| Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the June 19 chat here, and submit questions for the June 27 chat here. This week, a reader reflects on a trip back to “Twin Peaks.” I’ve really enjoyed the “Twin Peaks” revival much more than a lot of people seem to. I think the meandering plot line and Lynchian asides make it feel fresher than other revivals which, more often than not, try and fail to recapture the look and tone of the original series. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for David Lynch’s work and think “Fire Walk With Me” was criminally underrated, so his increased influence on the new season plays really well with me. However, I know the new season is disappointing for a lot of fans who just want more of the small-town antics and unnerving mysteries that lay underneath that were present in the original run. Do you have an opinion of revival shows in general, and what might be the best way to go about making them? Should revivals even be done at all? I am generally anti-revival for revival’s sake, by which I mean a network reviving a show with the same actors and in generally the same timeline because they wish they were operating in another era of television, when audiences for individual shows were larger and the advertising dollars flowed like wine. I tend to think that television revivals work best when they are driven by an artist who has more to say about an existing set of characters and a specific set of circumstances, or when they are reboots guided by an artist who wants to do something new within an existing framework. “Twin Peaks” strikes me as an example of the former approach: “Twin Peaks: The Return” thus far isn’t really — or at least entirely — about the town of Twin Peaks, or the murder of Laura Palmer and the void she left behind. It’s about Killer BOB, and the space between worlds, and our almost total unwillingness to acknowledge when something is wrong even when it’s right in front of our eyes because it’s just too frightening to acknowledge that the laws that govern us all are profoundly fragile. For an example of the latter, we might turn to Norman Lear’s “One Day at a Time,” which Netflix rebooted; Lear is still involved, but he’s working with a pair of showrunners, one of whom is Cuban American. The broad structure of the series is the same as the original: It’s about a single mom, her kids, her mother and the superintendent of their building. But by making the family Latino rather than white, and making the mother and her ex both veterans, the revival was able to address new issues and tensions. In other words, the key is the intention. If it’s just about nostalgia or driven by a network’s sense of what will be profitable, a revival or reboot seems less likely to succeed than if it’s driven by a story someone is genuinely eager to tell. | 
Twitter
Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment