Friday the 13th: The Series

In the late 1980’s, Frank Mancuso Jr., then caretaker of the popular and profitable Friday the 13th series of films, decided to branch off into a television series but without the hockey mask-clad killer Jason, much like John Carpenter’s decision for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) to not feature Michael Myers. Of course, we all know how well that went over with fans of that particular franchise so most were expecting history to repeat itself with the Friday the 13th show. After much publicized growing pains, the show hit its stride towards the end of the first season as it followed the adventures of a trio of antique store owners searching for cursed objects. It became the second highest rated first-run syndicated show for the much coveted male 18 to 49-year-old demographic, just behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show went on for two more season before being cancelled and now enjoys a dedicated cult following.


After their Uncle Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) leaves them his antiques shop, distant cousins Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay) and Micki Foster (Louise Robey) discover that it houses all kinds of supernatural-endowed objects. In the pilot episode, they attempt to sell off all the items in the store, not realizing their otherworldly properties. Pretty soon they meet Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a friend of their recently deceased uncle and supplier of several of the items in the store. He informs them that the items they sold were cursed and together discover the store manifest. It turns out that Lewis made a pact with the Devil for some of the items in the store. And so, Jack, Micki and Ryan have to locate and retrieve each item before they do too much damage to their new owners.

First on the list is a possessed doll belonging to a spoiled brat of a girl (played by a very young, pre-The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Sarah Polley). Pretty soon the doll turns homicidal a la the killer toys in Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987). “The Baron’s Bride” features a cursed cape that transports a newly turned vampire as well as Ryan and Micki to Victorian England for striking sequences that are shot in black and white so as to evoke classic horror films with Bram Stoker featured as a prominent character. This is perhaps my favorite episode of this season and shows how the show’s producers were able to get a surprisingly atmospheric and cinematic look on a low budget.

“Faith Healer” was directed by none other than horror auteur David Cronenberg and features a smoke and mirrors miracle man by the name of Stewart Fishoff (Miguel Fernandez). In the opening scene, he’s exposed as a fraud by Jerry Scott (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman), a friend of Jack’s. However, Fishoff discovers a magical glove that can transfer someone’s physical ailments to innocent people, killing them. Naturally, he abuses this ability for dubious personal gain, becoming famous on T.V. as a result. Jack happens to catch Fishoff’s theatrics on T.V. and discovers that the glove is a cursed item. Cronenberg’s trademark skepticism for power hungry public figures is channeled through the amoral Fishoff. This episode is anchored by a strong performance from Robert Silverman whose character, as it turns out, has his own agenda. He brings an eccentric style of acting that gives the episode emotional resonance, especially when he comes up against Jack and their friendship is put to the test.

“The Quilt of Hathor” is season one’s magnum opus, a two-parter about a cursed quilt that allows whoever sleeps under it to dream to death their enemies – Satan’s security blanket perhaps? However, it turns out that the quilt was created by Salem witches. Ryan and Micki travel to a village populated by Amish-like people. He even ends up falling in love with the preacher’s daughter in a forbidden romance a la Witness (1985), albeit with a supernatural angle.

Genre veteran Billy Drago stars in “Read My Lips” as Edgar, the owner of a supernatural ventriloquist’s dummy known as Oscar. The dummy forces Edgar to kill and before you can say Child’s Play (1988), their act has become a success. In an intriguing twist, Micki and Ryan discover that the dummy derives its powers from a cursed boutonniere that was actually used by Hitler in occult ceremonies. Edgar manages to break free from Oscar’s influence and the dummy latches onto a new owner, show biz wannabe Travis Plunkette (John Byner). Freed from playing one-note villains, Drago displays a refreshing amount of depth, imbuing Edgar with a twinge of tragedy.

“Scarlet Cinema” is an atmospheric homage to the classic Universal horror films with a geeky film student (Jonathan Wise) obsessed with The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains. He discovers a cursed movie camera, which allows him to realize his own lycanthropic aspirations and get revenge on some of his classmates. There are even clips from the actual film integrated into this episode in order to show how closely this guy identifies with it. Highlights include the footage that manifests itself within the cursed camera, shot in black and white just like The Wolf Man. The use of noirish lighting during the night time scenes on campus are excellent, enhancing the cinematic feel of this episode. The tense, final showdown between our heroes and the film student are juxtaposed with the actual film for quite an exciting finale.

John D. LeMay plays Ryan as an energetic goofball and a bit of a geek who is eager to believe in the supernatural, while Robey’s red-haired Micki is beautiful and the resident skeptic. In some respects they anticipate the dynamic between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files by a few years. Ryan and Micki’s relationship with Jack, the older wiser mentor and bookish type, also anticipates a similar one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer between Buffy, her friends and Giles, the school’s librarian. The Curious Goods antiques shop with its cursed objects that often fall into the wrong hands with disastrous consequences seems to evoke the one that all the stories revolve around in the classic British horror anthology film From Beyond the Grave (1974).

From its inception, Friday the 13th: The Series was never intended to have ties to the series of films of the same name and was intended to exist in its own world. It was originally called The 13th Hour among other titles but the show’s creators – Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams – soon realized that to survive in first-run syndication they needed a title that created awareness and curiosity. So, they took the title Friday the 13th from the popular horror film series and came up with a whole new idea around it. This was the first time that Mancuso had produced a T.V. show and he admitted that it went through some growing pains during the first season as “it took the first three or four episodes to figure out what we did and did now want to be doing.” He felt that it wasn’t as cinematic looking as he would’ve liked and they didn’t get the right mix of humor either. Mancuso candidly admitted that the show’s three protagonists were not fully developed and were often overshadowed by the flashy FX. However, he did feel that towards the end of the first season the show became more character-driven.

