets in a car crash and ultimately awakens from a coma with crime-solving psychic abilities. Like “M.A.S.H.,” “The Dead Zone” was both a book and movie before it became a television show — the Hollywood version came out in 1983 and famously starred Christopher Walken.

7. Haven, Maine — from the TV show “Haven”

This one gets the edge over Cleaves Mills because the show is still running, with the second half of its fifth season due to air this year. The television show “Haven,” is also based on King’s work — in this case, the 2005 novel “The Colorado Kid.” “Haven” first aired on the cable network SyFy in 2010. In this cult favorite, FBI agent Aubrey Parker is sent to the small town of Haven on what’s considered at first a routine crime investigation, only to get wrapped up in a series of supernatural occurrences locals are calling “The Troubles.” Before long, her own reality and sense of identity are turned upside down as she looks for answers.

6. Harmony, Maine — from the TV show “Passions”

While perhaps not as well known as soap operas like “Days of Our Lives” or “All My Children,” “Passions” ran for a respectable eight years on the major network NBC and got another two years of life on the DirecTV-only 101 Network before ending its run in 2008. In Harmony, the typical soap storylines of betrayal and love affairs were augmented by supernatural elements, like witches and portals to Hell. It was Maine, after all. A reader pointed out that there’s a real place called Harmony, Maine, which is true. But aside from the borrowed name, the town in this show bears no resemblance and is all fiction. That’s the best I can do for a write-around.

5. Empire Falls, Maine — from the two-part miniseries “Empire Falls”

I’ll admit I’m giving Empire Falls a bump here, placing it at No. 5 even though the fictional town spent less time on television than almost any of the other towns on this list. But the 2001 novel upon which the two-part 2005 HBO miniseries was based was written by Maine author Richard Russo and won the coveted Pulitzer Prize. The miniseries won a boatload of Emmy and Golden Globe awards, was filmed in the state and featured a star-studded, Hollywood Hall-of-Fame-level cast — featuring the likes of Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright and Philip Seymour-Hoffman — which made its airing a cinematic event of sorts.

4. Chester’s Mill, Maine — from the TV show “Under the Dome”

In the CBS series “Under the Dome” — yes, another program based on a Stephen King novel — Chester’s Mill is trapped under a mysterious transparent dome, leaving the small town’s residents to band together, backstab and band together again in the face of a common threat. As a hit contemporary show in the era of social media, Chester’s Mill may be one of the best known pretend Maine towns in the world today, even though it hasn’t been on the small screen nearly as long as, say, Cleaves Mills was. “Under the Dome” maintained top 10 ratings through its first season on the air in 2013, and will be back for its third season this year.

3. Storybrooke, Maine — from the TV show, “Once Upon A Time”

I think it’s safe to say there are more recognizable characters in the fictional town of Storybrooke than maybe anywhere else in the history of pretend Earth. The whole premise of the show is that fairy tale characters come to life in this Maine town, so we have people like Rumplestiltskin and Snow White, and in the most recent season, even the appearance of ice queen Elsa and her sister Anna from the Disney megahit movie “Frozen.” Even though “Once Upon A Time” is only in its fourth season on ABC, it seems to have a loyal following, and with a cast that can be updated anytime Disney puts out a new blockbuster, it could chug along with regular injections of fresh energy for years.

2. Collinsport, Maine — from the TV show “Dark Shadows”

In the late 1960s, the supernatural soap opera “Dark Shadows” took the world of vampires and werewolves to mainstream audiences long before the “Twilight” novels and movies. As a regular daytime drama on ABC, this show racked up more than 1,200 episodes during its original five-year run, making it one of TV history’s most prolific science fiction-fantasy series ever, easily besting the more transcendent “Star Trek.” The program was named one of TV Guide magazine’s top cult shows ever, and popped back up with a television reboot in 1991 and a Hollywood version starring A-lister Johnny Depp in 2012. In “Dark Shadows,” orphan character Victoria Winters initially goes to the eerie Collinsport to learn more about her past. But Winters was later largely supplanted as the show’s main character by noble vampire Barnabas Collins.

1. Cabot Cove, Maine — from the TV show “Murder, She Wrote”

“Murder, She Wrote” is a television classic, and unlike “M.A.S.H.,” the fictional Maine town in this series was integral to the plot, which featured mystery writer and amateur crime solver Jessica Fletcher and her regular pursuits of small-town killers. Because local murders fueled plot lines on the prime-time CBS series for 12 years — from 1984-1996 — the term “Cabot Cove syndrome” became part of the nation’s lexicon to refer to sparsely populated places with unusually high homicide numbers. With 274 fictional killings in a town of 3,500, Cabot Cove was reported by London’s Daily Mail newspaper as being the murder capital of the pretend world, with a murder rate 50 percent higher than the real-life murder hotbed of Honduras. Nonetheless, actress Angela Lansbury became one of the best-known television faces of all time with her acclaimed portrayal of Fletcher, earning record numbers of Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for best actress in the genre.