“Twin Peaks” has just three episodes to go (the finale September 3 is a double), but it’s over as far as everyone is concerned.
The Showtime reboot failed to make the top 150 cable shows on Sunday night. It was beaten by everything. The number 150 show, “Ouija: Origin of Evil” on Cinemax Prime, scored 124,000 viewers. “Twin Peaks” was somewhere below that, in a space that can’t be counted. Even I couldn’t be counted since I was at the Khalid show and watched the extremely daunting Part 14 on the Showtime press site.
Meanwhile, “Game of Thrones” won the night with 10.7 million viewers for the HBO show.k
Showtime at least can be happy about “Ray Donovan,” which took in 1.1 million viewers after “Twin Peaks” at 9pm. And the comedy “I’m Dying Up Here” benefited from “Ray Donovan” and had 240,000 viewers– not great but something.
Moving “Twin Peaks” to 8pm was supposed to help the ratings. But this past Sunday, at 8pm on cable most everyone was watching sports or something on TLC called “90 Day Fiancee.”
No one knows what “Twin Peaks” cost but let’s say 18 episodes cost at least $9 million on the low side, ad $18 million on the high side. The show has lots of name actors, and a ton of special effects. But ratings have collapsed from Part 1, usually resting around 240,000 viewers. The fact that fewer than 124,000 showed up Sunday really seals the deal.
Part 14 was just as frustrating as the entire 13 that preceded it. There’s no plot, a lot of filler, long pointless scenes. There’s no continuity. People come and go. On Sunday, Kyle MacLachlan– the star– wasn’t even on the show. But several members of producer-director David Lynch’s family were including his wife, Emily Stofle, who’s appeared in several episodes for no particular reason. (She plays a character no one knows, who discusses people we’ve never heard of and don’t care about.)
Sunday’s episode was full of special effects and weird stuff that connected to nothing. Lynch has indulged himself playing FBI chief Gordon Cole, who used to be a minor ingredient in the old “Twin Peaks” and here takes up screen time for no purpose. Cole’s continued trait is that he’s hard of hearing and must shout all the time. He hears nothing. This is an embarrassing hiccup in 2017.
On Sunday, Italian actress Monica Bellucci also played herself, in dream Cole has. Why? I guess, why not? She has no connection to the show, and the dream didn’t further the plot. Sitting next to Bellucci in a cafe was actually someone I know– a French journalist and publicist named Melita Toscan du Plantier who ran the late lamented Marrakech Film Festival in real life. She looked good.
This week: unicorns? Spaceships? Viewers?
