Remem­ber­ing On the Air – David Lynch and Mark Frost’s doomed ​’90s sitcom

A man stands in the cor­ner of a kitchen, root­ed to the spot in fear. Cue some uptem­po jazz music, which is prompt­ly cut. A woman enters the room, curt­sey­ing stiffly, and motions at the man to leave. He starts to run, but his braces get caught on a cup­board and he’s flung back­wards out of a win­dow. The woman screams. Then a man with a gun appears at the door. ​“I caught you with anoth­er man!” he yells. But there is no oth­er man.

This scene is as strange and out­landish as any to have sprung from bril­liant­ly sur­re­al mind of David Lynch, but there’s some­thing wrong with the pic­ture. This is On the Air, the ill-fat­ed sit­com Lynch and Mark Frost con­ceived as a fol­low-up to Twin Peaks. Dumped by ABC just three weeks into its sev­en-episode run in 1992 (it aired in full in the UK), the com­e­dy fol­lows the cast and crew of a ​’50s light-enter­tain­ment show that becomes a hit though a series of hap­py calami­ties on-set – par­al­lels def­i­nite­ly intended.

And if a half-hour sit­com seems like a strange depar­ture for the man behind Blue Vel­vet and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, well, you’d be half right. On the one hand, On the Air is slap­stick, sil­ly, and sur­pris­ing­ly broad in tone, right down to the overuse of com­e­dy sound effects. On the oth­er, it fea­tures a dreamy score from Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, on a break from com­pos­ing the theme music for the Barcelona Olympics, and just enough inspired nut­ti­ness to jus­ti­fy the billing.

Nan­cye Fer­gu­son, who plays go-get­ting pro­duc­tion assis­tant Ruth True­wor­thy, recalls her expe­ri­ence work­ing on the show to LWLies. ​“For me it was like, ​‘A David Lynch com­e­dy? How amaz­ing is that! What could it pos­si­bly be?’” she says. ​“I didn’t see it as a depar­ture. There’s a dark­ness to David’s work, but he always sees the light no mat­ter how dark you go. Like with Twin Peaks, yes, it’s dark, but there’s this delight­ful side in a lot of moments, which is pret­ty much David when you see how he is as a human being.”

To anchor their new show, Lynch and Frost brought in two Twin Peaks’ bit-parters, Ian Buchanan and Miguel Fer­rer, as The Lester Guy Show’s washed-up star and bul­ly­ing net­work exec­u­tive Bud Bud­waller respec­tive­ly. Both play out­size comedic riffs on their char­ac­ters from Twin Peaks, thes­py love inter­est Dick Tremayne and the majes­ti­cal­ly rude FBI pathol­o­gist Albert Rosen­feld. (David L Lan­der AKA Tim Pin­kle also returns as Vlad­ja Gochk­tch, the show’s vow­el-man­gling Euro­pean director.)

“I think Dick Tremayne would prob­a­bly in his mad­ness base him­self around some­one like Lester, but for me it was kind of an exten­sion of that char­ac­ter,” says Buchanan in ref­er­ence to his role on the show, which most­ly involved hav­ing var­i­ous indig­ni­ties heaped upon him in his attempts to out­shine co-star Bet­ty Hud­son (Mar­la Rubi­noff). ​“At the time I’d been doing soap opera roman­tic leads and that kind of thing, so it was a nice break for me. I liked the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a very bad song-and-dance man, I thought that would be kind of challenging!”

In the bril­liant Lynch-direct­ed pilot episode, the tran­si­tion from fun­ny-pecu­liar to fun­ny-ha-ha seems more a ques­tion of empha­sis. Lat­er in the kitchen scene, the woman – an actress per­form­ing in The Lester Guy Show – screams again, which we now know is the gunman’s cue to burst through the door and sur­prise his cheat­ing wife. This time, there is anoth­er man – it’s Lester Guy, swing­ing upside-down from a rope tied round his ankles. Lynch keeps return­ing to the image, let­ting it seep into your brain.

