The Best New TV Series You Will Never See
After reading in The New Yorker and Movieline about writer-director
David Lynch getting the unexpected news that ABC wasn't going
to pick up his TV series Mulholland Drive, I got my hands on a
tape of the pilot. And? In this tiresome era of Friends knockoffs,
Mulholland Drive would have been the best new show of the season
challenging, mysterious, brilliant. It seems a crime that
the network has failed to see the potential of the very thing
they asked for, an unusual, stylized nighttime soap about Hollywood
hopefuls, which finds Lynch at the top of his game.
Lynch's earlier series Twin Peaks influenced everything from
Northern Exposure to The X-Files to this season's Now and Again,
and there's no telling how Mulholland Drive might have changed
the face of television. The show does for Los Angeles what Twin
Peaks did for small-town life turns it upside down. Lynch
makes the familiar showbiz settings as ominous as a Martian landscape,
and peoples them with discontented, disconnected characters who
could be human or alien (or both). Although the pace is slow,
even hypnotic, before you know it all the seemingly random story
lines converge as L.A. dwellers pass one another like cars gridlocked
on a freeway at rush hour.
Mulholland Drive was to have revolved around four players
an actress (Naomi Watts), a director (Justin Theroux), a screenwriter
(Scott Coffey), and a beautiful amnesiac (Laura Herring)
all living in an apartment complex (run by former MGM tapper Ann
Miller). Since Lynch is the anti-Aaron Spelling, the apartment
house ought to have been called Hellrose Place. In the pilot,
Lynch's L.A. is awash in professional hitmen, two of whom in the
opening sequence bungle the offing of Herring when they are involved
in a sudden car crash. With thousands of dollars stuffed in her
evening bag, the dazed Herring walks shakily into Hollywood, where
she soon teams up with the show's most improbable character, a
corn-fed, ambitious ingenue who, while waiting for her big break
in Hollywood, likes to play Nancy Drew, girl detective. Game Naomi
Watts does what she can with this part, but I wish we could see
the intended series to discover how her character would develop
(more about this in a minute).
Into this mix come subplots like one where Justin Theroux
who is sensational in the part plays a movie director who
finds his wife cheating on him with the pool guy (Billy Ray Cyrus!),
even as Mafia gangsters shut down production on his feature film.
The baddies want Theroux to recast the female lead with their
chosen tootsie (Australian dish Melissa George) or they will ruin
him, as a spectral thug named Cowboy (producer Monte Montgomery)
makes plain.
In another story line, trigger-happy charmer Mark Pellegrino
steals every scene he's in. In one audacious black comedy sequence,
Pellegrino shoots a pal, only to discover that the bullet went
through the wall and into the fat lady next door. After he kills
her, he also has to off a curious janitor, and finally
memorably shoots the janitor's vacuum. Violent, yes, but
hilarious too. Scenes like this one would have put Mulholland
Drive on the map overnight: argued about, debated over, watched.
Lynch's deliberate, tranquil pacing suggests a drug-induced dream
state, which particularly favors several of the performers who
underplay their parts: standouts include Robert Forster as a seen-it-all
cop, Scott Coffey as a housebound writer, Laura Herring as the
novocained mystery gal, and Katharine Towne as a lovelorn production
assistant. In the pilot's most unexpected turnabout, Naomi Watts'
sunny character must audition by reading from a script with a
fading has-been (Chad Everett!). You expect the worst, but then
Watts suddenly turns carnal, finding the sexual undercurrent in
her banal dialogue, and scorches the screen. It's all part of
Lynch's observation that L.A. is a city where everyone acts, all
the time.
Why isn't Mulholland Drive on ABC's fall schedule? One answer:
The network wouldn't know a great pilot if it bit them on the
ass. I've heard ABC may run the pilot as a movie of the week,
which would be insane. The pilot is entirely open-ended, and no
number of reshoots or tacked-on endings could ever close up all
the Pandora's boxes Lynch has pried open here. Fox was interested
in acquiring the show to turn it into a multipart miniseries,
but I hear that plan died during money negotiations. Wherefore
art thou, Showtime? Whither HBO? Come on, guys, grab this gem,
air it as a weekly series, and watch the Emmys pour in.
By Edward Margulies
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