It doesn’t take long after putting in the first disc of
Peyton Place to see that it must have been a huge influence on David Lynch, ultimately taking his imagination down the path that eventually led to
Twin Peaks (and to a different degree,
Blue Velvet).
Peyton Place is a town full of secrets. It’s been put on slow boil, ready to erupt at any minute. Its characters’ lives are all so intertwined with one another, it’s amazing that anyone has a secret to keep, but that’s alright, because it’s all the more gripping when the skeletons come tumbling out of the closets. Peyton Place is a small, New England town full of doctors and high school students, the sane and the mentally unhinged, the good, the bad, and all those in between. It even features a mill with a complex family history as a major backdrop, which Lynch perhaps added to his series as an acknowledgement of the town in which the swaying trees and waterfalls of
Twin Peaks were rooted. If you’ve never watched
Twin Peaks, my advice would be to go buy the complete series box set, and then come back and watch
Peyton Place. If, however, you are a
Peaks devotee, then have I got a series for you (minus, of course, all the Lynchian weirdness like log ladies, giants and dwarfs).
Peyton Place was essentially TV’s first primetime soap opera. Based on the hit book and movie of the same name, the series was quite the runaway hit coming out of the gate, and having now seen 31 episodes of it, I understand why. It’s addictive television in a way that only the best soap operas have the power to be.
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It doesn’t take long after putting in the first disc of Peyton Place to see that it must have been a huge influence on David Lynch, ultimately taking his imagination down the path that eventually led to Twin Peaks (and to a different degree, Blue Velvet).
It’s always sad when a series doesn’t get a fighting chance and is quickly canceled before it even really gets to prove itself. My Own Worst Enemy was such a series on the fall 2008 schedule, and it only managed to rack up a whopping nine episodes before NBC announced it was axing the entire affair. The show is by no means remarkable programming, but it does roll along quite nicely, with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting for the less than half a season of it that was produced.
You know the infamous Dragnet episode entitled “The LSD Story”? There are episodes of The Mod Squad that are alarmingly similar to it, only instead of two stodgy cops, there are three hip young kids on the case. The Mod Squad first hit TV screens in 1968, and it was an attempt to grab the youth audience while addressing issues that the youth culture was being exposed to, like recreational drug use, the peace and love hippie movement, and racial unrest. Indeed, as it appeared a year after “The LSD Story,” one wonders if it was something of an answer to Jack Webb’s square brand of policing.
CBS has, in recent years, been incredibly successful with its crime shows, so unless that’s your kind of thing, it’d be easy to write off Criminal Minds as just another one of the pack. Crime procedurals aren’t my bag by a mile, and yet there’s something about Criminal Minds that fascinates. It centers on the Behavioral Analysis Unit (the “BAU”) of the FBI, and each week it’s their job to get inside the heads of unsavory criminal types and stop them before they strike again…which often doesn’t happen, as many a death occurs on their watch before apprehending or taking out the “unsub.” The easiest way to describe it is as the TV series version of Silence of the Lambs, and it’s almost as grisly.
After a fairly lackluster Season Two, Desperate Housewives creator and showrunner Marc Cherry must’ve known that the third season of his hit series needed to kick some serious suburban hiney.