WSJ (Contest) Grid: untimed; Meta: 40 minutes 
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Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Double Features” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a famous TV show of the 1990s. There were four long theme entries:
- 20a MYPOMPOUSSULLY: What a hero pilot’s friends called him after the fame went to his head?
- 25a CLEARCLAMMER: Someone who obviously knows how to dig for food at a beach?
- 43a NAILDEADLINE: Turn in your work assignment at the exact target date?
- 51a REVERSEVETSTEE: Turn an animal healer’s shirt
I quickly noted that each word was comprised of two (or four) of the same letter. I deduplicated those, leaving strings like MYPOUSL, CLEARM, etc. I tried to anagram those (using an online tool), but came up with nothing. Then I got stuck for a bit, exploring other doomed rabbit holes.
WSJ Contest – 04.26.2026
I eventually circled back to the anagram idea, and spotted EVEREST (twice) in REVERSEVETSTEE. I had the rabbit: the letters in each themer formed two of the same mountain names (my anagram tool failed to spot them because they were proper nouns):
- 20a Olympus (x2)
- 25a Carmel (x2)
- 43a Denali (x2)
- 51a Everest (x2)
That leads to our contest solution TWIN PEAKS. A solution requiring anagramming normally includes an indicator of some type, which I didn’t see here (I could be missing something). Impressive construction by Matt, minus that nit. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4.5 stars
The best indicator is the title.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4 stars
I too was stuck on the anagrams, and I got it done by using a better tool (https://anagram-solver.net/).
The title was probably too much of a spoiler. Folks familiar with 90s TV can guess the meta answer correctly just by looking at the title, without even filling in one cell in the grid. Not me though, I had to google “famous 90s tv show about mountains” and luckily Twin Peaks appeared in the first page.
Apart from the meta, the grid is also… something. 20A and 25A were unguessable, and I didn’t know the word STEERAGE, so at first I could only fill up the right hand side and the bottom of the grid, but then I figured out the theme just from 51A alone and it was smooth sailing afterwards.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 5 stars
I doubt I would have solved this had I not concluded Twin Peaks to be the answer from the puzzle title.
From that assumption I found a mountain name in each theme answer to confirm the assumption.
These theme answers are brilliant!
Matt, this was fun!
Similar process for me, though I had ?, CALMER, DANIEL/DENIAL, EVEREST. Also used an anagram solver (Nutrimatic) to get OLYMPUS, then the other two mountains and the meta came to me immediately.
While I did come around, my rabbit hole was that CLEARM also anagrams to the name of a certain pet monkey of a certain paleontologist that appeared in a few early episodes of a very popular show of the 90s…..
I ended up with the solution sort of by accident. I looked at the double letters in CLEAR CLAMMER and ACME jumped out at me. I remembered the clue HIGH POINTS which gave us ACMES. And I realized that could be a major hint. All the themers contained anagrams of well-known mountains. To be honest TWIN PEAKS is probably the only 90s show I’ve ever seen. So I was lucky there.
Nice one Matt. Only one quibble. In 20A why is “friends” used instead of “friend”? MY is singular. I see how a group of fans could each say MY POMPOUS SULLY individually. But it would have been less confusing if it had just been one. Was it supposed to be a red herring for the TV show FRIENDS? :)
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4 stars
Every long theme answer requires every letter to be doubled, so the meta solution must follow the same rule. Ergo the answer is SISTER, SISTER.
:)
That was my thought process also. A double feature with twin sisters Tia and Tamera Mowry.
+1 to “SISTER, SISTER” crew – once I found that, I didn’t think to look for an alternate route.
I had TWIN PEAKS, which I heard of, but never watched. Never heard of SISTER SISTER. TWIN PEAKS includes the fact of the 4 mountains/peaks in the theme answers. SISTER SISTER doesn’t use the mountain theme answers.
Yep. That was also my entry.
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Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4.5 stars
It took me a surprisingly long time to think of Mount CARMEL. I decided to look it up to learn more about it, and turns out it’s actually a mountain range rather than a specific peak. (The exact site of the Mt. Carmel mentioned in the Bible is disputed, apparently.)
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 5 stars
Beautiful!!!
I’m bummed that I didn’t get this one. I disagree with earlier comments that TWIN PEAKS was the obvious answer based just on “Double Feature.” (It wasn’t at all obvious to me.)
The goofy theme answers are not surprisingly full of letter pairs (the POs in MY POMPOUS SULLY, the CLs in CLEAR CLAMMER, etc.) There are similar things where paired letters are reversed. I spent so long looking at that stuff that not one of the scrambled mountains leapt out at me.
An aside: My husband and I were big fans of Twin Peaks in the 1990s. A few years ago, we tried watching it again and found it so self-indulgent that we abandoned it after a couple of episodes. I still like Angelo Badalamenti’s theme, though.
For those of you who first searched for 90s TV shows whose titles consisted of a scrambled duplicate set of letters, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers came awfully close, didn’t it?!