Prime-Time Mind Bender

By Richard Zoglin

THE RHINOCEROS IN THE SWIMMING pool -- the one that keeps giving Harry Wyckoff cold sweats in the middle of the night -- is only a dream. The trouble with Harry, however, is that most everything else plaguing him these days is real.

Driving to work, he sees people being beaten on their front lawns by mysterious men in gray suits. At a restaurant a goon squad abducts a customer while other diners barely look up from their pasta salads. Harry's five-year- old daughter, who doesn't talk, suddenly breaks her silence with one cryptic sentence: "Everything must go." And that's not counting the virtual- reality glasses that transport Harry into an 18th century ballroom, the strange palm-tree tattoos that seem to have become a fashion statement, and the creepy Senator who tries to recruit Harry to some shadowy cause by sending him a pen-and-ink drawing -- of a rhinoceros.

It's been a dull TV season; now for a little mind-bending mayhem. For four nights next week, ABC will plunge viewers into the bright, bizarre world of Wild Palms. The six-hour mini-series is the brainchild of two intriguing newcomers to network TV: Oliver Stone, the director of JFK and Platoon, and Bruce Wagner, writer of a hallucinated comic strip in Details magazine on which the mini-series is based. A few minutes into this futuristic fantasy, and viewers numbed by TV's docudrama deluge will realize they've stumbled onto something special. A few more minutes, and a lot of them might be zapping off to Married . . . with Children. But those who fall for Wild Palms could fall hard: what we have here may be TV's next cult hit. Or at the very least, the most spellbinding mini-series to come along since Twin Peaks.

The comparison to David Lynch's skewed soap opera is impossible to avoid, so best to get it out of the way quickly. Wild Palms would not exist if Twin Peaks hadn't paved the way. But Wild Palms is a total original -- just as daring as and perhaps even more demanding than Lynch's series. Twin Peaks, for all its weirdness, was at bottom a simple murder mystery: Who killed Laura Palmer? Wild Palms is denser and more disorienting, a paranoid dream play that bombards us with freaky characters and mystifying plot twists, tying them together only hours later, if at all.

A few things are more or less clear: the year is 2007, and Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi, stiff-backed and hollow-cheeked) is a patent attorney living comfortably in Los Angeles with his wife (Dana Delany) and two kids. His life starts taking strange turns when an ex-girlfriend (Kim Cattrall) seeks his help in locating her missing son. The mission turns out to be a ruse to lead Harry to Senator Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia) -- presidential aspirant, television entrepreneur and guru of a political-religious movement known as New Realism. Kreutzer's neofascist aspirations have something to do with hallucinogenic drugs, new technology that enables people to interact with holograms, and a battle between underground political camps known as the Fathers and the Friends.

Among the wigged-out characters scurrying through all this are Chickie Levitt (Brad Dourif), a paraplegic computer whiz living in terrified seclusion on the beach; Chap Starfall (Robert Morse), an over-the-hill nightclub singer recruited for nefarious purposes; and Tully Woiwode (Nick Mancuso), a flaky painter whose eyes are literally gouged out by Kreutzer's demonic sister (Angie Dickinson), who also happens to be Harry's mother-in-law.

Though four different directors -- among them Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) and Keith Gordon (A Midnight Clear) -- handled the various segments, the series establishes a consistent mood of subtle menace. The light is too bright; rooms are too large; the camera swirls around groups of people as if refusing to let us get our bearings. The '60s pop tunes emanating from every car radio seem oddly unsettling. Stand-up comics still perform live at the Improv in this gleaming technofuture, only now they have become angry political rebels. ("Put your hands together for the very strange, very bitter comedy stylings of Stitch Walken.") The key to the Senator's plot is a TV sitcom called Church Windows, in which characters come to life in living rooms as holograms, bringing their dumb gag lines and laugh track along with them. Stone himself even crops up on a TV talk show of the future for a sneaky in- joke. "It's 15 years after the film JFK," the host says. "The files are released. You were right. Are you bitter?"

Stone, that old conspiracy buff, found himself comfortably in synch with Wagner's vision of the future. "I like the concept of television taking over our reality," Stone says. "I like the concept of a man who does not recognize his reality anymore, who sees every prop in his reality removed and deconstructed by the end of the movie." He also liked the way ABC, which commissioned the project in the fall of 1991 as part of an effort to recruit more Hollywood filmmakers to TV, was so receptive. There were none of the "predictable fears, predictable anxiety" he was used to in the medium; the ABC programmers, Stone says, read Wagner's pilot script and "got it right away."

Though Stone set the project in motion, the production was largely overseen by Wagner, 39, the author of a novel about Hollywood (Force Majeure) and a few little-noticed screenplays (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills). He realized at the outset that his fragmented, dreamlike comic strip had to be rigged up with a more conventional plot to work on TV. One of his models was Britain's Dennis Potter, who mixed fantasy and reality in such acclaimed TV dramas as The Singing Detective. But Wagner adds, "I'm a fan of soap operas. I'm a fan of shows like Dallas and Dynasty, and to me, as strange as Wild Palms is at times, I had to root it in characters that you would care about."

Wagner too was pleasantly surprised by the lack of network interference. "Their only concern throughout was that they wanted things to make sense, they wanted the plot to evolve, and they wanted loose ends tied up," he says. "They never came to me and said, 'You can't do that on television.' Never." ABC Entertainment president Ted Harbert acknowledges, "They had a vision, they knew what they wanted to do, and we let them go off and do it. That was part of the gamble."

Another part of the gamble is scheduling Wild Palms to air in the middle of the high-pressure May sweeps. The network is hoping that the series, like Twin Peaks, will be unusual enough to attract an audience that rarely watches network TV, but not too weird to turn off the Home Improvement crowd. Whatever happens, ABC programmers claim they have learned one lesson from their last experiment in prime-time surrealism: unlike Twin Peaks, Wild Palms will not drag on indefinitely. The mini-series has a fixed ending (unfortunately, a rather lame one), and there are no plans to extend it.

At least not yet. Stone says Wild Palms could "absolutely" work as a series. And if America next week is buzzing about rhinos, Church Windows and New Realism, it will be hard for ABC to avoid bringing Wild Palms back in some form. That, in the world of network TV, is known as the Old Realism.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York