Culture Shock 11.13.14: 'Twin Peaks' is happening again

True to her word, it looks like Laura Palmer will indeed see FBI Agent Dale Cooper again in 25 years. Whether that's exactly what "Twin Peaks" creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had in mind back in 1990 is another matter.

Laura's prediction, in Agent Cooper's dream at the end of the first season's third episode, was just one of the many cryptic clues dropped during the show's brief, yet groundbreaking run.

When Lynch and Frost announced last month that "Twin Peaks" would return in 2016 for nine new episodes to air on Showtime, the news lit up the Internet like nothing short of announcing a new pope or a new "Star Wars" trilogy. As the giant told Agent Cooper, "It is happening again."

"Twin Peaks" returns to a television landscape radically changed from the one it shook up back in 1990 and '91. Back then, "Twin Peaks" was unique. Now, quirky shows with oddball characters and serialized storytelling that once was reserved for soap operas are virtually the norm.

"Twin Peaks" is in large part responsible for that.

When Lynch brought "Twin Peaks" to ABC in 1990, it was almost unheard of for respected filmmakers to slum in the television ghetto. Now that's common, too, and no one but the most obnoxious art-film snobs looks down on TV.

Yet that's not all that's changed about television in the intervening quarter century.
"Twin Peaks" is many things. It mixes comedy, melodrama, horror, science fiction, urban legends, bleeding-edge physics and Buddhist philosophy into the most compelling murder mystery since Jack the Ripper. "Who killed Laura Palmer" was the second coming of "Who shot J.R.?"

Yet structurally, "Twin Peaks" is deceptively simple. It's a parody of soap operas, and not the nighttime variety such as "Dallas" and "Dynasty," which reigned over the 1980s, but the daytime kind.

Like virtually every daytime soap ever aired, "Twin Peaks" is set in a fictional town with a sordid underbelly. A logging/resort community near the Canadian border, Twin Peaks falls into the long tradition of made-up burghs, from Salem to Genoa City, that attract more than their share of drama.

The show's mood music, courtesy of composer Angelo Badalamenti, swells with overwrought intensity at every romantic interlude. And the multi-generational cast reflects the storytelling necessities of daytime soaps, which traditionally shift their plots toward younger cast members in the summer to take advantage of teens being out of school.

"It is happening again. It is happening again."

Beyond that, "Twin Peaks" trades in all of the familiar tropes of daytime drama.

Infidelity? Aplenty. Convenient cases of amnesia? Nadine coming out of a coma thinking she's a teenager and back in high school qualifies. Characters presumed dead who turn out to have faked their deaths? That runs in the Packard family. A shady businessman who owns most of the town and schemes to gobble up or destroy everything he doesn't? Well, of course. "Twin Peaks" even has that most soapy of soap opera tropes, the identical twin who appears out of the blue.

James, a lovesick teen with resting pout face, seems to have just arrived from daytime TV. He goes through soul mates faster than most men do TV channels. He starts as Laura's "secret boyfriend" and moves on to her best friend Donna before the corpse is cold. Next he's on to Laura's identical cousin, then back to Donna and finally into the arms of an older woman, who so obviously plans to Double Indemnity him that we realize it faster than James can say Barbara Stanwyck.

In case all that doesn't clue us in, almost everyone in Twin Peaks is hooked on a soap opera within the soap opera, the amusingly overwrought "Invitation to Love": a parody within a parody.

But can "Twin Peaks" return as the same soap parody it was? In 1990 ABC, CBS and NBC each aired between three and four hours of soap opera programming each weekday. Today they air 3½ hours total between them. The daytime soap is a dead format, wrapped in plastic.

How the soap opera's demise will play into what Lynch and Frost have planned is, for now, just another of their unsolved mysteries. It could even involve a long lost twin.

"Would you like to play with fire? Would you like to play with Bob?"

Culture Shock 12.10.09: Another soap opera's bubble has just burst

Chalk up another victim of the changing demographics and economics of daytime television.

CBS announced Tuesday that it is canceling its long-running soap opera "As the World Turns," which has been a fixture of daytime TV for more than 50 years. The last episode will air in September 2010, giving the show's writers and remaining viewers plenty of time to say goodbye.