However, there was plenty turmoil behind the scenes as the show had a very rocky start. The budget for the FX was not very large and so screenplays featured 10-60 effects shots with only ten days of pre-production, forcing the crew to work fast and improvise when necessary. In addition, filming in Toronto, Canada forced the production to adhere to regulations of 50% Canadian talent. To make matters worse, a disgruntled former employee claimed that the story editors took control of the show, dictating the amount of special effects used leading to a breakdown in communication. Head of the FX department Michael (The Dead Zone) Lennick left the show after four episodes during the first season because of the long hours he worked for wages that did not reflect the time and energy he put it in. FX artist Al (Brain Damage) Magliochetti also left around the same time for similar reasons and cited the conflict between Mancuso, who wanted an effects-heavy show, versus producer Iain Patterson, who did not, and this resulted in confusion as to the direction the show should take.

Friday the 13th: The Series was the second highest rated syndicated series male 18 to 49-year-old demographic after Star Trek: The Next Generation. For its second season, the show moved from late-night to prime time going up against the likes of Freddy’s Nightmares and yet another incarnation of the Twilight Zone. Friday also enjoyed a significant increase in budget allowing for more elaborate sets and a wider variety of locations.

Despite some cheesy effects (check out the floating monk in “The Poison Pen”), the first season featured episodes directed by notable Canadian filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and the aforementioned Cronenberg. Along with genre shows like War of the Worlds and Freddy’s Nightmares, Friday the 13th: The Series pushed the envelope for what was known at the time as “acceptable content” with its depiction of violence, gore and sexuality on T.V. It was also part of an exciting mini-invasion of Canadian T.V. along with Diamonds, Night Heat and Degrassi Junior High. Its legacy continues on with shows like Warehouse 13, whose premise seems like a thinly-veiled copy of Friday the 13th: The Series with a goofy young man and sexy woman duo seeking cursed items with the help of an older mentor type. Regardless, Friday has endured with many episodes standing the test of time, featuring thought-provoking ideas, clever premises and a striking cinematic look that anticipated shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I think it’s safe to say that the show has finally gotten out from under the shadow of its more famous cinematic namesake and deserves to be regarded among some of the best genre T.V. that the 1980’s had to offer.

Note: Check out this fantastic fansite dedicated to the show.

Eerie, Indiana

When Eerie, Indiana debuted on American television in September 1991, it was well-received by critics who favorably compared it to Twin Peaks, albeit for kids. However, I always felt that a better analogy for this clever, short-lived show was that it was actually Friday the 13th: The Series for kids. Like the protagonists in that supernatural-themed program, the main characters in Eerie – two young boys – investigated bizarre happenings and collected artifacts from their adventures. The latter was much more light-hearted in tone than Friday the 13th, but still had a creepy undertone reminiscent of episodes of the classic era of The Twilight Zone.

Eerie, Indiana was the brainchild of Jose Rivera and Karl Schaefer, both relatively inexperienced in the realm of T.V. at the time (Rivera had done a handful of episodes for various sitcoms, while Schaefer had even less experience) but they capitalized on the flood gates of weirdness that Twin Peaks broke open during its brief tenure to push through a quirky show reminiscent of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries but if written by Stephen King. However, the look and feel of the show is indebted to filmmaker Joe Dante who not only directed the first episode (and four others) but also acted as creative consultant for the series. It is easy to see what drew him to the project as the suburban setting, with child protagonists encountering fantastical events, are all hallmarks of his career.

NBC originally aired Eerie Indiana on Sundays at 7:30 pm. Unfortunately, network executives didn’t know what to do with the show and after 13 episodes and rescheduling it was retooled, lasting only six more before being cancelled. It has been 20 years since the show first aired and it still holds up well while also providing nostalgic memories for anyone who can remember a time when fairly adventurous programming managed to find its way on the air if only for a short time.

Dante really sets the overall look and tone for the series with the first episode, entitled “Forever Ware” (a sly nod to the classic science fiction novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman perhaps?). Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) is a 13-year-old boy whose parents have moved from New Jersey, “just across the river from New York City,” where he loved that it was “crowded, polluted and full of crime,” to the wholesome, squeaky clean suburbs of Eerie, Indiana. Sure, it looks like a cross between the all-American Lumberton in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and the cookie cutter neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands (1990), but Marshall isn’t fooled. He can see past the façade and realizes that the town is in fact the “center of weirdness for the entire planet,” where the local mailman is packing a firearm, a lady hangs her laundry to dry which includes a strait-jacket, and a graying Elvis Presley emerges from his home to pick up the daily newspaper. And in a nice Lynchian touch, a crow can be seen perched on the town sign with an eyeball in its mouth. And this is all conveyed in the prologue!

Marshall’s family is introduced to the neighborhood by Betty Wilson, an AVON lady/Stepford Wife hybrid with two sons (Bert and Ernie – har, har) that peddle ultra-efficient Tupperware called Forever Ware. Betty’s eager to not just sell Marshall’s mother (Mary-Margaret Humes) some of her containers but invite her to become part of a small circle of friends. However, when one Betty’s sons slips Marshall a cryptic note, he decides to investigate with the help of his next-door neighbor Simon (Justin Shenkarow). They soon uncover a rather sinister plot that won’t make you look at vacuum-sealed plastic containers the same way again. Of note is Dante’s trademark mix of horror and humor through the eyes of young kids.

Part of what makes Eerie, Indiana work so well is how it takes things that kids deal with while growing up and give them a slightly sinister, supernatural spin, like going through the ordeal of getting braces in “The Retainer,” which sees a hapless kid beset by a prototypical retainer created by an orthodontist cum mad scientist (played with relish by Vincent Schiavelli) that allows the wearer to hear what dogs are thinking and it ain’t pretty. Marshall and Simon uncover a canine revolution where dogs demand, “Down with Kibble!” and “No more Stupid Pet Tricks!” and “No more neutering!” The only thing that appears to be stopping them is “the mystery of the doorknob,” as one dog puts it. While these scenes are played for laughs because of the sheer absurdity of the concept, it does remind one of how poorly dogs (and animals in general) are treated in pounds/shelters and are regarded in our society.

