TV Reviews : Lynch Goes Bananas ‘On the Air’

Between “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” and “Wild at Heart,” director David Lynch has lately been accused of slowly turning into a one-note stylist, the man obsessed with finding the horror in queasy Americana at any and all costs. While we await the “Twin Peaks” movie for further squalid Northwestern developments, Lynch decidedly branches out with his new ABC series, “On the Air,” into . . . madcap, slapstick farce.

Instead of who killed Laura Palmer , this goofball half-hour is a little closer to who put that banana peel under her foot?

The odd-tempoed humor of the series (premiering tonight at 9:30 on Channel 7) won’t come as any great surprise to those who stuck around for the latter episodes of “Twin Peaks.” Lynch--who directed this first episode of “On the Air” and co-wrote it with sometimes partner Mark Frost--clearly has a gift for staging bizarre comedy, though it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s able to sustain it through an entire show.

The setting is a 1957 network studio where the world’s worst variety show (“The Lester Guy Show”) is going out over live television. Everything that can go wrong will, but somehow, in this hardly credible alternate universe, the show is a smash anyway; if a studio camera gets upended and lands on its side, the narcotized home viewers are seen happily turning their heads sideways.

For someone with such an avant-garde rep, Lynch offers up too much standard-brand character shtick here for comfort, at least in the dialogue-heavy first half. Ian Buchanan is the series’ unctuous, supercilious star; Miguel Ferrer is the tough-talking, budget-minded producer. Classic character actor Tracey Walter is the sorta-blind board man, Marla Jeanette Rubinoff plays the dimmest of blond bulbs, and David L. Lander (remember Squiggy?) is the mega-accented hack director straight from “the old country.” As these types perpetuate the ongoing comedy of errors, the bumbling amateurishness of the show-within-a-show would seem more appropriate within an early-talkie setting.

Once the talk stops and the episode becomes a series of physical sight gags, “On the Air” suddenly takes off and really does begin to look like a silent comedy directed by a modern absurdist painter--with actors and small animals flung through prop windows, oddly framed angles of men’s suspenders caught in dresser drawers, the star dropped headfirst into a dog food bowl.

Though “On the Air” appears destined--between its unfortunate time slot and Lynch’s own odd sense of comedic timing--to be just a footnote in both his career and TV history, it’s one to tape for posterity, before it becomes “Off the Air.”