It's the swan song not just for a TV show, but for an era. Earlier this year, CBS aired the final episode of "Guiding Light," its longest-running soap, which started as a radio drama in 1937 before jumping to television in 1952.

Daytime soap operas are a dying breed, at least in the U.S. With the cancellation of "As the World Turns," CBS has only two daytime dramas left: "The Young and the Restless" and "The Bold and the Beautiful." Both are safe for now. They're daytime's two highest-rated soaps.

Meanwhile, NBC's daytime schedule is in even worse shape than its fourth-place primetime lineup. "Days of Our Lives," NBC's sole surviving daytime soap, was flirting with cancellation, too, just a couple of years ago. The soap's producers even dropped two of their most popular and highest-paid actors — Drake Hogestyn and Deidre Hall — in order to cut costs.

Surprisingly, kicking John and Marlena to the curb didn't hurt the show's ratings. "Days" is now tied for second with "The Bold and the Beautiful" and is the only soap to increase its audience in 2009. (But I think my mom has stopped tuning in. You can't please everyone.)

That leaves only ABC with a full slate of daytime soaps: "All My Children," "One Life to Live," which could be the next casualty, and "General Hospital." And a full slate isn't what it used to be, with local affiliates pressuring the networks for more local time in the mornings and afternoons.

Time and technology aren't being kind to daytime dramas. The stay-at-home moms who once made up the bulk of soap viewers are a shrinking demographic. Add to that increasing competition from cable channels, TiVo, DVDs and soccer practice, and soaps are under more pressure than ever.

The decline in soap viewership doesn't come as much of a surprise. Most daytime dramas are virtually unwatchable, with ludicrous stories and dubious acting. Seriously, how Susan Lucci finally won that Daytime Emmy in 1999 — after 18 previous nominations — is a mystery. I guess the pity vote carried the day.

Still, that awfulness is sometimes a soap's greatest selling point. When I was in college, "Days of Our Lives" had a long storyline in which Marlena was possessed by the devil. This included plenty of "Exorcist"-style demonic growing and levitating-above-the-bed action. You have to admire a soap opera that's willing to go that far over the top. Every day brought some new horror-movie cliché, sanitized just enough for daytime's broadcast standards. Yes, it was a good time to watch TV between classes.

A few years later, "Days" even beat ABC's primetime hit "Lost" to the stranded-on-a-mysterious-island plot. Yet that brings up another reason why daytime soaps are fading. Most primetime dramas now have continuing storylines, which used to be mostly a soap-opera thing.

You no longer need daytime dramas to get your fix of large casts and complex, never-ending, incomprehensible plots.

When the last soap opera's bubble finally bursts, it won't matter. Everything is a soap opera now.

NASCAR revs its engines and sends hearts racing

At a local bookshop, the sci-fi section begins where the romance section ends. Otherwise, I would never have discovered what is one of publishing’s strangest marketing tie-ins.

I somehow missed the announcement back in November 2005, but Harlequin, the venerable publisher of disposable romance novels, has entered into an agreement with NASCAR.

In terms of cross-promotion, this ranks up there with last year’s bizarre, one-time (I hope) smash-up between Marvel Comics and the CBS soap opera “Guiding Light.”

The less said about that, the better. You can Google it if you simply must know.

NASCAR’s press release, which I found on the company’s Web site, explains:

“The upcoming novels, written by some of Harlequin’s bestselling authors, will have plotlines centering on NASCAR and will feature the NASCAR brand on their covers. Harlequin will serve as the first and only publisher of women’s fiction for NASCAR.”

That was nearly two years ago. By now, there are more than a dozen Harlequin/NASCAR books in print and testing the limits of multimedia synergy. The titles include “Hearts Under Caution,” “Old Flame, New Sparks,” “Speed Bumps” and “Speed Dating.” The covers usually feature race drivers in the spot formerly reserved for Fabio.

I think this is the sort of thing NASCAR old timers have in mind when they say this isn’t your daddy’s stock car racing. Of course, if NASCAR isn’t what it used to be, neither are NASCAR fans.