Omri Katz plays Marshall like a budding Fox Mulder, anticipating the inquisitive FBI Agent and his show, The X-Files by two years. He is smart and able to jury rig gadgets to help in his investigations. He also does all kinds of research with Simon’s help and what they find out only confirms their suspicions. For example, in one episode they discover that the shape of the Bermuda Triangle perfectly mirrors the shape of Eerie. Marshall and Simon have the passion of conspiracy theorists only their paranoid fantasies turn out to be true! Katz and Justin Shenkarow play it straight most of the time as the bulk of the show’s humor comes from the outrageous people they encounter and the darkly comic situations they find themselves in.

“ATM With a Heart of Gold” places more of an emphasis on Simon as he befriends an intelligent ATM machine that Marshall’s father (Francis Guinan) invented. The machine’s interface features a computer avatar that’s a cross between Max Headroom and a Ken doll known as Mr. Wilson. Simon is just a kid who wants to belong and have friends because his home life is so crappy. In one scene, we see him walk towards a drab, earth-toned colored house where we can hear his parents arguing and fighting within. No wonder he wants to hang out with Marshall and investigate flights of fancy. Shenkarow does a nice job of conveying the longing Simon has for friends and how this leads him to befriending Mr. Wilson. This also blinds him to the machine’s creepy malfunctions. Pretty soon Simon learns that you can’t buy friendship and that money won’t solve all your problems.

Robert Altman regular Henry Gibson and Dante regular Dick Miller make an appearance in the Dante-directed episode, “The Losers,” and seem to be having a blast playing men responsible for all the recently disappearing items in Eerie. There are some nice visual gags in this one as we get a look at a few rather famous missing items found in their lair, chief among them a pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the sled from Citizen Kane (1941). This is definitely a more playful, whimsical episode and it is great to see veteran character actors like Gibson and Miller playing such pivotal roles.

I always enjoy Halloween-themed episodes of T.V. shows and Eerie, Indiana does not disappoint with “America’s Scariest Home Video,” which pays homage to the Boris Karloff 1932 horror film The Mummy as Marshall and Simon are stuck babysitting Simon’s little brother only to have the mischievous tyke transport himself into a horror film on T.V. and the Mummy in the film appearing in the house. The fog-enshrouded night and decrepit monster always make me think of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) minus the scary pirates from beyond.

In 1990, co-creator Jose Rivera was working on an idea for a horror anthology show set in a high school that would have been a teenage version of The Twilight Zone. Meanwhile, co-creator Karl Schaefer had an idea for a modern-day Tom Sawyer story. An agent got the two men together and they merged their ideas to create Eerie, Indiana. Schaefer described the show as “a twisted, modern fairy tale.” Rivera grew up loving fairy tales and wanted to impart notions of magic realism into suburbia, “that beneath the veneer of malls and crossing guards there lurks a deeper reality of something just slightly off-centre.”

He and Rivera picked Indiana because it had the image of “being a benign, harmless place to live.” They also asked Joe Dante to direct the pilot episode and with him convinced the executives at NBC to air the show. Schaefer said that the network liked the central character Marshall but they had to be convinced that the concept of the show would work because it was so different from NBC’s usual fare. In retrospect, Dante considered Eerie, Indiana a dream project because he was there at its inception and was then asked to stay on as a creative consultant. As a result, he even had a hand in casting Omri Katz. The producers originally wanted “this geeky kid,” according to Dante, but he felt Katz was more authentic and the young actor was cast. Dante was obviously taken with Katz as he subsequently cast him in his next film, Matinee (1993).

Eerie, Indiana was well-received by critics when it first debuted on television. Entertainment Weekly gave it a "B" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "You watch Eerie for the small-screen spectacle of it all — to see the way, in the show's first few weeks, feature-film directors like Joe Dante (Gremlins) and Tim Hunter (River’s Edge) oversaw episodes that summoned up an atmosphere of absurdist suburban dread. The Hollywood Reporter’s Miles Beller wrote, "Scripted by Karl Schaefer and Jose Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show's winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season's standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching." USA Today described the show as "Stephen King by way of The Simpsons," and Matt Roush wrote, "Eerie recalls Edward Scissorhands and even – heaven help it – David Lynch in its garish nightmare-comedy depiction of the lurid and silly horrors that lurk beneath suburban conformity." Finally, the Washington Times’ David Klinghoffer wrote, "Everything about the pilot exceeds the normal minimal expectations of TV. Mr. Dante directs as if he were making a movie, and a good one. In a departure from usual TV operating procedures, he sometimes actually has more than one thing going on on screen at the same time!"

After Eerie, Indiana’s demise, co-creator Karl Schaefer stayed in the genre, writing and producing T.V. shows routed in fantasy and horror, like Stephen King’s Dead Zone, Eureka and The Ghost Whisperer. Jose Rivera also continued to dabble in the supernatural, writing episodes for Goosebumps, Night Visions and Shadow Realm before moving on much acclaim with his screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and adapting Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road for the big screen. Omri Katz worked again with Dante in Matinee and starred in the fun family film about witches, Hocus Pocus (1993) before going back to T.V. with the short-lived but critically-acclaimed, The John Larroquette Show. Aside from a couple of one-off guest spots here and there, he’s largely dropped out of the business, which is a shame. Since Eerie, Justin Shenkarow has worked steadily in T.V. and movies, most notable a regular on the show Picket Fences while also doing a lot of voice work. Joe Dante has found it increasingly harder to get his kind of films made and has also gone back to T.V., directing two episodes apiece for the horror anthology shows Night Visions and Masters of Horror. He has made a new film called The Hole (2009), which is still without a North American distributor (?!).

Eerie, Indiana takes the trials and tribulations of a teenage boy, like his first crush on a girl, and gives them a supernatural spin – said girl gets a heart transplant from another boy that liked her and begins acting like him. The otherworldly aspects allow the show to deal with heavy topics like life and death while still aiming it at kids. However, there are plenty references for adults to recognize and enjoy, like the numerous visual cues to classic horror films and guest stars, like John Astin, from classic film and T.V., that elevates it above typical kiddie fare. Eerie’s influence can still be felt in more recent kid shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Goosebumps, and the more recent House of Anubis. However, none of its offspring could quite duplicate the diversity of Eerie, which wasn’t afraid to end some episodes on a whimsical note, or on an ominous one, or even in a poignant way. And I think this is down to the presence of Joe Dante, who instilled that X-factor missing from other shows of its ilk. Much like what David Lynch brought to Twin Peaks, Dante gave Eerie, Indiana the look and feel of cinema with each episode having his personal touch regardless of whether he directed it or not. This is why the show still holds up today and works whether you’re a young kid or simply young at heart.

