Vee

Just a masterful run by Curlee, Demorest, etc

The TP panel doesn't start for another few hours, but an 'executive session' with Showtime heads David Nevins and Gary Levine (who helped greenlight the original show) begins now with this:

New castmember Amy Shiels torments us about today's upcoming panel/possible events:

From 2011: Sheryl Lee at a Twin Peaks convention, talking about her most challenging scenes in FWWM, one of which was not completed and the other being a deleted sequence from the "Missing Pieces" with the ceiling fan which Carl is familiar with: Sheryl Lee explains a scene she refused to do in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me from Mary Hutter on Vimeo. This is the ceiling fan scene: Meanwhile: It's been a busy weekend for Mädchen Amick, who has been making the rounds of the Television Critics' Association panels, first for CW's Riverdale where she plays Betty's mom and then appearing again tomorrow at the big mysterious Twin Peaks panel, which I will be covering up to the minute as best one can from the distance of Twitter. TV Guide promises a video with her discussing the show and Shelly's changing style, but they don't seem to have the video up at this link yet - just a few quotes for now.

In light of what may be a big week coming up for Peaks fans, I want to again promote this: Joel Bocko's incredible video essay, Journey Through Twin Peaks. It is exhaustive and incredibly entertaining. I don't agree with every point he makes, but I agree with most of them. This is the best primer you'll get for the new and old series. Watch it.

Thomas Sangster (Jojen) is one of the stars of Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank's upcoming Western series for Netflix, Godless.

I thought the stuff with Michelle and Martin at the allotment the other day was a bit better for Jenna Russell(?). She still seems a bit too matronly and serene to me, but it's hard to compare to Sue Tully. I'm giving her a chance and I do like their rapport.

Fuller House is definitely in front of an audience - they've started breaking the fourth wall with it.

I had very little to do with it outside of marketing. I had a huge crush on Glenn Scarpelli when I was a kid watching the show in syndication so it was fun to grow up and discover he too was family.

Watching China struggle with modernity has always been interesting because I've been looking at it through a different keyhole - watching their film industry develop and wrestle with restrictions. They still have the strict SARFT censorship to deal with, but if a product has enough stars and enough money behind it, and stands to make enough box office, the standards have slowly gotten more and more lax. They still have no problem burying the work of major filmmakers and celebrities who try to defy the censors, but many of them work within those boundaries like filmmakers used to do with the Hollywood Production Code - subverting it or cheating it through dialogue or suggestion. On other things, money talks - and standards shift. China has grown a materialist upper middle class which demands satisfaction and it is wrestling with how to handle it, because its twin gods are now not only ideology but money, the polar opposite.

It's gotten crazy good reviews and I (full disclosure) worked on the release of last year's Norman Lear doc, so I have a fondness for the man and his works and am curious despite thinking it was a silly idea. I may have to check it out.

It's time to bring these back: The Georgia Coffee commercials! Filmed either after the series and Fire Walk with Me or during the latter, depending on who you ask, and directed by Lynch himself. The true Season 3!

Doug Jones talks the role of Lt. Saru.

The official Twin Peaks Twitter account.

Judging by this Showtime calendar, which has accurate month-to-debut pictures for Homeland and Billions, looks like Twin Peaks will debut on April 30th.

I haven't seen enough of him to judge but he seems darling. Honestly, just seeing someone relatively perky on this show is a nice change from the usual psychotic and crying gays I am used to. That's how I thought Ben might turn out in the old days but when they aged him up they just redid Stephen Beale, which was a confused enough storyline as it was. I am sure there is some sort of loveless/dissatisfied marriage situation with Martin and Stacey as there always is - and I think she was with Max? - but she does slot in very well with him at the house IMO. Also there's the lovely and talented Denise, one of the many black characters who has been here years but whom I can recall very little about because the show never seems entirely able to really focus on them any more than the gays. It's depressing to think that her being pregnant by Phil is her ticket to a bigger showcase. I've lost track of how many children Phil has either sired and raised while also beating incessantly. But then I was never able to buy that Sharon forgave Phil for what happened with Dennis, so I am well behind the times. (I liked Sharon and Dennis together a lot)

