David Lynch’s Third Peak

The deluge of appreciations, analyses and retrospectives that followed David Lynch’s Jan. 16 death all made the same two obvious points: 1986’s “Blue Velvet” was his breakthrough film, establishing his inimitable aesthetic. In short order “Lynchian” became a euphemism for all things oddball, dark and funny. Then, with 1990’s “Twin Peaks,” he became a mainstream cultural icon without compromising his singular vision. Yes, all that’s undeniably true, and the post-mortem accolades are richly deserved. But there’s a footnote to those observations even ardent Lynch fans seem to have forgotten.

Following the unexpected mammoth success of “Twin Peaks,” in 1992 executives at ABC gave Lynch and “Twin Peaks” co-creator Mark Frost carte blanche to go off and make another TV show to capitalize on that “Twin Peaks” juggernaut. What they came back with was “On the Air.”

“On the Air” was a weekly half-hour sitcom focused on the bumbling behind-the-scenes antics at a live TV variety show in the 1950s. Lynch and Frost were the executive producers, with each directing one episode. The cast and crew included a few “Twin Peaks” holdovers, and Lynch regular Angelo Badalamenti composed the theme music. 

The show’s central conflict concerned the disastrous efforts of the variety show’s host, washed-up actor Lester Guy (Ian Buchanan) to destroy the career of Betty Hudson (Marla Rubinoff), the sweet and naive singer who has accidentally become an audience favorite, eclipsing Lester. It all sounds perfectly reasonable and straightforward on paper. The show itself was neither reasonable nor straightforward.

“On the Air” swoops way below lowbrow into sub-Three Stooges territory, liberally peppered with cheap slapstick, dumb jokes and deliberately over-the-top Dadaist absurdity. 

A pair of conjoined twins known as the Hurry Up Twins zip into and out of scenes without warning, encouraging everyone to, well, hurry up. One character is mocked mercilessly for her frequent bouts of hyperventilation. David Lander, familiar to TV audiences for playing Squiggy on “Laverne & Shirley,” here plays the director Valdja Gochktch, who is obsessed with shoes, never quite figures out how to use a megaphone and speaks with such a ridiculously thick European accent he often requires subtitles. In one episode, Snaps, a dog that is a recurring character, plays bongos. At the close of another episode, the cast and crew of the show all dance barefoot with shoes on their hands. And in an image that may well sum up the entire series, in the final episode, a character in a gas mask recites poetry to a roomful of ducks.

After screening the pilot, ABC executives, baffled as they were, told Lynch he had to make one change. Familiar character actor Tracey Walter plays Blinky, the variety show’s blind sound engineer, who trips over things, runs into walls and operates the sound board by whacking it with his white cane. It was an offensive stereotype, Lynch was told, and had to go. Well, Lynch didn’t want to rewrite the character, so took a different and properly Lynchian tack. Every time Blinky appears, a voiceover informs audiences he isn’t really blind, but suffers from Bozeman’s Simplex, a condition that allows him to see much more than we do.

“On the Air” was frenetic, loud and sloppy with nary a whisper of subtlety. It’s adamantly, proudly, gloriously stupid. No, make that “stoopit.” As some of Lynch’s later online shorts like “Dumbland” reveal, none of this was out of character for him. My god how I loved that show.

Well, when the pilot aired on June 20, 1992, it got fairly decent reviews. Sort of. Entertainment Weekly, which helped generate the buzz about “Twin Peaks” by putting Lynch on the cover of its premiere issue, wrote, “‘On the Air’ is a one-joke sitcom that makes explicit the message that TV is stupid, and people will watch anything. Its undisguised contempt is pretty enthralling.”

When the second episode ran and things only got dumber, ABC execs were flabbergasted. General audiences were flabbergasted. Even all those new diehard Lynch fans who were still riding that “Twin Peaks” high were flabbergasted. Where was all the brilliant dark poetry and magic and complexity of Laura Palmer and the gang? This is plain moronic.  

After the third episode ran on July 4, ABC quickly and unceremoniously pulled the plug. While the entire series ran in Europe, only three of the seven finished episodes were broadcast in the States.

There’s an interesting historical parallel here. In 1969, Dennis Hopper directed the shaggy dog hippie road movie “Easy Rider.” Like Lynch and “Twin Peaks,” Hopper’s film became a wholly unexpected hit, was declared a counterculture touchstone and made a bazillion dollars.

Figuring Hopper was their ticket into that elusive youth market, in 1971, Universal executives, as ABC executives would with Lynch 20 years later, gave Hopper carte blanche to go off and make whatever he wanted to capitalize on “Easy Rider’s success. Hopper got all hopped up on goofballs, meandered down to Mexico and returned some time later with what he called “The Last Movie.” Even the film’s target demographic, stoned hippies, dismissed it as a painful, incoherent mess. Thanks to the “Last Movie” debacle and his unpredictable drug-addled zaniness, very little was heard from Mr. Hopper for the next 15 years. 

As it happens, the role that eventually revived Hopper’s career was his turn as the terrifying and hilarious Frank Booth in Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” 

Unlike Hopper, Lynch was not banished after the “On the Air” debacle. In a fortuitous career move, a month after the series was cancelled, he released his “Twin Peaks” prequel, “Fire Walk With Me,” which made it easy for everyone to purge any memories of the zany sitcom from their collective consciousness.

In the years following Hopper’s death in 2010, critics and scholars went back and re-evaluated “The Last Movie,” concluding that maybe it wasn’t so unforgivably atrocious after all. At the moment, I’m patiently waiting for these same critics and scholars to turn their attention back to “On the Air.”

Stream five episodes of “On the Air” here.