(no subject)

[proximoception]

So not just Twin Peaks but the X-Files is returning, Mr. Show basically is, and Seinfeld did in every way that matters with that great Curb season. Cue mean joke about only The Simpsons not being resurrected, of the great '90s shows.

Revivals are cute and all, but I'm not very enthusiastic about any of these upcoming ones. (Well, Twin Peaks, but just to see anything at all by Lynch.) I'm afraid Futurama taught and retaught me the dangers of zombie tv shows enough for the lesson to finally sink in. (Thus RIP Hannibal and Community. You were (mostly) motherfucking sublime.)

Though Better Call Saul is a spinoff and The Leftovers a sort of annotation, and both are fine. I guess the trick with sequels is to be doing some other distinct thing just close enough to take or leave what fits from the old? Shows that keep going long enough end up doing that anyway. Adventure Time's initial version is cute, but I assume not terribly far past the Sponge Bob level - not that I know anything about the Sponge Bob level, but no one could have predicted anything as amazing as what it became, especially recently. I'm just assuming they've peaked. I'd be a bit scared if they haven't.

Not even Shakespeare's franchises were always worth it, I guess. Maybe instead of thinking of shows as being along the lines of novels or movies we should compare them to authors' collected stories or poems, where we're used to the catalogue starting little more than amusingly (Chekhov) or derivatively (Shelley), and, when premature death is eluded, ending in self-repetition (Borges and Hawthorne, mostly), comparative triviality (Whitman, Dickinson), notes-to-self oddity (Blake) or total surrender to sucking in style and/or substance (Wordsworth). But people are supposed to be like that. Maybe we don't know quite what to suppose yet, here. Past that we're supposed to be disappointed most of the time.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Do you think Hannibal will come back somewhere?

If we're supposed to be disappointed most of the time (and I agree), I must be doing something right. It's probably hard to make a list of writers who were great 100% of the time from youth to old age with no disappointments. It's hard to even think of item 1 for the list.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think the pressure to resume it will be pretty intense. That show's reputation is going to grow. But who knows.

Yeah, authors with perfect track records either died at once (maybe Buchner?) or published just one or two things and burned the rest. Like, um. Someone, surely. Certain ancients with assiduous friends? Lucretius?

I'm not sure even Kafka's earliest stories disappoint me. Some of his notebook drafts might, but one doesn't tend to expect anything of them, since he was often just setting his pen free.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

I don't want to see either the X-Files or Twin Peaks. Both of those were so much a part of broadcast TV, for me (but did you watch them later? oh, right, I'm old). Twin Peaks because it seemed there was something scandalous about its being on TV at all. And the X-Files, too, in a different way; it wasn't that it was so "underground" as David Lynch, but for me its enjoyment was distinctly tied to its being on once a week. You can't watch more than one episode now, you can't watch two in a row. (Actually I've never been able to go back to that show, even to some favorite episodes like Clyde Bruckner or the Lord Kinbote one. It's just over.)

But all that is to say it's like a movie that's ended, when really I think your idea about the collected works is more interesting.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I've seen like four episodes of X-Files through. Didn't like any. Just including it as a courtesy, since it gets grouped with those others.

I watched Twin Peaks from its 2nd season premiere. My cultural brain came online around then (age 15 I think? Or 16 if that was '92.). Yeah, except for the actual Lynch episodes it was mainly of interest for broadening television, which 25 years later is of next to no interest at all.