DVD of the Week: The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season

In the past few years, vampire-themed programs have surfaced on television with True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and, recently, Being Human (both U.K. and the U.S. remake). Sure, there have been more across the board, supernatural fare with shows like Haven and, well, Supernatural, but up until now no one has attempted a zombie-themed program. Due to the graphic nature of most post-George Romero zombie films, it would be impossible to do a decent show (if you were going to have gore) outside of HBO or Showtime. However, thanks to channels like AMC and FX producing more challenging fare like Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Shield, there is more leeway on what you can show.


The time was right for The Walking Dead, an adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series of the same name, about a small group of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Director Frank Darabont and producer Gale Anne Hurd, no strangers to the horror genre, are the driving forces behind this show and wisely enlisted legendary makeup artist Greg Nicotero to create the gruesome carnage. His presence also gives the show additional credibility among horror fans. This isn’t going to be cheap, slapped-together gore effects, but realistically rendered stuff that nightmares are made of. The end result is an engaging tale of survival that isn’t just a bunch of gory set pieces but also about humanity on the brink of extinction.


After being seriously wounded by a gunshot, police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up from a coma in a hospital to find it in complete disarray and populated with the living dead. Driven to find out if his wife Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and his little boy are still alive, Rick arms himself and heads for the nearest large city – Atlanta – and quickly discovers that the world has been devastated by a zombie apocalypse. While the hospital scene recalls a similar one in 28 Days Later (2002), The Walking Dead quickly settles into a familiar Romero-esque tale of survival as Rick is reunited with his family and a small group of people that include his partner and best friend Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal). The Darabont-directed pilot episode sets the tone for the rest of the series as our group of survivors encounters plenty of zombies and also living people who are just as dangerous as the undead.


The Walking Dead has the look and feel of a feature film as it starts off on an intimate level but by the end of the first season its scope has expanded considerably so that we get an idea of just how bad the epidemic has gotten. There are some powerful images throughout the six-episode season, like the parking lot full of dead bodies all tied up and bagged in the pilot, or Rick and another survivor covering themselves in blood and gore so that they can make their way through city streets populated by zombies in the appropriately titled, “Guts.” All of this horrific eye candy is juxtaposed with the interpersonal relationships between the group of survivors, in particular, the love triangle between Rick, Lori and Shane. Andrew Lincoln (previously known mostly for his role in Love, Actually) anchors the show with his portrayal of Rick Grimes. He’s a strong, stand-up guy that cares but over the course of the season, Lincoln shows the cracks that occasionally form on Rick's façade as he fears for the safety of his family and doubts his own leadership skills. It is also great to see Darabont regulars Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden as regular cast members who get some fantastic moments here and there that help define their characters.

It is the humanity the cast injects into their respective characters that makes The Walking Dead more than a simple gore fest and is perhaps the most Romero-esque aspect. However, where his stories were served in feature-length chunks, Darabont and his writers have the time to develop multi-episode story arcs and introduce characters that don’t make a significant impact until later on, possibly even in season two. This is one of the most interesting things about the show as we see what happens to these characters over time and how more of the nightmarish world they inhabit is revealed.


Special Features:


“The Making of The Walking Dead” is a 30-minute featurette on how the show came together. Darabont was drawn to the characters in Kirkman’s comic book and also the notion of a serialized zombie story. This extra takes us through the show’s genesis with the cast and crew talking about it with plenty of behind-the-scenes clips. Highlights include seeing Greg Nicotero applying zombie makeup.


“Inside The Walking Dead: Episodes 1-6” consist of five minute featurettes about each episode from the first season with cast and crew talking about their intentions for them.


“A Sneak Peek with Robert Kirkman” features the writer introducing more behind-the-scenes with clips from the show and the cast talking about it. There is some overlap from the Making Of featurette.


“Behind the Scenes Zombie Make-Up Tests” sees Greg Nicotero giving some insight into how they transform a person into a zombie. This is a fascinating extra as we see the process broken down for you to try if so inclined.


“Convention Panel with Producers” features highlights from the San Diego Comic Con with Kirkman, Darabont, Nicotero and others. They talk about how the show differs from its source material. The cast also join the panel and talk about their characters.


Also included is a trailer.


“Zombie School” shows how the extras are taught to act like zombies.

“Bicycle Girl” takes us through the genesis of a memorable zombie in the pilot episode.


“On Set with Robert Kirkman” features another location shoot from the pilot episode.


“Hanging with Steven Yeun” features the actor giving us a tour of another location and speaking fondly of his love for the comic book, which he was into even before the show was made.


“Inside Dave’s RV” features Jeffrey DeMunn taking us on a whimsical tour of his character’s Winnebago.


Finally, there is “On Set with Andrew Lincoln,” yet another tour of a location shoot as the actor takes a breather from filming.

Twin Peaks Tribute Week: April 4 - April 10th, 2010

Twin Peaks holds a special place in my heart because it was responsible for getting me seriously into film. I had always enjoyed watching them but once I saw the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, directed by none other than David Lynch, I had to track down and watch everything else he had made. This led to Blue Velvet (1986) which immediately became my favorite film of all-time and made me realize, for the first time, that a film could be so much more than just entertainment. What struck me about Twin Peaks is that Lynch took a lot of the themes from Blue Velvet (evil hiding under the facade of small-town innocence, voyeurism, a woman in trouble, etc.) and brought them into mainstream television, changing the medium forever. The show began with the murder of Laura Palmer and explored the ramifications of this incident over 16 subsequent episodes. As a result, Twin Peaks demanded much more of the viewer than the average weekly drama. One could not simply watch the occasional episode and expect to understand what was going on. Many details and clues to who killed Laura were buried throughout the 17 episode story arc so that watching every one was crucial to following the narrative.

