The series is set in Los Angeles in the year 2007. The United States has become an unstable mix of oligarchy, anarchy and police state, which sounds about right. Technology has gotten scary: from virtual-reality spectacles to holographic karaoke. Perhaps in reaction, Angelenos are retro-obsessed: dumb-looking Edwardian collars, ’60s rock, premillennial cars. This sounds plausible, too; it also saves on production costs (no cars-of-the-future to design and build) and makes a salable soundtrack album. Our hero, lawyer Harry Wycoff (James Belushi), naively goes to work for Sen. Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), a neo-psychedelic demagogue resembling L. Ron Hubbard, Pat Robertson, Timothy Leary and Ross Perot. He’s running for president, but it’s not clear why he’s bothering since he plans to transform himself into a living hologram, become immortal and “reach into our dreams … He’ll be like Christ.” Or at least like Freddy Krueger: Bruce Wagner, the novelist and screenwriter who dreamed up “Wild Palms,” co-wrote Nightmare on Elm Street III."
The senator, who commands a TV network, a religious cult and a secret army of upscale Brownshirts (the Fathers), is busy softening up the populace with the first holographic TV sitcom (“Church Windows”) and the ultimate recreational drug, mimezine. (It allows you to interact physically with holograms in a computer-generated neverland.) But to become immortal, the senator needs a computer-chip implant: the allpowerful Go Chip becomes the show’s mystic maguffin. Harry’s goal, of course, is to thwart him-though it takes him (like us) a couple of episodes to figure out what’s going on. All this silliness is dressed up in splendid visual style: garish colors and memorably sinister images, like the ghastly, feral face of lounge singer Chap Starfall (Robert Morse) singing “All of You” as he murderously closes in on … himself, in an interactive mimezine hallucination.
“Wild Palms” is least satisfying in its big moments and big performances. “My rule of thumb is never to give in to camp,” says Wagner. “Never to parody.” But when Belushi’s Harry gets earnest (“With you I feel there are no limits,” he tells his lover) we stifle a giggle-and wonder if we’re expected to. Josie, Dickinson’s bleached-blond villainess, is wonderful when she’s being falsely unctuous, yet wooden when she goes into full dragon-lady mode (“We have come too far to be terrorized by your prim sensitivities”). But 12-year-old Ben Savage’s Coty Wycoff, Harry’s putative son and costar of “Church Windows,” is a perfect monster of prepubescent malice, and Neuwirth’s Tabba Schwartzkopf is most obnoxiously actressy of actresses.
“Hate to say it, but I like him so much better since he died,” she says in her Hollywood drawl, watching a Chap Starfall hologram. “That posthumous quality really makes me shiver.” And Coty and Tabba’s scenes from “Church Windows” show what Wagner means about eschewing parody. They don’t exaggerate or distort sitcom inanity: they’re the excruciating thing itself.
Paradoxically, it’s today’s equivalents of “Church Windows” that made “Wild Palms” possible. Fewer people sit saucereyed and suggestible in front of conventional network shows these days, and the demographic group advertisers want (18-year-olds to fortysomethings, with money) are getting smart enough to prefer anything else: PBS, cable, videos, books, even their lives. Hence, the current rush to rope in such feature-film makers as Stone (box), allows them time to stretch out (at six hours, “Wild Palms” runs as long as three Hollywood movies) and gives them a surprising minimum of corporate guff. “They never told us we’d gone too far,” says Wagner. Some stuff you don’t need to be told: irate characters have to make their F word “freakin’,” and the palm-tree-and-nakedbabe logo is naughtier than anything on screen. Wagner still gets away with plenty.
Even before being aired, “Wild Palms” is making a bid for cult status. St. Martin’s Press has published “The Wild Palms Reader,” an entertaining set of elaborations by writers ranging from the godfather of cyberpunk sci-fi, William Gibson (who makes a cameo appearance in the mini-series), to Thomas (“The Brave Little Toaster”) Disch to E. Howard Hunt. (One piece implicates Sting as one of the senator’s fellow travelers.) Hard-core fanslet’s coin the word Palmies before someone beats us to it-will surely microanalyze Wagner’s imaginary technology and pharmacology; point out the parallels with his surreal 1991 Hollywood novel, “Force Majeure”; compare the styles of the series’ four directors, and speculate on the influence of John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer” (significant) and Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” (negligible).
But will everyday folks stick with “Wild Palms” past the first commercial, or TURN IT OFF when Ryuichi Sakamoto’s artfully empty music starts up and the flapping palm fronds appear? “The TV audience doesn’t buy style over substance,” says media buyer Paul Schulman, who’s seen the show, applauds ABC for its gamble in airing the show during sweeps week-and has his doubts. “That was the problem with ‘Twin Peaks.’ You can get away with it in the art house, but not on the networks.” Since most TV has neither style nor substance, you’d think “Wild Palms” would be ahead of the game. True, the mass audience will recognize “Wild Palms” as more smartypants TV. But if style counts for anything, they’ll have trouble changing the channel.
The crossover from big to small screen is perilous. A scorecard:
This movie spinoff is striking out, ranking 91 out of 140 shows.
Applauded by critics, the series is ranked 135 out of 140.
Ranked 99 out of 140, the future of this police drama is in doubt.
Dazzling effects, but feeble scripts lost viewers. Ranks 114 out of 140.
Though a cult favorite, ratings dropped steadily; canceled in 1991.
1989 pilot acclaimed, but after six episodes the series got the ax.
