"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."
Jan. 4th, 2008 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI got my Twin Peaks complete series DVDs last night and couldn't resist indulging in some of the extras. They really outdid themselves with this—there's a two hour documentary where they talk with pretty much everyone involved, and there's a half hour interview with Lynch, where he proves that he just can't communicate like a normal person. Trust me. It was pretty painful to watch. But they also dug up a series of commercials the cast did for a Japanese coffee, a bunch of promos for the show, including ads for when it changed timeslots and one to support the troops in the Gulf War. And—this is my favorite. Apparently Twin Peaks, at the height of its fanatical following, had a 1-900 line where you could call and get spoilers for $2 the first minute, $1 each additional minute. This is brilliant. Twin Peaks was just at the dawn of the internet—one of the first shows with a usenet group—so it was before websites would have taken those spoilers and posted them for everyone. You couldn't do something like that now.
On almost every special feature for any DVD I've watched, the creators claim their show is "unique," "groundbreaking" and all around brilliant. In the case of Twin Peaks, those claims are more than just blowing smoke. I know this has more to do with when I came of age as a viewer, but for me, prime time TV shows pretty much start with Twin Peaks. There's almost nothing I want to watch that was around before that. Not only was Twin Peaks unlike anything else on TV before or since, but many of the genre shows I love have their roots in Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks was groundbreaking, partly for its structure (one dominating storyline that developed week to week, so that you couldn't miss an episode, something that's much more common now), partly for its surrealism and genre-bending. But it also made TV history in the way it fell apart, fairly spectacularly. Its first, eight-episode season, it was the most popular show in television. Its second it was cancelled.
I read a book of essays on Twin Peaks a while ago called Full of Secrets; many of these essays were concerned with why the show failed. The discussions focussed mostly on narrative structure. Season one was driven by one story, and once that story was resolved, the show failed to bring up another, compelling story or to transition to a more serial storytelling style. I can think of several shows recently with this same problem that have dealt with it with varying degrees of success. Veronica Mars, which owes a lot to Twin Peaks, resolved the mystery at the end of its first season and introduced a new one in season two. This didn't quite duplicate the magnetism of season one, but did keep the show limping along into season three. Lost has just tried to prolong the mystery indefinitely, which is its own brand of unsatisfying, but has kept the show on the air. This was apparently what Lynch intended to do, but was forced to show his hand by the network. 24, I think, has been the most succesful with dealing with this limitation, by creating a new season-long arc every season.
Twin Peaks, on the other hand, never really had a second arc to go to. The new story arc they introduced was lame in the extreme. This was in part because the arc that they'd planned was vetoed by Kyle MacLachlan—this was to develop the relationship between Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne. It's interesting to see this decision discussed by each of the different cast and production people. Everyone says they really wanted to do it, but it didn't work for "cast dynamics reasons" or "interpersonal reasons" until they get to Kyle, who just says he wouldn't do it.
But Twin Peaks had more problems in its second season than just that. ABC, which had always been leary of the show, bounced it from timeslot to timeslot. The Gulf War broke out, and apparently the show was preempted in all or part for six out of eight weeks, which made it impossible for viewers to follow the threads of the stories. But most importantly, the show runners, David Lynch and Mark Frost, left in the middle of season two to work on film projects. They came back at the end of the season, and the show began to draw together again, but by then it was too late.
Frost talks in the interviews about his ideas for season three, which, god, I would have loved to see. Despite its cliffhanger ending, I've never been interested in Twin Peaks fic, mostly because it's hard to imagine anyone coming up with a resolution to the story half as brilliant as what Lynch and Frost would have done. Even knowing where they were going, my imagination just isn't good enough to even theorize as to what would have happened.
Television is a collaborative medium. The ultimate failure of Twin Peaks was that it was, from the beginning, David Lynch's show. Mark Frost was able to take Lynch's wild imagination and shape it, but the two of them were practically unsupervised by the network the first season. To a man, everyone interviewed considered themselves conduits for David Lynch. Most of the actors, editors, even the directors, said that they'd read a script and they just wouldn't get it. Even looking at the raw footage they didn't get it. They all trusted Lynch and recognized his genius, but not one understood or shared his vision.
The first eight episodes were pretty much artsy independent films, which is what Lynch had done in the past. Television, on the other hand, places gruelling demands on the creator, and one or two people simply cannot continue to be solely responsible for a show over several seasons. So when both Lynch and Frost's attention flagged in the second season, and they left to work on their own movies for a few episodes, no one was capable of stepping up and taking over.
One of Twin Peaks' hallmarks was its dream-like quality. In every episode, there are weird, inexplicable elements. But as actress Sherilyn Fenn pointed out, everything that Lynch did was grounded in something. Everything was deliberate and had meaning, if only to him and no one else. When he went hands-off in season two, the new show runners started being weird just to be weird, and there is a palpable difference between the two.
That's the tragedy of Twin Peaks. The combination of surreal elements, when done right, is genius. But the minute they lost focus, those very elements, incorrectly used, made the show suck harder than almost anything on television. There have been many shows on TV that went from brilliant to crap, but most, like the X-Files, had nine seasons to do it. Twin Peaks went from the heights to the depths in one season, practically from one episode to the next. So watching Twin Peaks is not just good entertainment, but a whole education in how television shows are run.
