Subject: Re: The trouble with David Lynch.....
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Date: 1991-02-14, 16:17
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <18688.9102151653@uk.ac.keele.seq1> iru03@seq1.keele.ac.uk (P.R. Grove) writes:
> >LYNCH SHOULD HAVE REMAINED AS DIRECTOR FOR THE WHOLE SERIES!

You don't know how difficult, nay impossible, this is to do.

Each episode, a teleplay in itself, requires weeks of preparation on the
director's part.  At any one moment there are usually three to five
episodes in various stages of completion.  Each of these demands most of
a day's work from its director, every day.  For one director to do
everything, he or she would have to juggle all these jobs in his or her
head at once, and work 120 hours a week.  And the results would suffer.

For this reason, virtually no American television series makes it with
one director.  Most employ stables of three to five regulars, plus
guests.  Some half-hour taped sitcoms do get by with one or two, but
they have little location work or post-production to deal with and
usually have a two week cycle.

UK readers are accustomed to canned miniseries from the BBC, Thames TV
et al.  featuring one director, but these are usually a year's project
for the production team since episodes must be developed and filmed
serially.  American TV works differently.

The REAL trouble with Lynch, or rather his chosen stable of directors,
is that they do not share a consistent tone.  This makes the week-to-week 
handover more noticeable to the viewer than is ideal.  It's a danger
when you aim for anything approaching the cutting edge, I guess.