The Log saw this one coming, did you?
A Show About…What, Exactly? Salem Falls (1990-1994)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications
Last issue I talked about 1989’s Jerry, the “show about nothing.” By contrast, today’s article is about David Lynch’s seminal surreal series Salem Falls, a show about…what, exactly? A murder mystery? Demonic possession? Supernatural dream dwarves? Psychic logs? Apple pie and coffee?
Oh, where to begin?
Not exactly this…
I guess we can start at “the top”, when Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, suggested that he should do a TV show. Lynch was at first not interested, but Krantz talked up the idea of a small town where Lynch’s particular views of American life could be explored. “You should do a show about real life in America,” Krantz said, “your vision of America the same way you demonstrated it in Blue Velvet and Less than Zero.”[1]
Lynch, who had gained critical renown with Ronnie Rocket but failed to get any follow-up offers given the outrageously non-mainstream, non-commercial nature of his films, was running out of options. He decided to humor Krantz’s “small town” idea, reviewing the 1957 film Peyton Place as a suggestion. After exploring settings such as North Dakota (the show nearly got named “Brainard”), with the idea of the mystery and romance of the frontier west, the nostalgia of small-town America, and the dark and seedy underbelly of the American counterculture scene all coming together in a comedic and bathos-filled clash.
Dun-DUN (deee...deee...deee) Dun-Dun...
Not expecting much to come from it, Lynch brought up the idea to Diana Birkenfield at MGM Television while in production on Ronnie Rocket. She and Mel Brooks got him in touch with the production team of Joshua Brand & John Falsey, who loved the idea, having been kicking around ideas for a show set in Alaska[2]. The ideas merged and the show was ultimately drawn to Lynch’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest, specifically a rural community in an old Cascades logging town called Salem Falls. The name was inspired by the magnificent Snoqualmie Falls, which ultimately ended up in the opening credits. The series would follow a combination of murder mystery, soap opera, and dark, character-driven comedy with the murder of the beautiful teenage Virginia Dare (Sheryl Lee, who also plays her cousin Maddy Ferguson) as a “hook” and McGuffin to draw in viewers, and where ultimately the oddball characters and their quirks and relationships and secrets would, in theory, hold on to them.
They took the idea to ABC where producer Chad Hoffman and ABC Entertainment Vice President Bob Iger loved the idea and ordered a pilot. The executives were mixed when they saw the pilot, in particular Michael Eisner, who thought that it was “too strange, too complicated, and too confusing” and lobbied to reject the pilot out of hand. His burgeoning rivalry with Iger may have played a part in the decision. Ultimately ABC turned down the show, which was taken to PFN, who’d gained a reputation at this point for being willing to gamble on the bizarre and non-mainstream. PFN greenlit the pilot, which did well with the profitable 18-25 demographic, and a half season was greenlit at $1.1 million an episode.
Salem Falls first aired in the fall of 1990 amid a massive media campaign that played up the mystery. And from the second that the moody resonance of the minimalist bass guitar notes of the theme rang amid pictures of industrial saws and sublime waterfalls, audiences knew that they were in for something unlike anything else that they had seen before. And indeed, the overt mystery of “who killed Virginia Dare?” became a public mantra of “who shot JR?” level. However, Lynch, Brand, and Falsey knew that the overt mystery could never hold the show forever, so instead the hope was to draw viewers into the “sublime mystery” of the spiritual, human, and dreamlike magical realism that underlie everything.
If Virginia Dare’s murder was the bait, the hook was the characters and the sinker the oddball writing. When Sheriff Harold Tubman (Michael Ontkean) and Deputy Sheriff Jim "Hawkeye" Chigliak (Michael Horse) proved unable to solve the mystery, they brought in FBI Special Agent Curt Darby (Kyle MacLachlan) to help solve the case. Agent Darby served as the show’s focus, relaying his observations and suspicions to his assistant back at headquarters through a miniature tape recorder in a noir-inspired pseudo-narration. Each episode would see him interview another strange and suspicious townsperson like Dare’s parents (Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie), who seemed to be hiding something, Virginia’s bad boy boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), manipulative businessman Jack Horne (Richard Beymer), his rival the lumber magnate Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), abused diner waitress Shelley (Mädchen Amick), tomboy Bush Pilot (and Jack’s daughter and Virginia’s friend) Audrey Horne (Janine Turner), mill owner Jocelyn "Josie" Packard (Joan Chen), and level headed and gruff general store owner (but who’s hiding a dark secret) Ruth-Anne Miller (Peg Phillips).