What Lynch and his collaborators did was create mini-movies that lasted just under an hour every week, drawing us into a strange and engaging world that nobody had ever seen before. The show debuted on April 8, 1990 with an estimated 35 million audience. ABC helped fuel a media blitzkrieg promoting the pilot episode as a television event and trumpeting the show as a hit with advanced praise from the critics. Twin Peaks became one of the first pop culture events of the 1990s. Intense interest around who killed Laura reached a fevered pitch with articles appearing in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek while Lynch made appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Unfortunately, the quality of Twin Peaks declined rapidly after the Laura Palmer storyline achieved closure. The show was never able to regain momentum and the series was cancelled after its second season. For a brief while it became a pop culture phenomenon and marked one of Lynch’s most prolific periods of his artistic career where he managed to bring his unique worldview into the mainstream.

The show was kick-started by the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the beautiful teenage high school girl and homecoming queen found washed up on a beach, naked and wrapped in plastic. The outpouring of grief throughout the town is emotionally gut-wrenching as we see how news of her death affects her family, her friends, and even those who barely knew her. In some way, she touched everyone’s lives – good or bad. To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl.” The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one – not Mark, me, anyone – had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead," Lynch said in an interview. Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. And then, while Lynch shot the home movie that  Laura’s best friends James Hurley (James Marshall ) takes of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene – the video with Donna on the picnic – and it was that scene that did it." As a result, Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast appearing in flashbacks as Laura and becoming a re-occurring character – Maddie, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB (Frank Silva), the demonic presence from another dimension.

When another girl from her school, Ronette Polaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found wandering along a deserted stretch of railway tracks, beaten and raped, the FBI is called in to investigate. Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), an eccentric fellow who records his every thought and the minutest details into a tape recorder to his unseen assistant Diane. He meets with Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), a plain-spoken man who begins to feel a little like Dr. Watson to Cooper’s Sherlock Holmes. The FBI agent relies on his intuition and most intriguingly, his dreams to provide clues into the possible identity of the killer.

This culminates in a fantastic episode (directed by Lynch) where Cooper dreams of meeting Laura in an otherworldly dimension known as the Red Room where she whispers the killer’s identity into his ear while a backwards talking dwarf (Michael Anderson) dances to groovy jazz music. While making Eraserhead in 1971, sound designer Alan Splet taught Lynch how to say words phonetically backwards. Lynch planned to record some dialogue this way and then reverse it in a scene that was never shot. "When I got the Red Room idea this must have been coming back to me. Then the idea followed that the visual would all have to be done backwards as well." When this episode aired it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen on T.V. Lynch’s avant garde sensibilities were harnessed by co-creator Mark Frost’s sense of structure and storytelling and the result was some of the most compelling television as the nation became swept up in the mysteries of the show.

A producer at Warner Brothers wanted Lynch to direct a film on Marilyn Monroe based on the book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers. Lynch remembers that he was "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story.” Veteran television producer/writer Mark Frost was hired to write the screenplay. Lynch's agent at the time, Tony Krantz suggested that he work with Frost. Even though this project was dropped by the studio, Lynch and Frost became good friends and wrote a screenplay entitled, One Saliva Bubble with Steve Martin starring in it. However, this film was not made either.

Krantz had been trying to get Lynch to work on T.V. since Blue Velvet but the filmmaker was never really that interested in the idea. One day, they met at a Los Angeles restaurant and Krantz told Lynch that he should do a show “about real life in America – your vision of America the same way you demonstrated in Blue Velvet.” Lynch got an idea of a “small-town thing” but he and Frost were not too keen on it but decided to humor Krantz. Lynch remembers, "so one day Mark and I were talking at Du Pars, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake." Frost wanted to tell “a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go on perpetually.” Frost, Krantz and Lynch rented a screening room in Beverly Hills and screened Peyton Place (1957) as a source of inspiration for the kind of town they wanted to create.

They pitched the idea to ABC in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman with nothing more than this image and a concept: "The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was the foreground, but this would recede slightly as you got to know the other people in the town and the problems they were having ... The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters," said Lynch. At the time, ABC was in last place among the T.V. networks and were looking for something that would get them out of the basement. ABC liked the idea and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. Originally, the network didn’t think Twin Peaks would be made into a series and might run as a seven-hour mini-series that would appeal to college students.

The first thing Frost and Lynch did was draw a map of the town. According to Frost, “we knew the town had a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” They talked about it for three months and then wrote the script in ten days. Frost wrote the more verbal characters like Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) while Lynch was responsible for Agent Cooper, writing most of his monologues. Originally, the show was entitled Northwest Passage and set in North Dakota, but the fact that a town called Twin Peaks really existed (much like Lumberton in Blue Velvet), prompted a revision in the script. Frost and Lynch went on a location scout to Washington state and a friend of Frost’s recommended Snoqualmie Falls. They drove there and found all of the things they had written about in the pilot. ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard ordered the two-hour pilot for a possible fall 1989 series. He soon left the position in March 1989 as Lynch went into production. The director shot the pilot on location near Seattle in 24 days and on a budget of $4 million (subsequent episodes averaged $1 million and took a week each to shoot). Robert A. Iger and his creative team took over, saw dailies and met with Frost and Lynch to get the “arc” of the stories and characters. Iger saw a rough cut of the pilot by late May and ordered seven episodes.

However, even though Iger liked the pilot, he had a tough time persuading the rest of the network brass. "I was baffled by it," admitted then ABC president Mark Mandala, "but we were all 50-plus white males." Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group. "Unanimously, they loved it," Mandala remembers. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air. However, Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives – Iger won and Twin Peaks was on the air.

