Archive for category tv
Fan Loyalty and Artist Betrayal
In a recent issue of triple j magazine, I interviewed Tyler Labine about his subversive horror / comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. He also played ‘Sock’ on the cult TV hit Reaper; a show that was cancelled after two seasons to the dismay of its avid audience. (It’s definitely worth checking out, especially its second season, where it develops more ongoing storylines and greater depth while retaining its knockabout slacker charm.) Anyway, conversation turned to the loyalty of genre fans.
Your Tucker and Dale co-star Alan Tudyk [from Firefly and Dollhouse] has that crazy Joss Whedon love behind him!
We just went to Comic-Con. I’d never been before. It was nuts there. I was like a superstar – and Alan is like the God of Comic-Con. It was insane! Those fans are the best fans you could have. If you get in with them, you’re good for life.
Was it particularly hard seeing Reaper cancelled when you knew this passionate audience was out there? Absolutely loyal to the show?
We were really hitting our stride, critics were pricking up their ears, our ratings were actually really good for the CW – so we were like ‘what the hell was the problem?’ To this day, I still don’t know. We didn’t fit into the idea of what the network wanted and got the axe. And it sucks because when a show’s cancelled, the actors are the ones left to deal with the fans. I ended up on another show right away, and to some fans it looked like I’d jumped ship…
Like you’d betrayed them?
Yeah. These people who’d been my fans were suddenly, like, “you suck! You’re an asshole! I can’t believe you have another job!” The show had been canned for months – they just didn’t know it yet, because we weren’t allowed to announce it. It sucks. And I myself was a fan of the show, regardless of my involvement. I thought the show was supercool. I would’ve watched that show even if I wasn’t in it. So that kind of pissed me off. But also Reaper was like my fifth television series, so I understood how TV is a fickle bitch. Onwards and upwards I guess, you know?
The problem with loyalty is how it can so quickly sour into feeling betrayed. Fans give so much to these stories. They just expect the cast and crew and creators to do the same. Treating a role just like another job won’t cut it: it has to be a passion, a calling, the dream of a lifetime. Everyone on set must be the best of friends, too.
Remember the outpouring of anger when Michael Rosenbaum said he wasn’t going to appear as Lex Luthor on the final episode of Smallville? Or the ire directed towards George R. R. Martin for not writing his next Song of Ice and Fire book fast enough? At least that resulted in Neil Gaiman’s fantastically quotable clarification of the contract between writers and readers: ”George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”
Neither’s Tyler Labine, damn it.
The Twilight Zone Season One: jmag review
Here’s a quick triple j magazine review of the amazing first season of The Twilight Zone, now out on blu-ray. I get a little evangelical here, but who can resist a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity? Not me.
TWILIGHT ZONE SEASON ONE
Creator: Rod Serling
Starring: Too many to name
Country: USA
Commentary tracks and deleted scenes seemed so entrancing when DVDs first appeared, huh? Man, the novelty wore off fast. Occasionally, though, pop culture archaeologists dig up something that makes it all worthwhile. The new Twilight Zone set, collecting the first season from 1959, is a time capsule: commentaries, lectures, old sponsor advertising, and creator Rod Serling’s original pitch to the TV networks. He sells his show like a pre-Mad Men Don Draper.
Unfortunately, those extras are only on the fancy blu-ray collection, but show itself is available on DVD. And it’s more than just a time capsule. It still feels alive today. Watching it will make you embarrassed for a lot of the TV we’ve made since.
The Twilight Zone took the burbling anxieties of the time – alienation, nostalgia, war – and turned them into 20-minute nightmares, week after week, aided by some of the best science fiction writers of the day. They created little morality plays with limited budgets, gorgeous black and white photography, and narration that sounds like poetry.
Other reviews this month: The Adjustment Bureau and Never Let Me Go in cinemas; the probably-better-than-the-original Let Me In on DVD.
Issue #48 on sale now.
Apologising to Laura Palmer
This is an extended remix of half my presentation from last week’s Twin Peaks nine-hour marathon at ACMI. I was especially gratified to demand – and receive – a rousing round of applause for the regularly ignored Mark Frost, too.
Did you see the Twin Peaks homage-slash-reunion on this week’s episode of Psych?
The fact that it’s so odd to Peaks’ actors, all grown up, shows how few have had successful post-Peaks careers. Kyle MacLachlan might’ve been on Sex and The City and Desperate Housewives, but it’s always a little sad to see Agent Cooper playing these neutered, neurotic characters. Ray Wise has fared better, with memorable roles including the Devil himself on short-lived slacker comedy Reaper.
Sometimes this curse that follows cult TV stars can almost seem like a gift to that show’s fans; it lets the characters freeze, unaging, with the men and women who embodied them tucked out of the public eye like they’re trapped in Dorian Gray’s attic.
The fact that the New York Times considered this Psych episode newsworthy shows how Twin Peaks still circulates strongly through popular culture. Recently, there have been a bunch of twenty-years-later articles, all unearthing fun facts about the show; like the fact that it was David Lynch himself who placed the sand, grain by grain, on Sheryl Lee’s face for the infamous ‘wrapped in plastic’ moment.

She said: “It was a great learning experience playing a corpse. I got to be a sponge and soak up everything.” I always wished Sheryl Lee – as Laura Palmer, and later, her cousin Maddie – deserved to be bestowed the status of full-blown Scream Queen, equal to Fay Wray or Jamie Lee Curtis.
But I’ve also made the case – in print, no less – that Twin Peaks is a much more satisfying show if you see it as a soap opera, and not a mystery. Laura is just a reason to kick off the plot. She gives some characters something to hide and others something to uncover. Sure, we’re told Laura is “full of secrets” – but when we look deeply into her eyes on video tape, it’s not to see into her soul. It’s just to see the reflection of something else in the same scene.
What if Laura’s not just wrapped in plastic, but made of plastic, too?
Today, though, I think I’ve changed my mind, and misjudged Laura Palmer by labelling her an easy narrative excuse. The follow-up movie Fire Walk With Me (infamously booed on its premiere at Cannes) is a Herculean attempt to turn Laura back into a human being. It acts as a kind of retroactive apology for how Laura was treated throughout the show.
Fire Walk With Me begins with the destruction of a television set; a not exactly subtle way of violently highlighting that what you’re about to watch will be different than anything you saw on TV. While Twin Peaks was regularly terrifying – in fact, I still believe it’s the most frightening thing to ever appear on network TV – the movie is relentless. It’s the kind of film that leaves you wanting a shower afterwards.
(I’m going to tread carefully from this point to avoid spoilers for a twenty-year-old show. That’s how much I care.)
Just as Laura can be seen as an excuse, so can some of the show’s supernatural elements. It never sat right with me how Laura’s killer was, in essence, forgiven for all crimes by Peaks’ possession plotline. Fire Walk With Me, however, strips those excuses away again.
After the Black Lodge and the backwards talking and the David Bowie cameo and the inexplicably chilling monkey-face that appears from behind a mask, Fire Walk With Me shows us the psychic toll of all this horror on Laura herself.
And it leaves us with a broken young woman who – despite all those TV Guide cover stories and I Killed Laura Palmer T-shirts – finally finds some kind of peace.
One: the pilot episode of The Walking Dead might be the best thing Frank Darbont has ever done.
It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.