Makes just as much sense in this timeline (Image source “vulture.com”)
The cast is padded out by recurring but quirky townspeople like Deputy Hill’s eccentric son Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows) who wants to be a director, Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) who is Bobby's father (and the former subject of military experiments), Canadian crime boss (and Jack Horne’s and Maurice Minnifield’s sometimes business associate) Jean Renault (Michael Parks), and the mysterious and bizarre “Log Lady” (Catherine E. Coulson), whose “psychic log” acts as a fortune teller. And then there are the denizens of a dreamlike Red Room, Michael J. Anderson and Carel Struycken, who offer surreal advice and confounding pseudo-revelations, often said backwards.
And then there’s “B.O.B.” (Frank Silva), a demonic entity who may be the true villain.
And if any of this makes sense to you, then you can explain it to me, over coffee and blueberry pie.
But “sense” is not in Lynch’s repertoire. The mystery of Virginia Dare is not really the point. Instead, Salem Falls is like an extended surrealist soap opera, a dreamlike exploration of American small-town life. All of the characters approach things through a mixture of logic, suspicion, and magical thinking with the supernatural just on the other side of a thin, invisible wall all around. On one hand it’s pure mind-screw, on the other hand it’s a surreal satire of American society, and on the third hand it’s a quirky, character-driven oddball comedy. The series itself seems constantly pulled between the competing poles of Lynch’s dreamlike vision and Brand and Falsey’s quirky character comedy. And indeed, the network was constantly pushing for more of the latter and less of the former. The show attempts to balance these competing poles. It doesn’t always succeed, but when it does it’s as sublime as Snoqualmie Falls
Shown: a surprising percentage of the show's runtime (Image source “time.com”)
The network, due to fan demand, was also pressing for Lynch, Brand, and Falsey to reveal Dare’s killer, which, as Lynch astutely put it, “was missing the point”. They relented at the end of Season 2, with a huge, 2-hour special event, “Fire Walk with Me”, that drew record viewership. I won’t reveal the “killer” here just in case you care about decades-old spoilers – and remember that the “answer” is really missing the point – but needless to say once the “answer” was revealed, Season 3 saw viewership drop precipitously. However, with the quirky characters and some increasing interpersonal drama thanks to Brand and Falsey, the show held on to a reasonable viewership and saw another season before Lynch pulled out to return to film, and then squeaked out another season and a half under Brand and Falsey, the magical realism slowly leaking away in favor of quirky character studies. But without the balance between the strange and familiar, it became just another oddball ‘90s series with quirky characters among many, ironically increasingly indistinguishable from its many imitators.
Salem Falls would win multiple Emmys and Golden Globes and would become an icon of the 1990s. It was an immediate breakout in the US and Canada and became popular in Europe, particularly France and Italy, and in Japan, which would later relaunch the series as a Manga and Anime. It would spawn a direct-view “where are they now” miniseries in the 2010s. It would also become the target of constant and merciless satire and parody, which amused Lynch to no end.
The series would also spawn some attempted copycat series. The most famous and immediate of these was Sandy Veith’s[3] Southern Exposure on CBS, which saw a New York City doctor (Rob Morrow) open up a practice in the small Northern Georgia town of Pine Hill as a condition of his medical school scholarship, encountering many quirky “hillbilly” locals. It was reportedly Columbia CEO Ted Turner’s favorite show. But plenty of other shows followed at least some aspect over the years from the X-Files, which took the supernatural mystery and ran with it, to Picket Fences, which went for the weird and quirky.
Salem Falls, for all of its surrealist absurdism, has gone on to influence many more series since, and can largely be seen in hindsight as a truly transitional piece. It was in some ways a product of its time, and yet it was also a transformative show, marking a clear television watershed between the 1980s and 1990s. It was a show that probably never should have become as popular as it was given just how far out of the mainstream it was, and yet for a brief period of time it was the show to watch on American television.
[1] Krantz made the same quote in our timeline, but without reference to Less than Zero, obviously.
[2] In our timeline this became Northern Exposure.
[3] In our timeline Veith approached Universal with the idea of a NY doctor moving to the rural south around the same time Brand and Falsey approached Universal with their “Alaska” idea. In a later lawsuit the jury found Universal (but not Brand and Falsey, who were “fed” the specifics of the idea by Universal) guilty of plagiarism and awarded Veith $10 million in damages and legal fees. Here he went to Columbia and explicitly made the southern setting Georgia knowing that he’d appeal to the new “Y’allywood” based CBS.