Frost and Lynch wanted to create a timeless quality and achieved this by mixing styles from several different eras. Lynch said, “this started happening on Twin Peaks when we were shooting in the school which was built in the fifties. Something from the era just started floating around in the present day and influenced a lot of things that took place on the set.” Surprisingly, Lynch encountered very little interference from the network. Standards-and-practices only had a problem with one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up in the pilot of Cooper’s hand as he slides tweezers under Laura’s fingernail and removes a tiny “R.” They wanted the scene to be shorter because it made them uncomfortable but Frost and Lynch refused and the scene remained.

Before the pilot episode premiered on T.V., a screening was held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Hollywood. Media analyst and advertising executive Paul Schulman said, “I don’t think it has a chance of succeeding. It is not commercial, it is radically different from  what we as viewers are accustomed to seeing, there’s no one in the show to root for.” The two-hour pilot was the highest-rated film for the 1989-1990 season. Initial episodes were well-received by T.V. critics. The Washington Post’s Tom Shale wrote, “Twin Peaks isn’t just a visit to another town. It’s a visit to another planet. Maybe it will go down in history as a brief and brave experiment.” In his review for The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “Twin Peaks is not a sendup of the form. Mr. Lynch clearly savors the standard ingredients ... but then the director adds his own peculiar touches, small passing details that suddenly, and often hilariously, thrust the commonplace out of kilter.” Entertainment Weekly gave the show an "A+" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "Plot is irrelevant; moments are everything. Lynch and Frost have mastered a way to make a weekly series endlessly interesting." Time magazine said that it, "may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV.”

What makes the first season so strong is the strength of Frost and Lynch’s vision for the show. They hand-picked every director and writer for the episodes they didn’t do themselves and this resulted in a solid consistency. Many of them were directors that Lynch had known from his days at the American Film Institute (i.e. Caleb Deschanel and Tim Hunter) or referrals from someone he knew. Lynch and Frost maintained tight control over the first season, handpicking all the directors. "They have a script and they chat with one or both of us and away they go. And then I'd see their shows at the sound mix. If something was completely wrong there would be time to fix it. But I can't even say that that ever happened," Frost said in an interview. After directing the second episode, Lynch went off to complete Wild at Heart (1990) while Frost wrote the remaining segments. The Lynch-directed pilot episode was the series blueprint in terms of style and tone that everyone else adhered to. It’s not surprising that the weakest episodes are the ones that diverge too far from this template.

One can’t talk about Twin Peaks without mentioning the unforgettable music by Angelo Badalamenti. He had worked previously with Lynch on Blue Velvet and really stepped it up on the show to provide rich, atmospheric music that enhanced every scene it was used. The music is so distinctive that is almost another character on the show. Who can forget the haunting theme for Laura Palmer or the jazzy score for the Red Room? And, of course, there is the show’s theme song that is instantly recognizable. Every time I hear the opening strains, it gets me every time. In the fall of 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch created the score. Lynch would often describe the mood or emotion he wanted the music to evoke and then Badalamenti would begin to play the piano. In 20 minutes, they produced the signature theme for the series. Badalamenti called it the “Love Theme from Twin Peaks.” Lynch told him, “you just wrote 75% of the score. It’s the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks.” Truer words were never spoken.

The show featured a fantastic cast of actors that ranged from Lynch regulars like Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet) and Jack Nance (Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet), to Hollywood veterans like Piper Laurie (The Hustler) and Richard Beymer (West Side Story), to newcomers like Sherilyn Fenn (Two-Moon Junction) and Madchen Amick. They inhabit their eccentric characters so well and really make you care about them, like the pure of heart Agent Cooper, or hate them, like the wife-beating truck driver Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re). While these characters are either on the side of good or evil, they have plenty of layers (and secrets) that are fleshed out over the course of two seasons.

The problem with the second season is that after the murder of Laura was solved, the show lost its way for a spell as the writers struggled to create a storyline just as compelling. This is evident in brooding teenager James Hurley’s clunky film noir storyline or Nadine’s (Wendy Robie) bizarro regression to her teenage years albeit with a steady supply of adrenaline. Cooper even started wearing flannel shirts – a flagrant betrayal of the spirit of his character and symptomatic of how the show faltered with the absence of Frost and Lynch’s guiding influence. Twin Peaks improved significantly once Cooper’s ex-partner Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh) arrived in town to play a deadly game of cat and mouse (and an actual game of chess) with Cooper that builds to an unforgettable final episode that infuriated many viewers but remains one of the most exciting and unpredictable swan songs for a series in television history.

Several problems plagued Twin Peaks that became readily apparent during the second season. There were the restrictions of the medium of T.V. According to Lynch, "the power of most movies is in the bigness of the image and the sound and the romance. On TV the sound suffers and the impact suffers." The network was also an issue for Lynch who said, “there were a lot of good people at ABC, but I really still got the feeling that what motivated their decisions had nothing to do with the show. And that's where I think they go wrong. The show is the least important part of their plan." The change from Thursday to Saturday night really hurt the show by diminishing its viewer audience. Lynch said, “I don't think the TV executives are as loyal to any one show as they are to an overall thing against the other networks. There's no way I can talk about what they did because it made zero sense to me. All I know is that they killed it by changing nights and then forcing the solving of 'who killed Laura Palmer.'"

As a result in the change from one day of the week to another, they lost a large chunk of their audience. "It's nice when people like something that you've done but it's sort of like love that seems inevitable that the people reach the point when they've had enough of you, and they fall for the next thing. You're helpless to control that process and awareness of it is like a dull ache,” Lynch said in an interview. There was also the public's desire to know who killed Laura Palmer. "And one thing led to another, and the pressure was just so great that the murder mystery couldn't be just a background thing any more." Once the murder was solved, the show lost its focus and struggled through several sub-plots and declining ratings. Lynch also didn’t like what happened to Agent Cooper over the second season: "Cooper ceased to be 100 per cent Cooperesque for me. He got these flannel shirts and stuff! Some people maybe liked it. So you say, ‘Yes, I'm glad in a way, and in another way I'm really sorry because a guy that's too much like me cannot sustain that intense interest or dream.’ He's got to be specific. Cooper is a certain way. It's necessary."