On almost every special feature for any DVD I've watched, the creators claim their show is "unique," "groundbreaking" and all around brilliant. In the case of Twin Peaks, those claims are more than just blowing smoke. I know this has more to do with when I came of age as a viewer, but for me, prime time TV shows pretty much start with Twin Peaks. There's almost nothing I want to watch that was around before that. Not only was Twin Peaks unlike anything else on TV before or since, but many of the genre shows I love have their roots in Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks was groundbreaking, partly for its structure (one dominating storyline that developed week to week, so that you couldn't miss an episode, something that's much more common now), partly for its surrealism and genre-bending. But it also made TV history in the way it fell apart, fairly spectacularly. Its first, eight-episode season, it was the most popular show in television. Its second it was cancelled.
I read a book of essays on Twin Peaks a while ago called Full of Secrets; many of these essays were concerned with why the show failed. The discussions focussed mostly on narrative structure. Season one was driven by one story, and once that story was resolved, the show failed to bring up another, compelling story or to transition to a more serial storytelling style. I can think of several shows recently with this same problem that have dealt with it with varying degrees of success. Veronica Mars, which owes a lot to Twin Peaks, resolved the mystery at the end of its first season and introduced a new one in season two. This didn't quite duplicate the magnetism of season one, but did keep the show limping along into season three. Lost has just tried to prolong the mystery indefinitely, which is its own brand of unsatisfying, but has kept the show on the air. This was apparently what Lynch intended to do, but was forced to show his hand by the network. 24, I think, has been the most succesful with dealing with this limitation, by creating a new season-long arc every season.
Twin Peaks, on the other hand, never really had a second arc to go to. The new story arc they introduced was lame in the extreme. This was in part because the arc that they'd planned was vetoed by Kyle MacLachlan—this was to develop the relationship between Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne. It's interesting to see this decision discussed by each of the different cast and production people. Everyone says they really wanted to do it, but it didn't work for "cast dynamics reasons" or "interpersonal reasons" until they get to Kyle, who just says he wouldn't do it.
But Twin Peaks had more problems in its second season than just that. ABC, which had always been leary of the show, bounced it from timeslot to timeslot. The Gulf War broke out, and apparently the show was preempted in all or part for six out of eight weeks, which made it impossible for viewers to follow the threads of the stories. But most importantly, the show runners, David Lynch and Mark Frost, left in the middle of season two to work on film projects. They came back at the end of the season, and the show began to draw together again, but by then it was too late.
Frost talks in the interviews about his ideas for season three, which, god, I would have loved to see. Despite its cliffhanger ending, I've never been interested in Twin Peaks fic, mostly because it's hard to imagine anyone coming up with a resolution to the story half as brilliant as what Lynch and Frost would have done. Even knowing where they were going, my imagination just isn't good enough to even theorize as to what would have happened.
Television is a collaborative medium. The ultimate failure of Twin Peaks was that it was, from the beginning, David Lynch's show. Mark Frost was able to take Lynch's wild imagination and shape it, but the two of them were practically unsupervised by the network the first season. To a man, everyone interviewed considered themselves conduits for David Lynch. Most of the actors, editors, even the directors, said that they'd read a script and they just wouldn't get it. Even looking at the raw footage they didn't get it. They all trusted Lynch and recognized his genius, but not one understood or shared his vision.
The first eight episodes were pretty much artsy independent films, which is what Lynch had done in the past. Television, on the other hand, places gruelling demands on the creator, and one or two people simply cannot continue to be solely responsible for a show over several seasons. So when both Lynch and Frost's attention flagged in the second season, and they left to work on their own movies for a few episodes, no one was capable of stepping up and taking over.
One of Twin Peaks' hallmarks was its dream-like quality. In every episode, there are weird, inexplicable elements. But as actress Sherilyn Fenn pointed out, everything that Lynch did was grounded in something. Everything was deliberate and had meaning, if only to him and no one else. When he went hands-off in season two, the new show runners started being weird just to be weird, and there is a palpable difference between the two.
That's the tragedy of Twin Peaks. The combination of surreal elements, when done right, is genius. But the minute they lost focus, those very elements, incorrectly used, made the show suck harder than almost anything on television. There have been many shows on TV that went from brilliant to crap, but most, like the X-Files, had nine seasons to do it. Twin Peaks went from the heights to the depths in one season, practically from one episode to the next. So watching Twin Peaks is not just good entertainment, but a whole education in how television shows are run.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 06:49 pm (UTC)What comes through so clearly, though, for everyone involved, is the sense of betrayal and bitterness when things fell apart--not about the cancellation, but the quality of the show in the second season. All of them felt that in the first season they were working on something amazing, the fulfilment of all their dreams as an artist, and then in season two they were working on crap. Everybody sort of gave up on it all at once. And it's hard to imagine a way that Twin Peaks could have sustained itself for longer. Most shows have room for a couple of dud episodes a season, which are going to happen anyway, no matter how hard you try. This one didn't. So as soon as duds started happening, all the people working on the show just threw in the towel.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 06:57 pm (UTC)