Directed by: David Lynch.
Written by: Mark Frost & David Lynch.
Starring: Ian Buchanan (Lester Guy), Nancy Ferguson (Ruth Trueworthy), Miguel Ferrer (Bud Budwaller), Gary Grossman (Bert Schein), Mel Johnson Jr. (Mickey), Marvin Kaplan (Dwight McGonigle), David L. Lander (Valdja Gochktch), Kim McGuire (Nicole Thorne), Marla Rubinoff (Betty Hudson), Tracey Walter ('Blinky' Watts), Raleigh Friend (Hurry Up Twin), Buddy Douglas (Buddy Morris), Raymond Friend (Hurry Up Twin), Irwin Keyes (Shorty the Stagehand), Everett Greenbaum (ZBC Announcer).
A
year after Twin Peaks went off the air, David Lynch and Mark Frost returned to
network television for the surreal, half hour comedy On the Air. More than a
decade before 30 Rock or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Lynch and Frost’s show
was a behind the scenes look at a live variety show – this time set in the
early days of television in the 1950s. The network, ABC, apparently hated the
show – and ended up only airing three of the seven episodes that were made in
the summer months before pulling it off the air forever. The show has developed
a cult following – of course – in the years since though. Lynch directed the
first episode of the series, but none of the rest. Having never seen the show,
I thought I’d take a look at that first episode to decide if I wanted to
venture through the next six. The short answer to that question is no. Had I been
a Lynch fan in 1992 (when I was 10), I probably would have stuck with the show
to see if it went anywhere. Watching it 23 years later though, I felt the first
episode was an unfunny mess – and I don’t see much point in continuing the
series.
The
show was takes place on the set of fictional television program The Lester Guy
Show. Lester Guy (Ian Buchanan) was a movie star coming over to TV, because
according to the network, the research shows that the audience wants that. The
pilot episode has a series of bad things happening before the show that they
work out, and then the show itself – which went out live – was a complete and
utter disaster. Anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. The punchline
being, of course, that the show was an immediate smash hit because of all the
screw-ups.
I
found the pilot episode of On the Air to drag – a lot – but not in the way most
pilot episodes do. Many pilots are mediocre at best, because you have to spend
so much time setting up the characters, their relationship to each other, and
the basic outline of the show. By the time you get that out of the way –
especially in a half hour sitcom – there’s no room for anything else. I didn’t
find that to be the case with On the Air – which spent most of its time dealing
with just a few characters, which is smart, but ones who are horribly unfunny
and one joke characters, which is not smart.
So,
for example, there was Betty Hudson (Marla Rubinoff), the blonde co-star of the
show, whose one character trait seems to be that she is the dumbest dumb blonde
in the history of the world. She doesn’t understand anything, and has to have
it explained to her multiple times (the part about her mother ironing was
painful). Then there is Valdja Gochktch (David L. Lander), the show’s director
“from the old country” who is supposed to be funny, I guess, because he has an
accent. The star of the Lester Guy Show isn’t actually in the opening scenes –
as they prepare the show – very much, but once it gets started, he has a lot of
slapstick comedy (which, admittedly), is pretty good. There are lots of other
characters – like Miguel Ferrar playing the network executive you would expect
him to, and a strange soundman named Blinky.
I
didn’t really laugh during the first episode of On the Air. The show did get
better as it moved along, but in general, I found the whole thing so overtly
silly that none of it landed for me. For the most part, I believe you need to
have something ground a show like this in reality – that allows you to take
weird flights of fancy – but in this show everyone and everything has to be so
zany at every second that grounding is impossible.
I’m
not surprised the show didn’t last on ABC – hell, I’m surprised it even made to
air on ABC at all, or any other network. Perhaps now, with so many channels
looking for content, Lynch and Frost could have created a show this outlandish
for a small and passionate audience – but not back in 1992. I loved many of the
zanier aspects of Twin Peaks, but there they had something to balance them out.
Here, they don’t – the whole pilot seems like its cranked up to 100, and this
ends up making it the weird combination of boring and exhausting. Yes, it’s
certainly a David Lynch TV show – but in this case, just not a very good one.
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