A friend and I were discussing the classic 1990s TV series “Twin Peaks” the other day as, in their household, they had recently been working their way through the DVD box set. I vividly remember “Twin Peaks” being on TV during the days when I still produced artwork by hand and before we first were relocated to begin doing our work on rinky-dinky computers, so I guess that shows how long ago it now was and how scary a thought that is.
I remember taping quite a lot of it at the time on the kind of cheap bright red videocassettes that they used to sell at one of those long-forgotten photo processing shops that you never seem to see any more and giving up on my recording about halfway through the second (and final) series when it dawned on me that once the mystery of who actually did kill Laura Palmer had been resolved, the rest of the series didn’t really seem to matter all that much.
Don’t get me wrong. It was still very stylistic and probably head and shoulders above any of the other dramas that were airing at that time, and the stories that were unfolding were still intriguing and engaging enough to keep me watching, it was just that I realised about then that I was unlikely to ever sit down and watch it again and that little flat was already starting to get over-run with too many of the tapes that still clutter the house I currently live in.
Many, many years later of course, having failed to complete that particular taping journey did rather come back and bite me when the first series got a shiny new DVD release and then the second one didn’t. This of course has now been rectified, but there was a certain amount of frustration at having to re-watch the story unfold on very dodgy old tapes that held off-air recordings taken on a very cheap video machine (although that didn’t stop it from being stolen…) from a less than impressive signal that arrived through a badly tuned aerial all those years ago, and then having the story just stop because I had no more episodes.
If you ever wonder how on earth I started to become such a completist, maybe that incident will give you a tiny bit of insight into the “why” of it at least. Happily, I did (no doubt due to some bizarre notion of ‘posterity’) record the very last episode, so things were not left completely up in the air.
But the thing about “Twin Peaks” was an issue that seems to cause problems for a lot of our favourite TV shows; we like them so much that we want more of them even though the story has really run its natural course. We think something is so good that we want more of it, but then we get disappointed when it fails to deliver more of the same but different, and if it does try to be too different then it’s just not the same show any more and we can very quickly fall out of love with it, stop watching and it inevitably staggers along to an extended and rather pathetic conclusion (or worse, an unplanned cancellation) with everyone wishing that it had gone out while it was still the great show it once was.
The problem is that, if something becomes “popular”, we as viewers demand more of the same but then complain if it becomes repetitive. We want the same characters in the same situations but, at the same time, we also want the series to remain stimulating and unpredictable. Sometimes it is the very quirkiness and difference that the new show has that becomes its downfall. Shows like “Lost”, “Heroes” and “The X Files” have all failed to live up to the intriguing promise shown in their earliest years, and sometimes trying to exceed those early achievements and remain interesting and innovative leads to a less than impressive over-extension of a format, style or storyline that really only had a limited potential lifespan. Once the “murder mystery” element of “Twin Peaks” had run its course, all that White Lodge/Black Lodge and Windom Earle shenanigans just seemed to be trying too hard to be intriguing without having the strength of the original narrative thread binding it all together. Once the mystery had been solved there really was no longer any reason for Dale Cooper to remain in that obscure little logging town, and the reasons to keep him there seemed ever more contrived.
Of course, the idea of “Twin Peaks” without the character of Dale Cooper didn’t make any sense because for most of the audience his character was the show, in the same way that Joel Fleischman leaving “Northern Exposure” made that show less popular. Equally a series about the further adventures of Agent Cooper in another town probably would have failed (like “Beverley Hills Buntz”) as no doubt any further tales of the town of Twin Peaks itself would without the Cooper character.
We don’t like our TV shows to be like real life in that life simply goes on despite all the comings and goings (unless it’s a soap opera of course), we really want our favourite to go on and on without ever changing, and yet, because of that pesky real world rolling its dice and production people and actors wanting to selfishly get on with their own lives and careers, that is of course impossible (or at least unlikely – after all, not everyone is like William Roache…). Rather astoundingly, the original run of “Dallas” ran for 14 seasons, surviving a full 11 years from the climactic “Who shot J.R.?” events at the end of (incredibly) only the second year, and even now it is being reborn in a new millennium with many of the same characters and situations as if it had never been away.
Although I never watched “Desperate Housewives” I’m reliably informed that it is another show that has struggled to find a new identity for itself once the original intriguing riddle was solved. A show which I never actually saw but which also seemed to have a format that struck me as being one which offered very few places to go was “Prison Break” because, once it became successful, how many prisons did you want to have the same characters break out of? You also would have needed to have them all re-arrested each year to give you another year, which stretches credibility and seemed unlikely at best. Mind you, as I mentioned I never saw it, so maybe I’m missing the point of it. Steven Bochco’s “Murder One” did try having “another year and another case” of course, but the second one just wasn’t as interesting as the first and there was never a third.
Even a show with a more flexible format such as “24” can struggle to find a credible threat that matches the previous one. Strangely, “24” also had a difficult first series, as the producers insisted on having a conclusion to the storyline at about the episode 12 mark just in case it was cancelled and they would still need to sell it as a complete package for syndication. What history would have made of a “real-time” dramatic show called “24” that only consisted of 12 parts is something we will never know, but it is one of those strange little quirks of American network television.
So, it would seem that some TV shows just seem to have a built-in “self destruct mechanism” just because of their format, and perhaps it would just be kinder to let them live out their natural lives instead of constantly trying to jump-start the corpse until it has nothing left to offer.
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