I remember when Wild Palms was originally shown amid much hype in 1993, but have only seen it now that it comes to DVD.
Imagine an adventure of cyberpunk intrigue which takes place in a near future world where VR ("Virtual Reality", for those too young or old to have assimilated the 90's buzzword for telepresence) is hitting the media mainstream; all in an environment of weird religious cults and treacherous politics. A cutting-edge commentary on the effects of new media.
But in reality, there was very little of this! It seems to me that the writers were worried that these heady concepts were not quite ready for prime-time acceptance, and took pains to dilute them quite a bit. The production looks great for its time, and some of the actors fit their roles quite well - especially Robert Loggia and Angie Dickenson. In the six sprawling episodes of the miniseries, not a lot really happens. There is not a lot of character development. Many of the actors could have handled more substantial roles - Belushi, Bebe Neuwirth, especially David Warner and Brad Dourif come to mind. Rather than a well crafted mystery, there is mostly conceit that something sinister is going on which the main character is unaware of, explanations of which are spooned to us in small portions. The dialogue was often quite good, if sparse. The cult and VR aspects really struck me as being pretty superfluous, the "media manipulation of social reality" idea didn't bring anything which couldn't have been explained in terms of newspapers or television - apart from the fact that people interacting with "holograms" (while on designer drugs, no less!) afforded a few opportunities for fun photographic trickery.
Wild Palms seems to me very much a product of its time. In the US at least everybody was jumping onto the internet bandwagon, techno music hit the mainstream, immersive VR became practical, the little-understood prefix "cyber-" became linked to countless names, just as "electro-" and "astro-" had been hyped decades before. I'd recommend Wild Palms to those who may never have thought about this sort of scenario before, as a bit of an introduction. More than ten years earlier, the film "Network" covered many of the same ideas in much less time, more memorably, and with far more style. For better examples of watered-down cyberpunk fiction for television I'd rather recommend ABC's short-lived series "Max Headroom" and the recent animated series "Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex". It is not a bad show, but where Wild Palms falls short is in the promise of revealing how combining new media with the older routines of people's obsessions and ideas of self- interest can result in interesting shifts in society, and in the societal consensus of reality itself. Too little, too late, I'd say.
And what was the deal with that cameo of William Gibson?
Imagine an adventure of cyberpunk intrigue which takes place in a near future world where VR ("Virtual Reality", for those too young or old to have assimilated the 90's buzzword for telepresence) is hitting the media mainstream; all in an environment of weird religious cults and treacherous politics. A cutting-edge commentary on the effects of new media.
But in reality, there was very little of this! It seems to me that the writers were worried that these heady concepts were not quite ready for prime-time acceptance, and took pains to dilute them quite a bit. The production looks great for its time, and some of the actors fit their roles quite well - especially Robert Loggia and Angie Dickenson. In the six sprawling episodes of the miniseries, not a lot really happens. There is not a lot of character development. Many of the actors could have handled more substantial roles - Belushi, Bebe Neuwirth, especially David Warner and Brad Dourif come to mind. Rather than a well crafted mystery, there is mostly conceit that something sinister is going on which the main character is unaware of, explanations of which are spooned to us in small portions. The dialogue was often quite good, if sparse. The cult and VR aspects really struck me as being pretty superfluous, the "media manipulation of social reality" idea didn't bring anything which couldn't have been explained in terms of newspapers or television - apart from the fact that people interacting with "holograms" (while on designer drugs, no less!) afforded a few opportunities for fun photographic trickery.
Wild Palms seems to me very much a product of its time. In the US at least everybody was jumping onto the internet bandwagon, techno music hit the mainstream, immersive VR became practical, the little-understood prefix "cyber-" became linked to countless names, just as "electro-" and "astro-" had been hyped decades before. I'd recommend Wild Palms to those who may never have thought about this sort of scenario before, as a bit of an introduction. More than ten years earlier, the film "Network" covered many of the same ideas in much less time, more memorably, and with far more style. For better examples of watered-down cyberpunk fiction for television I'd rather recommend ABC's short-lived series "Max Headroom" and the recent animated series "Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex". It is not a bad show, but where Wild Palms falls short is in the promise of revealing how combining new media with the older routines of people's obsessions and ideas of self- interest can result in interesting shifts in society, and in the societal consensus of reality itself. Too little, too late, I'd say.
And what was the deal with that cameo of William Gibson?