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
|