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications
Last issue I talked about 1989’s Jerry, the “show about nothing.” By contrast, today’s article is about David Lynch’s seminal surreal series Salem Falls, a show about…what, exactly? A murder mystery? Demonic possession? Supernatural dream dwarves? Psychic logs? Apple pie and coffee?
Oh, where to begin?
Not exactly this…
I guess we can start at “the top”, when Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, suggested that he should do a TV show. Lynch was at first not interested, but Krantz talked up the idea of a small town where Lynch’s particular views of American life could be explored. “You should do a show about real life in America,” Krantz said, “your vision of America the same way you demonstrated it in Blue Velvet and Less than Zero.”[1]
Lynch, who had gained critical renown with Ronnie Rocket but failed to get any follow-up offers given the outrageously non-mainstream, non-commercial nature of his films, was running out of options. He decided to humor Krantz’s “small town” idea, reviewing the 1957 film Peyton Place as a suggestion. After exploring settings such as North Dakota (the show nearly got named “Brainard”), with the idea of the mystery and romance of the frontier west, the nostalgia of small-town America, and the dark and seedy underbelly of the American counterculture scene all coming together in a comedic and bathos-filled clash.
Dun-DUN (deee...deee...deee) Dun-Dun...
Not expecting much to come from it, Lynch brought up the idea to Diana Birkenfield at MGM Television while in production on Ronnie Rocket. She and Mel Brooks got him in touch with the production team of Joshua Brand & John Falsey, who loved the idea, having been kicking around ideas for a show set in Alaska[2]. The ideas merged and the show was ultimately drawn to Lynch’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest, specifically a rural community in an old Cascades logging town called Salem Falls. The name was inspired by the magnificent Snoqualmie Falls, which ultimately ended up in the opening credits. The series would follow a combination of murder mystery, soap opera, and dark, character-driven comedy with the murder of the beautiful teenage Virginia Dare (Sheryl Lee, who also plays her cousin Maddy Ferguson) as a “hook” and McGuffin to draw in viewers, and where ultimately the oddball characters and their quirks and relationships and secrets would, in theory, hold on to them.
They took the idea to ABC where producer Chad Hoffman and ABC Entertainment Vice President Bob Iger loved the idea and ordered a pilot. The executives were mixed when they saw the pilot, in particular Michael Eisner, who thought that it was “too strange, too complicated, and too confusing” and lobbied to reject the pilot out of hand. His burgeoning rivalry with Iger may have played a part in the decision. Ultimately ABC turned down the show, which was taken to PFN, who’d gained a reputation at this point for being willing to gamble on the bizarre and non-mainstream. PFN greenlit the pilot, which did well with the profitable 18-25 demographic, and a half season was greenlit at $1.1 million an episode.
Salem Falls first aired in the fall of 1990 amid a massive media campaign that played up the mystery. And from the second that the moody resonance of the minimalist bass guitar notes of the theme rang amid pictures of industrial saws and sublime waterfalls, audiences knew that they were in for something unlike anything else that they had seen before. And indeed, the overt mystery of “who killed Virginia Dare?” became a public mantra of “who shot JR?” level. However, Lynch, Brand, and Falsey knew that the overt mystery could never hold the show forever, so instead the hope was to draw viewers into the “sublime mystery” of the spiritual, human, and dreamlike magical realism that underlie everything.
If Virginia Dare’s murder was the bait, the hook was the characters and the sinker the oddball writing. When Sheriff Harold Tubman (Michael Ontkean) and Deputy Sheriff Jim "Hawkeye" Chigliak (Michael Horse) proved unable to solve the mystery, they brought in FBI Special Agent Curt Darby (Kyle MacLachlan) to help solve the case. Agent Darby served as the show’s focus, relaying his observations and suspicions to his assistant back at headquarters through a miniature tape recorder in a noir-inspired pseudo-narration. Each episode would see him interview another strange and suspicious townsperson like Dare’s parents (Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie), who seemed to be hiding something, Virginia’s bad boy boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), manipulative businessman Jack Horne (Richard Beymer), his rival the lumber magnate Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), abused diner waitress Shelley (Mädchen Amick), tomboy Bush Pilot (and Jack’s daughter and Virginia’s friend) Audrey Horne (Janine Turner), mill owner Jocelyn "Josie" Packard (Joan Chen), and level headed and gruff general store owner (but who’s hiding a dark secret) Ruth-Anne Miller (Peg Phillips).