During the course of the second season Lynch and Frost had a falling out. While they worked closely together during the first season of the show, when Lynch went off to do Wild at Heart, Frost says that, "David left me alone." Frost elaborates further in an interview: "When he [Lynch] got on the set, very often he threw out the script – which didn't please me all that much. But he would go off and do his own thing. He wasn't showing up all that often. He'd come in and direct an episode every once in a while. He wasn't really involved with the scripts. Then he'd go off on his own thing and leave us hanging." Clearly, Frost did not like or approve of Lynch's methods on the set but it is abundantly clear that Frost has his own agenda. In a 1991 interview, he said that he and Lynch worked closely on the first seven episodes but in a Wrapped in Plastic interview he says, "David's not really a writer by nature. He's a wonderful director and a great visual stylist, and he can write in collaboration with somebody. But it's good if the person he's working with has a strong sense of narrative and story, because those honestly aren't David's strengths." It seems that Frost was quite resentful of the amount of attention Lynch received about the show, while he did not get nearly the amount of press or recognition for his contribution.

Looking back, Frost wished they had “worked out a smooth transition” and that the Laura Palmer storyline was a “tough act to follow.” In regards to the second season, Frost felt that “perhaps the storytelling wasn’t quite as taut or as fraught with emotion.” At its best, Twin Peaks surpassed the safe confines of generic T.V. The first appearance of the Black Lodge, an otherworldly dimension populated by cryptic supernatural figures, in the third episode is a prime example of when the series defied genre categorization. Agent Cooper has a dream where he finds himself in the Red Room, a place within the Lodge populated with backwards-talking dwarves, op-art floor design, and distorted spatial relationships. Lynch described the Black Lodge as a place where "there is no problem with time. And anything can happen. It's a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary.” Cooper's dream is a brilliantly constructed sequence that echoes Lynch's experimental debut feature film, Eraserhead (1977).

Lynch went one step further when he revisited the Black Lodge in the final episode of the show. At this point, Twin Peaks was on the verge of cancellation. Lynch had returned from working on other projects and was surprised at what had happened to the show. Instead of only offering a tantalizing glimpse of the Black Lodge, as he did in episode three, he adopted a go-for-broke attitude by re-writing the script as he shot the episode and proceeded to set almost half of the show in this environment. As Agent Cooper wandered through various rooms searching for his true love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), the conventions of generic T.V. disappeared. Cooper's actions followed a dream logic that seems confusing at first, but makes sense if you remember what was said about this place in previous episodes. The final result is a wonderfully surreal exercise as Lynch regained creative control to end the series with a shocking conclusion – good does not triumph over evil as Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while BOB takes possession of his body in the real world. Lynch brings Twin Peaks full circle by thumbing his nose at convention and once again subverting our expectations.

Twin Peaks paved the way for quirky, unusual fare like Northern Exposure, American Gothic, The X Files in the ‘90s and continues to do so with shows like Wonderfalls and Lost. It has been 20 years since the pilot episode aired on T.V. and the show has lost none of its power or ability to enthrall with its intriguing mysteries and engaging characters. Lynch and Frost’s show broke through and proved that challenging, cinematic, serialized T.V. could find a mainstream audience if even for only a brief time.


For more Twin Peaks, check out the Twin Peaks Archive blog which is also celebrating the show's 20th anniversary. Jeremy Richey also paid tribute to the show at his wonderful Moon in the Gutter blog. There's also the episode guide blog, props blog, and exhaustive In Twin Peaks site. Joining the fun is Edward Copeland's in-depth look back at the show over at his blog and Christine Hadden's excellent celebration of the show over at her Fascination with Fear blog.

LAMBLOG-A-THON: FILMIC TV: Crime Story

Fresh from the success of Miami Vice in the mid-1980's, Michael Mann parlayed his powerful clout to produce a new television show entitled, Crime Story. It was a pet project that he developed with good friend, Chuck Adamson and Gustave Reininger. Like Vice, Crime Story was a cop show but set in the early 1960s and with a grittier, darker edge as opposed to the stylish, brightly-lit pastel look of its predecessor. To this end, Mann not only cast Hollywood outsider, Dennis Farina (whose unconventional looks must've terrified NBC executives), but had exploitation filmmaker, Abel Ferrara direct the pilot episode. The result is a lean, mean drama that features politically incorrect police officers battling it out with nasty criminals.

The pilot episode for Crime Story begins with a daring restaurant robbery gone badly. Del Shannon sings "Runaway" (re-recorded especially for the show) as the hold-up turns into a hostage situation. Three police detectives led by Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) race to the scene (blink and you'll miss a young Michael Rooker as a beat cop). No words are spoken between the men as they calmly check their guns and get ready. As the criminals are about to take off with their hostages, Torello leans in menacingly and says to one goon, "you hurt anybody else, when this is all over I'm gonna find what you love the most and I'm gonna kill it. Your mother, your father, your dog. Don't matter what it is – it's dead." Welcome to the world of Crime Story.

It turns out that the criminals are working for local wise guy, Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), a vicious thug with a short fuse and an awesome pompadour that defies gravity. This guy isn't afraid to smash bottles and furniture over hapless underlings to get his point across. Luca plans to steal some valuable European royalty jewels from the Lakeshore Museum but Torello intends to link the restaurant robbery to the thug and stop the heist from going down.

Mann has said that he was influenced by working on the Police Story T.V. series (1973-1977), which was run by playwright Liam O'Brien and included famous crime writer, Joseph Wambaugh (who wrote The Onion Field) as a contributor. Each episode was based on a real event, working with the policeman whose story it was based on. Mann "learned a lot about writing and about working with real guys." Crime Story was based on the experiences of Chuck Adamson, a former Chicago police detective of 17 years. He claimed that the stories featured on the show were composites rather than actual events that happened, “but they’ll be accurate.” According to Mann, the genesis of the project was to follow a group of police officers in a major crimes unit in 1963 and how they change over 20 hours of television. He asked Reininger and Adamson to write the series pilot and a "Bible."