Back to NASCAR’s press release: “Research shows that of the 75 million NASCAR fans in this country, 40 percent are female.”

Harlequin is counting on at least a few of those female fans wanting to mix their love of racing with their love of love. And maybe it’s not as crazy an idea as it seems because Harlequin isn’t the only publisher trying to cash in on female race fans.

NASCAR analyst Liz Allison, the widow of late NASCAR driver Davey Allison, recently released “The Girl’s Guide to Winning a NASCAR Driver.” Allison calls her book “tongue-in-cheek” and says it’s “just a fun book of how to daydream about your favorite race car driver.”

I hope her readers are in on the joke. In any case, if you look up Allison’s book at Amazon.com, you’ll see that customers who bought it also purchased Harlequin’s NASCAR books.

This isn’t the first time Harlequin has stepped outside of its traditional romance-novel box. Harlequin also publishes a line of comics drawn in the Japanese manga style.

Given that manga is one of publishing’s major growth categories, it makes sense to try to hook teenage girls on comics in the hope that they’ll eventually graduate to Harlequin’s bread-and-butter bodice rippers.

So, where does Harlequin go next? What other professional sports are ripe for romance?

This could be a whole new medium for David Beckham to conquer. I mean, it’s not as if the Los Angeles Galaxy’s $250 million man is putting in much time on the soccer pitch these days.

Maybe I’m just not creative enough. Every time I try to think of a clever title for a romance novel set in the NBA, NFL or Major League Baseball, the result sounds more like the title of the sort of movie you’d find in a video store’s back room, if you see where I’m going.

Apparently, there is a thin line between romance and smut.

Anyway, for all I know, Harlequin has already announced deals with other professional sporting leagues and I just haven’t heard about them.

I could go online and Google the answer, but I really don’t want to find out. After what I saw in the bookshop, I’m starting to think there are some things man was just not meant to know.

As for you women, try to keep it to yourselves.

Soap opera physics could destroy the universe

You think about strange things when you’re stuck at home with a 103-degree fever and the room is spinning.

Did you know that the laws of physics don’t apply to soap operas? It’s true. For one thing, time in soap operas isn’t a constant.

One character can start the day on the other side of the world, hop on a jet and arrive home hours later. Meanwhile, another couple of characters can have a conversation over drinks. All the while, the soap opera cuts back and forth between the two scenes as if they’re taking place over the same period of time. Clearly, something isn’t right. Time is moving more quickly for some characters than it does for others.

It isn’t widely known, but this is the problem Albert Einstein was trying to solve when he formulated his theory of special relativity. It goes something like this: For any child separated from his or her parents on a soap opera, time will speed up by a factor of 10 until child and parents are reunited.

As a result, any child sent to boarding school for two years of Earth Standard Time will return 20 years older than when he or she left. Because of this, lots of 5-year-olds have left for kindergarten only to return a short time later, ready to produce children of their own.

Of course, if you fool around with the time stream as often as soap operas do, it’s inevitable that you’ll accidentally create alternate timelines, which are bound to give you lots of evil twins. That’s the real reason there are so many evil twins on daytime TV.

No daytime drama is a greater threat to the space-time continuum than “Days of Our Lives.” This, after all, is the soap that once had a major character possessed by the devil. Every time I accidentally watch an episode of “Days,” I’m confused. People who are supposed to be dead aren’t, and people who are supposed to be good have gone bad.

For example, Thaao Penghlis has played “Days” character Tony DiMera on and off since the early 1980s. In that time, Tony has been good, evil, alive and dead more times than I can count.

While waiting on my meds to kick in, I learned Tony is once again alive and apparently evil. Then I went to the drug store for more meds and saw a soap-opera tabloid that claimed Tony is his own evil twin. Or maybe he’s the good twin. Who can keep up? Probably Einstein could if he weren’t dead.

My fever finally broke, but not before I had a flashback to a confusing period when “Days” featured three actors all of whom had, at one time or another, played the same character. At that time, two of them were playing different roles, and the actor playing the part all three had in common was the one who had started his “Days” career as yet someone else.

Those “Days” folks sure do play fast and loose with the laws of the universe. It’ll be their fault when reality starts to unravel.