The TV series David Lynch calls “sensational”
Television has long been a landscape for promising filmmakers to thrive, with much time having passed since the medium was seen as ‘lesser’ to the grandeur of the Hollywood silver screen. Lars von Trier released the surreal series The Kingdom in 1994, Steven Spielberg continued his interest in WWII dramas with Band of Brothers in 2001, and David Lynch helmed Twin Peaks in 1990, a seminal series that changed how TV was watched and produced.
Telling the story of a brutal murder in a fictional town veiled in dreamlike fantasy, Lynch’s Twin Peaks broadcasted the director’s often inaccessible-feeling style to a global audience. A little like his 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet, the series explored the dark energy that festers beneath the normality of American suburbia, featuring elements of horror in this strange tale of existential dread.
Speaking about the meditative darkness that pervades his TV series, Lynch stated: “If you saw a film and the beginning of the film was peaceful, the middle was peaceful, and the end was peaceful – what kind of story is this? You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.”
Still, whilst Twin Peaks is a favourite for so many fans and filmmakers across the world, Lynch himself has his own thoughts when it comes to the greatest TV series.
Speaking to Shortlist, the director revealed one of his TV favourites to be AMC’s Mad Men, the beloved show that ran from 2007 to 2015, starring such Hollywood names as Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss and January Jones. Created by Matthew Weiner, the drama told the story of a prestigious ad agency in New York during the 1960s, following the many personalities that make up the business.
“They’re great characters, and whoever cast that show did a sensational job. It’s great writing, great atmosphere,” he stated, refusing to even separate Moss and Hamm from their on-screen personas, “That’s who they are to me. I called Peggy, ‘Peggy’.” Asked whether they were phased about him being unable to separate the actors from their characters, Lynch added, “No, not a bit. I met them in Cologne, Germany, and my wife and I had drinks with Peggy in Paris.”
“From the very beginning of the drinks, he called us by our character names, Don and Peggy. It kept going, and we went with it,” Moss later confirmed in an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Continuing, she added, “Then he emailed me afterwards, and he wrote ‘Dear Peggy’ and finished it with ‘Give my love to Don’.”
Take a look at the trailer for the TV show Lynch calls “sensational” below.
