Wild Palms: TV Takes a Surreal Look into the Future

Twenty years ago ABC aired am original and challenging mini-series - Wild Palms. With Oliver Stone as executive producer, the five-part series attempted to speculate on the future of media.  If you combine the elements of the Bible, Jacobin revenge plays,Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Phillip K Dick's psychedelia,. film noir, William Gibson's cyperpunk all set to a rocking 60s soundtrack and you get Wild Palms.  
By exploring themes of virtual reality, mass media manipulation, drugs, polarized politics, and technology, the series put coherence aside in favor of a disjointed narrative.  As the series progresses each episode delves deeper into retro future world.   Kathryn Bigelow directed an episode ending with a dizzying, Peckinpah inspired shootout set to "House of the Rising Sun."  The costume motifs envision a future where every style's is retro.  Based on comic book series by Bruce Wagner, Wild Palms stands alongside The Prisoner for its willingness to question modern notions of politics, technology, drugs, and reality.

Wild Palms is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, and its not the dying metropolis of Blade Runner, but a sunny utopia.  Two shadowy groups known as "the fathers" and "the friends" are in a covert war over the proper use of technology.   Although Wild Palms did not anticipate the internet, it did foresee a society under increasing media consolidation. The "fathers" are corporate elitists

using technology as a means of mass mind control, while the Friends are an underground movement trying to free humanity from its reliance on technology. While politics are one of the many themes in the series - it's interesting to compare with the present.  By my understanding, libertarians oppose the government, but not corporate power.  Occupy Wall Street's critique of the financial system, at least in their moderate expression, advocates for more government regulation. The "Friends" oppose any kind of tyranny.  In Wild Palms, the "friends" use poetry as their mantra, primarily Whitman's "My Captain, My Captain."  The fight is to keep humanism alive.

Jim Belushi gives the performance of his life as Harry Wyckoff, a corporate lawyer living an average upper middle class life with his wife Grace (Dana Delaney) and their two kids.  His life changes after a politician-media mogul Anton Kruetzer, played by Robert Loggia, in an over the top performance, offers Harry the chance to run a TV network.  That's the basic plot.  Through the course of the series Harry gradually finds out most of his reality is fiction. Harry's character arc has a strange trajectory from an everyman hero to a new age media prophet.

There's a lot going on.  Unlike modern television which uses linear storytelling (with exceptions of course), Wild Palms still looks (and feels) subversive with its use of vivid imagery and psychotropic narrative. 

2019 note - A part of the plot involves letting viewers control the story of their favorite TV shows, something Black Mirror attempted with "Bandersnatch." With fans petitioning for new endings to their beloved shows - Wild Palms might've been on to something. Still in our time of "Peak TV" Wild Palms in all its messy glory offers an alternative to the rigid structure of a Netflix series.

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