My first job was at a record store. I know how High Fidelity of me. It was also a coffee/chocolate/malt/sandwich joint and it was a great job to have as a 16 year old. I worked with an older girl (late 20’s) who was eccentric and I often see glimmers of her style and face in what is now current day Portland. She was really into “the Davids”, Cronenberg and Lynch and was first to introduce me to the magic that is Wild at Heart. Another Lynch creation she talked about fondly was Twin Peaks, the now infamous cult show on CBS that ran for just two seasons, cancelled despite the protest of many fans a la Arrested development style.
This month, after many years of passing it by and saying “one day”, I rented the whole Twin Peaks series. It was everything that I knew to expect, part murder mystery, sci-fi, surreal, soap opera, comedy thing. Am I now a Twin Peaks fanatic? No but I did enjoy many elements of the show and was very engrossed a majority of the time and in many ways I agree with what David Lynch said himself when the shows rating were faltering, “We should have never solved Laura Palmer’s murder.”
For those of you who don’t know the plot (I’ll TRY to be brief) Twin Peaks, a logging community in Washington, is thrown into havoc when the prom queen washes ashore in a plastic. An unconventional FBI agent comes to town to help the local sheriff’s solve the murder and through the investigation we (the viewers) get wrapped up in the lives and drama of all the other residents of Twin Peaks. I thought this plot device worked well. I really enjoy when all the characters motivations are centered around a main character who is dead and/missing, the un-main-character if you will.
The music was unique, part sweeping Douglas Sirk Melodrama, part jazz club and often certain characters would be synced up with certain music adding to their persona and general development within the story arc. One of the shinning characters is Dale Cooper, the FBI agent whose eccentric methods lead him to clues as well as deep into the drama of the Twin Peaks Community.
In the episode 16 we finally know who killed the un-main-character. The next few episodes were hard to get through as the thing that was driving everyone to act loony was now gone. However, it began to pick up speed again with the introduction of a co-called villain (a man from Dale Cooper’s past) and I was quite upset when the final episode left one hell of a cliff hanger that will never be resolved. A movie(Fire Walk With Me) was made after the shows cancellation but rather than close up the gaping plot whole left at the end of the series, Lynch opted for a prequel to the Laura Palmer plot line, focusing on the events the week before her murder. I plan to make this my next rental.
There never seems to be true fairness when it comes to the decision a cancel a show. TV execs go straight to the obvious source, the ratings. Creators of the shows in jeopardy are prone to blame time slots, and what other shows they are paired with in those day/time slots. Fridays tend to be where shows go to die and 10pm is just a hair too late for many. The Neilson ratings have dictated the lives of television shows for a long time now and I like many I know have always questioned just how and where the fuck they are getting there info anyway? According to their website they are the industry leader in “measurement science”( whatever the hell that is, sounds totes made up) but what they don’t take into account is that many people don’t plan their schedules around TV shows. Just because I’m not watching it at its regularly scheduled time slot does not mean that I don’t like it or will go back and watch it later. I really enjoyed Pushing Daises but I was not going to stop my life to be home at whatever the fuck time on whatever the fuck day.
It is too bad Twin Peaks got cancelled but that we have been subjected to 9 seasons of Two and a Half Men, or that we only got to enjoy the Bleuth Family for 3 seasons but got 11 seasons of 7th Heaven.
It’s a cruel cruel world in television. Thank god for HBO J
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