Makes just as much sense in this timeline (Image source “vulture.com”)
The cast is padded out by recurring but quirky townspeople like Deputy Hill’s eccentric son Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows) who wants to be a director, Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) who is Bobby's father (and the former subject of military experiments), Canadian crime boss (and Jack Horne’s and Maurice Minnifield’s sometimes business associate) Jean Renault (Michael Parks), and the mysterious and bizarre “Log Lady” (Catherine E. Coulson), whose “psychic log” acts as a fortune teller. And then there are the denizens of a dreamlike Red Room, Michael J. Anderson and Carel Struycken, who offer surreal advice and confounding pseudo-revelations, often said backwards.
And then there’s “B.O.B.” (Frank Silva), a demonic entity who may be the true villain.
And if any of this makes sense to you, then you can explain it to me, over coffee and blueberry pie.
But “sense” is not in Lynch’s repertoire. The mystery of Virginia Dare is not really the point. Instead, Salem Falls is like an extended surrealist soap opera, a dreamlike exploration of American small-town life. All of the characters approach things through a mixture of logic, suspicion, and magical thinking with the supernatural just on the other side of a thin, invisible wall all around. On one hand it’s pure mind-screw, on the other hand it’s a surreal satire of American society, and on the third hand it’s a quirky, character-driven oddball comedy. The series itself seems constantly pulled between the competing poles of Lynch’s dreamlike vision and Brand and Falsey’s quirky character comedy. And indeed, the network was constantly pushing for more of the latter and less of the former. The show attempts to balance these competing poles. It doesn’t always succeed, but when it does it’s as sublime as Snoqualmie Falls
Shown: a surprising percentage of the show's runtime (Image source “time.com”)
The network, due to fan demand, was also pressing for Lynch, Brand, and Falsey to reveal Dare’s killer, which, as Lynch astutely put it, “was missing the point”. They relented at the end of Season 2, with a huge, 2-hour special event, “Fire Walk with Me”, that drew record viewership. I won’t reveal the “killer” here just in case you care about decades-old spoilers – and remember that the “answer” is really missing the point – but needless to say once the “answer” was revealed, Season 3 saw viewership drop precipitously. However, with the quirky characters and some increasing interpersonal drama thanks to Brand and Falsey, the show held on to a reasonable viewership and saw another season before Lynch pulled out to return to film, and then squeaked out another season and a half under Brand and Falsey, the magical realism slowly leaking away in favor of quirky character studies. But without the balance between the strange and familiar, it became just another oddball ‘90s series with quirky characters among many, ironically increasingly indistinguishable from its many imitators.
Salem Falls would win multiple Emmys and Golden Globes and would become an icon of the 1990s. It was an immediate breakout in the US and Canada and became popular in Europe, particularly France and Italy, and in Japan, which would later relaunch the series as a Manga and Anime. It would spawn a direct-view “where are they now” miniseries in the 2010s. It would also become the target of constant and merciless satire and parody, which amused Lynch to no end.
The series would also spawn some attempted copycat series. The most famous and immediate of these was Sandy Veith’s[3] Southern Exposure on CBS, which saw a New York City doctor (Rob Morrow) open up a practice in the small Northern Georgia town of Pine Hill as a condition of his medical school scholarship, encountering many quirky “hillbilly” locals. It was reportedly Columbia CEO Ted Turner’s favorite show. But plenty of other shows followed at least some aspect over the years from the X-Files, which took the supernatural mystery and ran with it, to Picket Fences, which went for the weird and quirky.
Salem Falls, for all of its surrealist absurdism, has gone on to influence many more series since, and can largely be seen in hindsight as a truly transitional piece. It was in some ways a product of its time, and yet it was also a transformative show, marking a clear television watershed between the 1980s and 1990s. It was a show that probably never should have become as popular as it was given just how far out of the mainstream it was, and yet for a brief period of time it was the show to watch on American television.
[1] Krantz made the same quote in our timeline, but without reference to Less than Zero, obviously.
[2] In our timeline this became Northern Exposure.
[3] In our timeline Veith approached Universal with the idea of a NY doctor moving to the rural south around the same time Brand and Falsey approached Universal with their “Alaska” idea. In a later lawsuit the jury found Universal (but not Brand and Falsey, who were “fed” the specifics of the idea by Universal) guilty of plagiarism and awarded Veith $10 million in damages and legal fees. Here he went to Columbia and explicitly made the southern setting Georgia knowing that he’d appeal to the new “Y’allywood” based CBS.
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