“David directs with such ease,” says Fer­gu­son, whose char­ac­ter was report­ed­ly based on Lynch’s future wife and edi­tor on the show Mary Sweeney. ​“He’s very spe­cif­ic but [when some­thing worked] he’d be like, ​‘That was a gosh-darn good take!’ He has these won­der­ful expres­sions. It was all done with joy, and it real­ly felt like we were in an ele­vat­ed state a lot of the time. David is a bril­liant artist [but] he’s also an excep­tion­al human being with an amaz­ing kind­ness and heart, his world is so spe­cif­ic [that] you real­ly feel like you’re part of something.”

Like any good sur­re­al­ist, Lynch knows that a door is nev­er real­ly a door, just like a pipe is nev­er real­ly a pipe. In a scene of pri­mal ter­ror from the new series of Twin Peaks, there’s an insis­tent thump­ing at a door as Agent Dale Coop­er tries to escape from exis­ten­tial lim­bo. ​“You’d bet­ter hur­ry,” says a woman with no eyes. ​“Moth­er is com­ing!” Unlike in the gun­man scene from On the Air, here the door is an unset­tling rather than a comedic device. But its basic ​‘mean­ing’ is the same: the door is where the id gets in, threat­en­ing to unleash the forces of chaos on ordered real­i­ty. (In Jokes and Their Rela­tion to the Uncon­scious, Freud for­mu­lates a the­o­ry about humour that echoes his the­o­ry of the uncan­ny – essen­tial­ly, both have to do with the return of repressed thoughts and desires to the con­scious brain.)

If the pilot set the bar impres­sive­ly high, what fol­lowed was, quite lit­er­al­ly, his­to­ry repeat­ing itself as farce. The net­work buried the show in a 9.30pm sum­mer slot and, with Lynch tak­ing a back-seat on all bar one of the remain­ing episodes, qual­i­ty con­trol nose­dived accord­ing­ly. Still, there’s a fran­tic ener­gy to all of the episodes that occa­sion­al­ly tips over into the bizarre, like the scene where Lester has to make out with a pup­pet called ​‘Mr Peanuts’ because his lead­ing lady has fall­en down a well. ​“When I look back on it, I think parts were real­ly clever and inven­tive,” says Buchanan. ​“There’s an episode that came in slight­ly long, and rather than trim it or cut it I think it was just sped up a lit­tle bit, which I think is just very, very fun­ny and a great way to han­dle it.”

Fer­gu­son was con­vinced the show was going to be a hit. ​“There wasn’t any­thing in my mind that didn’t think we were going to be on the air for a real­ly long time,” she recalls. ​“I remem­ber David say­ing, ​‘Well, you know what hap­pened with Cheers!’ I was like, ​‘We’re in!’”

What­ev­er its flaws, On the Air did point up some intrigu­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties for tele­vi­sion – the now-fash­ion­able lack of a laugh­ter track, for one, and the post­mod­ern show-with­in-a-show set­ting, beat­ing 30 Rock to the punch by near­ly 15 years. It’s also strik­ing how Lynch and Frost chose to fol­low up a show that deci­sive­ly rolled back the fron­tiers of tele­vi­sion with one tak­ing the piss out of its parochialism.

More­over, it’s reveal­ing that ABC were so quick to bail on a show from an estab­lished direc­tor who’d recent­ly hand­ed them their biggest rat­ings hit since Dynasty. ​“The net­works at the time real­ly didn’t know what to do with an artist,” says Fer­gu­son. ​“Today a show like On the Air could be nur­tured by a Show­time or an HBO – a small audi­ence can be plen­ty for a sub­scrip­tion net­work, which can real­ly let things exist for peo­ple to dis­cov­er. It doesn’t always have to be this big blowout based on adver­tis­ers. I think it was way ahead of its time, and com­plete­ly judged by a stan­dard that should not exist for an artist work­ing in television.”

Dur­ing its brief but calami­tous run, On the Air hint­ed at a world of no-rules tele­vi­sion mak­ing that wouldn’t come to pass for at least anoth­er decade. As Buchanan puts it wry­ly, ​“David’s still the only direc­tor I’d hang upside down for.”