Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 7, 1990 TAG: 9004070484
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. HILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Peyton Place."
The movie "Dune." And "Blue Velvet."
"Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man."
The drama, the soap opera, the bizarre.
They all come together, in various ways, in ABC's new hour-long drama "Twin Peaks," a show that, in a relatively tepid TV season, will put an indelible stamp on the television landscape this week.
Whether anyone will watch is another matter entirely.
It's that kind of show.
Add another item to the list of evocative titles and buzzwords: executive producer, creator, writer, director and enigmatic David Lynch.
What we have here is a series pilot airing Sunday (at 9 p.m. on Channel 13 in the Roanoke viewing area) followed by a one-hour drama slotted on Thursdays (at 9 p.m.).
On the surface, the story is a mystery, asking the simple question: Who killed the homecoming queen? Her body washes ashore one day, bringing to town Kyle MacLachlan, in the role of FBI agent Dale Cooper. He cruises into town, dictating memos into a tape recorder and admiring the towering Douglas fir trees around the mythical Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks.
But what we also have is a story that is told in such an unusual fashion that it challenges the TV audience to hang in there, to stick around for the next clue, the next revelation that is always another commercial, or maybe another week, away.
After a few minutes, those who are not easily taken by Lynch's moody, dawdling, eerie style of story-telling will be squirming in their chairs.
Indeed, watching the two-hour pilot unfold is like watching one of those Douglas fir trees grow. Viewers with MTV-type attention spans will turn this movie off in 18.5 seconds flat, and that thought has ABC concerned. So much so, that at one point there was thought of airing the movie with little or no commercial interruption. A few seconds with the advertising rate sheet and a calculator dispelled that notion.
The pacing is just one of the unusual aspects of the story. The tale is, by turns, funny and grim, amusing and dark. At one point, a changing traffic light takes on an air of foreboding. At another, a woman walks into a public meeting carrying an arm-load of logs. Who's that? That's the Log Lady. The story's quirks become its nuance.
It all comes from Lynch, a Montana native whose family settled in Alexandria, Va., when he was a child. An early experimental film called "The Alphabet" led to a grant from the American Film Institute and study at their Center for Advanced Film Studies. From 1971 to '76 he turned out "Eraserhead."
Later, he helped write and directed "The Elephant Man." He did the screenplay for "Blue Velvet," and adapted and directed the film version of the science-fiction novel, "Dune."
All of this work has dealt with the offbeat, if not the weird. Some of it has been dismissed by some critics as incomprehensible, some classified as fodder for a cult following. Some of it is dark, and at least one - "Elephant Man" - has been highly praised.
Now network television, bidding for viewers to return from more provocative cablecasting and cassettes, has called upon Lynch with all his idiosyncrasies to produce an innovative series, one that will break dramatic ground the way "Hill Street Blues" did nine years ago.
What he has produced is, essentially, a soap opera, a piece that will remind viewers of a certain age of that continuing drama of the '60s, "Peyton Place." For viewers who like all the gimmicks of a soap, "Twin Peaks" could be as entrancing as "Peyton Place" - that best-selling novel and first major nighttime soap.
With each slowly passing scene, new relationships among the people of Twin Peaks come to light as MacLachlan's FBI agent and Michael Ontkean, as Sheriff Harry S. Truman (really), round up the unusual suspects.
Will viewers stick with it? "It's a murder-mystery soap opera," said Lynch, "with fantastic characters. Everybody loves a mystery and we're all detectives of sorts, and we want to know what's going to happen."
Lynch, at a news conference along with many of the show's players, was short on details as to what might happen, being as elusive, vague and enigmatic as his show.
Mark Frost, bearing the titles of executive producer, creator, writer and director, said he doesn't see the show as inaccessible as the pilot's style might suggest.
"I don't really think the show is that radical a departure from what's gone before," he said. "If you consider that we're just trying to reimagine the genre of the nighttime soap, in the way that a `Hill Street' did the cop show a decade ago, then I think we have to give the audience a chance to decide whether they like it or not." Frost was a writer and story editor on "Hill Street" for three years.
To carry the show, Lynch and Frost have assembled a cast that is far more than an ensemble. This group is large enough to start a real town.
"We have 15 regular characters and another 20 satellite characters," said Frost, "each of whom have their ongoing dramas and relationships in town."
The cast is an interesting mix of old faces and new. The players (some of them, anyway):
MacLachlan is getting to be a Lynch-movie fixture, having starred in both "Dune" and "Blue Velvet." Ontkean's sheriff is a Twin Peaks native who knows a lot about most everyone in town and has secrets of his own.
Piper Laurie plays the tough manager of the local sawmill, locked in a power struggle with her brother's widow, played by Joan Chen, who owns the place.
Madchen (pronounced may-chen) Amick plays a waitress at the local diner; Dana Ashbrook, James Marshall and Lara Flynn Boyle play high-school seniors.
Richard Beymer is resurrected to play the town's financial kingpin, owner of a hotel, department store and other holdings. In a piece of casting that Lynch shrugged off as some sort of coincidence, he is reunited with Russ Tamblyn, his costar in the film "West Side Story." Tamblyn plays a psychiatrist who obviously needs a shrink himself.
In a nice touch, Frost and Lynch have cast Peggy Lipton as the owner of the diner. TV fans will be glad to see she still looks well 17 years after her five-season stint on "Mod Squad."
Lynch directed the pilot and the second one-hour episode. Frost directed the seventh one-hour show.
The series' unusual, engaging music is provided by Angelo Badalamenti, who worked with Lynch on "Blue Velvet." "The music," said Lynch, reaching for a description, "there's a lot of kind of jazz in it, some bass guitar and symphonic music as well. It's kind of a jazzy score among those Douglas firs."
Why, Lynch was asked, did the show have to be set in a small-town locale in the Pacific Northwest, sort of a "Peyton Place" tucked away in the pines?
"For those beautiful Douglas firs."
"I guess the series is sort of a step outward in a different direction," said Frost, the straight man of the Lynch-Frost duo. "I don't think we're trying to send up the conventions of the nighttime soap in any way.
"There're things that people could laugh at certainly, but you can't control that. It was never our intention to do any kind of a parody. I think the story, however it may strike you, was told with a straight face. And maybe it's a step forward for the genre, I don't know. That's for other people to decide."
"Twin Peaks" has a certain weird allure that many viewers will find entrancing. Many others will reach for the remote control before the first commercial. But those who stick with the two-hour pilot will surely tune in to the next episode Thursday, and the ones that follow. That's a promise. And a warning.
by CNB