Reininger was a former Wall Street international investment banker who had come to Mann's attention based on a screenplay he had written about arson investigators, and a French film that he had written and produced. Reininger researched Crime Story by winning the confidence of Detective William Hanhardt who put him in touch with undercover officers in Chicago. They sent him on meetings with organized crime figures. Reininger risked wearing a body microphone and recorder. After visiting the crime scene of a gruesome gangland slaying of bookmaker Al Brown, Reininger backed off his Mob interviews.

Mann said that the first season of the show would go from Chicago in 1963 to Las Vegas in 1980 where the characters would have "very different occupations, in a different city and in a different time." He said, "It's a serial in the sense that we have continuing stories, and in that sense the show is one big novel." Mann and Reininger's inspiration for the 1963-1980 arc came from their mutual admiration of the epic 15+ hour film, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mann said, "The pace of our story is like the speed of light compared to that, but that's the idea – if you put it all together at the end you've got one hell of a 22-hour movie."

NBC President Brandon Tartikoff gave an order for a two-hour movie, which had a theatrical release in a handful of U.S. theaters to invited guests only. Tartikoff also ordered 22 episodes which allowed Reininger and Adamson to tell a story with developing character arcs, and continuing stories (instead of episodic, self standing shows). Mann predicted a five-year network run for the show. However, due to budgetary constraints (the need for four sets of cars proved to be too expensive). Tartikoff eventually allowed their series to move to Las Vegas for the last quarter of the 22 episodes. By the second season, an average episode cost between $1.3 and 1.4 million because it was shot on location, set during the 1960s and featured a large cast.

However, they realized that it was too expensive to go through several different period changes in one season. Universal Pictures decided not to make Crime Story because they deemed it too expensive and a small studio called New World Pictures Ltd. stepped up to finance it. It allowed them to work in the big leagues with a major T.V. network like NBC and a chance to sell the show overseas while Universal would retain the domestic syndication rights. The production schedule was a grueling two episodes every three weeks shooting 12 hours a day or more every day of the week.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Crime Story is the look, the attention to period detail. Hilda Stark worked as an art director on the pilot and was asked back by Mann after seven episodes to be the production designer. To achieve the show’s period look, she and her team would go to second-hand and antique stores, run ads in the in newspapers seeking articles from the period, and sometimes build furniture if they could not find it. According to Stark, the overall design or look of the show featured “a lot of exaggerated lines. We go for high style – sleek lines and high style. . .We go for the exaggerated shapes that recall the era.” Stark and her team also came up with a color scheme for the show that featured “saturated color, and certain combinations – black, fuchsias – reminiscent of the ‘50s.” She finds inspiration from a library of old books and magazines, in particular Life. For the vintage cars in the show, they buy or rent from private owners.

It's a testimony to Mann's reputation at the time that Crime Story was even greenlighted. NBC would have never gone for the casting of Dennis Farina, with his pockmarked face and lack of acting experience, had Mann been a neophyte producer with no proven track record. The choice of cult film director Abel Ferrara must have also freaked out network execs. His previous films included The Driller Killer (1979), where a deranged psycho gruesomely kills people with a power tool, and Ms. 45 (1981), where a rape survivor viciously kills the men who attacked her with a .45 pistol.

And yet, the final product proves that Mann's instincts were right on the money. Farina delivers the hard-boiled dialogue with the perfect amount of intensity (Farina orders a loose cannon cop, "why don't you get unconscious for awhile."). You can see it in his eyes and the way he barks out orders that this a no-nonsense guy who isn't going to let anything get in the way of his job. In many respects, he is the prototype for Al Pacino's equally driven cop in Mann's Heat (1995). Farina's Torello is the prototypical Mann protagonist: professional and a perfectionist, all at the expense of everything else.

Ferrara directs with the same proficient skill of crime auteur, Don Siegel. Like Siegel's two best crime films, Charley Varrick (1973) and The Killers (1964), Crime Story depicts a harsh world where life is cheap and characters will do anything – even if it means bending or breaking the law – to achieve their goals. Crime Story would provide the blueprint for Ferrara's later forays into urban crime films like The King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992).

When the show debuted on September 18, 1986, following Miami Vice, the two-hour pilot had a 20.1 national Nielsen rating and a 32 percent audience share. The ratings dipped when it was counter-programmed against ABC's Moonlighting. By October, the show dropped below a 22 Nielsen share, where a series is deemed a "failure.” Despite low ratings, Crime Story was picked up by NBC to finish the 1986-87 season. This prompted the network to move the show to Friday nights after Miami Vice on December 5, 1986, where its ratings improved but it still lost to Falcon Crest. NBC temporarily pulled Crime Story off the schedule on March 13, 1987. In order to get more people to watch, Farina and other cast members promoted the show in five U.S. cities.

The New York Times wrote, "With its first-rate cast, Crime Story might have had the offbeat, compelling authenticity of an Elmore Leonard novel. But the show looks suspiciously as if it would be more than willing to settle for the mindless glitz of Miami Vice.” In his review for the Washington Post, Tom Shales wrote, "When the smoke clears away, a viewer may feel impressed yet unmoved. But then, if all the smoke cleared away, there'd be no show.” John Haslett Cuff, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, "The characters and locales are as greasy as the rain-soaked streets, and in the show's best moments there is a dangerous glitter that happily transcends the cartoon violence of too much television.”

One of the most striking aspects about Crime Story is that it feels like it was ripped right from the pages of a James Ellroy novel. It is even more surprising that this show was done before Ellroy had written his famous L.A. Quartet of books that featured L.A. Confidential, which Crime Story most closely resembles. The author claims that he hadn't seen the show until after he wrote these novels but he does admit to being a fan since then. In an interview with Paul Duncan, Ellroy said, "I think Dennis Farina as Lieutenant Mike Torello is a force of nature. When the hatred between him and Anthony Denison fuels the plot, it's great, it's epic. but after a while it just goes to hell." This, of course, begs the question, when is someone going to reunite Farina and Ferrara to do a proper Ellroy adaptation? Having them tackle White Jazz or American Tabloid would be a dream come true.