Yeah, that's the vibe I've gotten for awhile, that they definitely want to pair them up but they seem to have no real initiative to focus in on the characters and telling a full story for them beyond the usual bearding/lying/suffering cycle that seems to dog Ben and many gay characters. Then someone will leave or get fired and round and round it goes. And I have no clue what is going on with Steven/Stephen. The arc of that character didn't make sense to me ten years ago, but I am particularly baffled that they often seemed to reuse portions of it for Ben. Maybe the new producer will surprise, who knows. I'm just glad to see Kathy.

All it was really missing was a portrait of Jesse with Jesus.

What's wrong with him? He's cute! It feels like Ben has been coming out for ten years. Every time I check in on the show he either has the same problem or he or one of the other occasional gay characters has either impregnated someone, killed them or tried to kill them. It's more agency than most American gay soap characters get, but you didn't see Kyle and Oliver on OLTL get hazed in the LPD locker room for two years straight.

If Agnes were alive and things had turned out well she'd be having a field day with a Trump surrogate (possibly an existing character) on AMC 2.0. Or maybe Angie would be writing letters to the White House, just like Amy Tyler did.

The new Johnny Carter is pretty adorable. I am finding the show enjoyable on YT. I know a lot of the people. But my nagging issues with EE in the 2000s are still around. My problem with EE in the 21st century is that as often as it goes 'real' on an issue - hammering home something by not having a happy ending to a social issue story like depression, or addiction, or coming out or whatever else, or avoiding an easy closure by leaving something open-ended - and as often as the executions of many of those stories are either well-acted, well-scripted, well-produced or some combination of the above - that the 'hard' approach has kind of become rote. And that in and itself almost becomes glib, because they do it so often. Someone gets a drug addiction; they die horribly. Someone (Lucy) is a troubled teen; she dies horribly. Gay kids struggle in a difficult home environment (Ben); they continue to wrestle with their families for years with no active evolution. Ian has a cavalcade of illegitimate children and several have gone nuts, died or become pariahs; nobody really handles it except sweeping it under the rug or living with it. And now Danny Dyer's cute son is horribly depressed and a [!@#$%^&*]-up; he may very well kill himself. In a vacuum or on a case by case basis, playing these stories out with tough, sad conclusions, or lack of conclusion, or letting them just percolate for years is very admirable. But with EE it just feels grinding to me these days - I mean, there are so many stories like this. Peggy committed suicide, Pat died, Pauline died in the street! No one is ever happy for long, their fates are always to be hard done by, nothing is ever really lasting. When everything is approached so coldly or coolly through such a searing eye, it's hard to invest. I mean, does whatshisface (Lee?) really need to kill himself to drive a point home on this latest dark social issue story? And can Ben or Johnny's storylines feel like more than window dressing when they don't have to do with the Mitchells or Danny Dyer? It feels like two things can be relied upon: That the stories will be as depressing as possible and then rarely resolved with a note of hope, and that the gay or minority characters will still sort of float about a bit, however prevalent they now are. I hope that makes sense. The show goes harder at stuff than the Americans ever would which I have always admired, but in terms of turning a page I think they often find it very difficult on some things. If this was an American soap Ian's entire patchwork family would've publicly exploded years ago. Possibly literally.

I think Trump is just stir-crazy, period. He never wanted this job, he's in over his head, it's incredibly complicated and taxing, it demands all these things and attention from him, he's regarded as a fraud, he keeps having to answer all these questions, and his inauguration is looking humiliating. And there is no end in sight.

This is going to burn out a lot faster than I thought. He's in a spiral. To be clear: It still won't be good, but I'm not sure he can keep this up for a year, let alone four. And yes - NBC deserves it all, especially as someone there seems keen to re-stock half their line-up with Fox castoffs.