Coming Soon
DAVID LYNCH: ON THE AIR
1992
Director
David Lynch
Starring
Ian Buchanan
Marla Rubinoff
Miguel Ferrer
Kim McGuire
Marvin Kaplan
Runtime
120 minutes
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The year is 1957. A new program entitled "The Lester Guy Show" is debuting on the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). Most of the cast is nuts, the crew is incompetent and everything that could go wrong always does. Of course, this makes the show a hit.
While mixing the sound for an episode of the second season of TWIN PEAKS, Lynch was hit with a sudden inspiration. "It just came into my head, the idea of people trying to do something successful and having it all go wrong." Following the initial success of TWIN PEAKS, David Lynch and Mark Frost were hot properties in Television. When they approached ABC with the idea for ON THE AIR, the network was eager to take them up on the offer. The show itself was a half-hour absurdist comedy featuring many of the cast and crew from PEAKS. The pilot tested very well, and six more episodes were ordered. However, by the time it came to scheduling ON THE AIR, things with TWIN PEAKS had already fallen apart, and the network was no longer eager to work with Lynch. "During that time everything was going belly up and there wasn't any support from ABC for this show at all. They really hated it." As expected, the show received poor ratings, and only three of the seven episodes were aired by ABC before they gave it the axe.
The series is a weird and sometimes upsetting take on the traditional American sitcom. It's full of Lynch's trademark surrealism with a cast of bizarre characters with strange maladies and personality quirks. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times, one of the series' stars, Miguel Ferrer, described the show as David Lynch doing "I LOVE LUCY on acid." It stands as a testament to Lynch's low-key absurdist sense of humor and tantalizes as a fragment of lost Lynchiana.
We're showing the Lynch-directed pilot alongside a smorgasbord of other of Lynch's rare televisual oddities!!!
While mixing the sound for an episode of the second season of TWIN PEAKS, Lynch was hit with a sudden inspiration. "It just came into my head, the idea of people trying to do something successful and having it all go wrong." Following the initial success of TWIN PEAKS, David Lynch and Mark Frost were hot properties in Television. When they approached ABC with the idea for ON THE AIR, the network was eager to take them up on the offer. The show itself was a half-hour absurdist comedy featuring many of the cast and crew from PEAKS. The pilot tested very well, and six more episodes were ordered. However, by the time it came to scheduling ON THE AIR, things with TWIN PEAKS had already fallen apart, and the network was no longer eager to work with Lynch. "During that time everything was going belly up and there wasn't any support from ABC for this show at all. They really hated it." As expected, the show received poor ratings, and only three of the seven episodes were aired by ABC before they gave it the axe.
The series is a weird and sometimes upsetting take on the traditional American sitcom. It's full of Lynch's trademark surrealism with a cast of bizarre characters with strange maladies and personality quirks. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times, one of the series' stars, Miguel Ferrer, described the show as David Lynch doing "I LOVE LUCY on acid." It stands as a testament to Lynch's low-key absurdist sense of humor and tantalizes as a fragment of lost Lynchiana.
We're showing the Lynch-directed pilot alongside a smorgasbord of other of Lynch's rare televisual oddities!!!