TELEVISION : It Melts in Your Mind : With the exotically demented ‘Wild Palms,’ the network that brought you ‘Twin Peaks’ again hopes to turn TV on its side

Like an old lover he can’t get out from under his skin, “Twin Peaks” still haunts Robert Iger.

The president of the ABC Television Network Group remembers David Lynch’s twisted series--which rolled onto the television stage in 1990 like a rare jewel and then, in less than a year, disintegrated into a pile of dust--as “one of my most exhilarating experiences as a network programmer, but also one of the most frustrating.”

“Looking back on ‘Twin Peaks,’ if it had been given the job of entertaining the public over six or seven hours instead of over multiple seasons, it might have gone down in history as one of the most successful television shows ever,” Iger said. “But, because it was envisioned as a series, it had to tell a story over a long period of time, and, while they created a place and characters that the audience desperately wanted to see, the story after a while just wasn’t rich and compelling enough.

“So we thought, ‘What about coming up with a story that was similarly new and provocative but didn’t have to be on that long?’ Because we all felt that there is a need from time to time to take television and turn it on its side so that it looks taller.” And so was born “Wild Palms”--yet another exotically demented series, described by one of its stars as “ ‘Dynasty’ on peyote.” Iger hopes it will provide viewers with a “Twin Peaks” kind of fix without delivering any long-term side effects for the network, simply because it is designed to run only six hours.

Set in the year 2007, “Wild Palms”--which begins next Sunday with a two-hour installment and continues with two more hours Monday and then one-hour installments on Tuesday and Wednesday--starts with a rhinoceros in an empty Beverly Hills swimming pool and ends with a schmaltzy shot of a misbegotten family staring off into the sunset on a Santa Monica beach.

In between, all hell breaks loose: attempted suicide, a young boy gleefully carving up one of his full-grown enemies with butcher knives, a baby-stealing ring, a woman viciously blinding a renowned painter with her bare hands--and that’s just the normal TV stuff. The weird part is--well, probably not that weird to cyber-punk aficionados and devotees of sci-fi author William Gibson, but it’s going to be awfully strange to the millions who love “Roseanne.”

The convoluted plot revolves around an upwardly mobile lawyer, Harry Wycoff (James Belushi), who accepts a job at a TV network that is developing a revolutionary holographic technology. The network’s visionary owner, a U.S. senator and presidential candidate (Robert Loggia), is also the head of a bizarre cult. As Wycoff probes deeper and violence escalates, he must decide whether to enjoy the riches and power of his new position or join the fight against mind control.

“I like to describe it as a techno-shamanistic melodrama,” said Bruce Wagner, the creator, writer and producer of the miniseries. “It’s obviously not your usual reality-based movie-of-the-week or miniseries. It’s not Alex Haley’s ‘Queen.’ It’s not even Alex Haley’s Bastard Prince. But I feel there is enough melodrama in it to satisfy the viewer that doesn’t care to be excessively challenged, and for those that do like a challenge, I think there’s more than enough to grab onto.”

“Wild Palms” came from a simple image Wagner had concocted of well-dressed men violently yanking other stylish people out of trendy stores on Melrose Avenue. He thought he’d eventually use it to make some kind of futuristic feature film about fascism. Instead, Details magazine asked him three years ago to do a cartoon strip, and he turned that image into “Wild Palms.” Although it contains most of the same major characters, the cartoon is even more surreal, non-linear and bad-dream-like than the miniseries.

Wagner, who wrote the screenplay for “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills” and co-wrote “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” had a deal with Oliver Stone to turn his violent, bitter and somewhat pornographic series of stories about Hollywood, “Force Majeure,” into a feature film. But Stone was--and still is--having difficulty securing financing for that provocative story, and so Wagner pitched him an idea based on the cartoon. At about the same time, ABC, looking for a way to lure noted filmmakers to television--even if only on a limited basis--approached Stone.

“I told them, ‘Let me take a shot at something wild and original and fresh,’ and they gave us the opening and they haven’t reneged on their promise,” said Stone, who, although touted heavily in the promotion for the miniseries as executive producer, served primarily as a script and casting consultant to Wagner once the project earned ABC’s go-ahead.

“The comic strip,” Stone said, “was nutty and very surreal and difficult to understand, and I don’t think this (TV adaptation) would ever have happened even a few years ago. Because the problem with television is that it’s always looking for advertisers, always trying to appeal to something, and (creativity) doesn’t work that way. The good stuff always comes because it is what it is and people respond to it.

“But the network was willing to give us a shot with a tremendous amount of freedom, and I think we do owe some of that to the success of ‘Twin Peaks.’ But at the same time, this is not just a weird murder mystery like ‘Twin Peaks.’ It has a social theme about where the power in the country lies, who is seeking it, why television is important, the power of the media to make people forget, the power of television to control the future, the concept of being hooked on television, where Los Angeles is going after the riot. A lot is being said here about the future.”

In “Wild Palms,” which also stars Angie Dickinson, Dana Delany, Kim Cattrall, Ernie Hudson, Nick Mancuso and Brad Dourif, Los Angeles looks similar to the city of today: There are no futuristic flying cars or overcrowded, neon, Third World-styled ghettos a la “Blade Runner.” But some things have changed:

* Men in designer suits burst into a trendy restaurant to rough up and then kidnap another well-dressed man while other patrons simply go on munching their steak tartare.

* Children attend the Daryl F. Gates Elementary School.

* Oliver Stone appears on what looks like “The Tonight Show” to brag that the conspiracy theory he posited in “JFK” turned out to be right on the money.

* A disabled computer genius in Malibu dons a pair of sunglasses and, via the magic of virtual reality, is able to dance in a spectacular 18th-Century Viennese ballroom with a fat Japanese man in Tokyo, who appears not as himself but as a gorgeous ballerina.

* Holograms are everywhere. When someone watches TV, the images that once were contained within the box actually enter their living room. With the help of a drug called Mimizine, a human can interact with--even have sex with--a hologram, and the brain will believe that it is the real thing.

* In the oddest plot twist, the cult leader attempts to achieve a kind of Christlike immortality by having a computer chip implanted in his brain. The chip is supposed to transform him into some kind of hologram, permitting him to live forever in command of his minions and, presumably, allowing him to go to the Easter Island nirvana where holograms play when humans turn off the machine.

Or something like that.

It was “the surreal elements” that appealed to Keith Gordon, who directed the feature film “A Midnight Clear” and two of “Wild Palms’ ” six hours.

“It’s creepy and funny and scary and campy,” he explained, “and there are so many ideas about media and losing your innocence and not wanting to face reality and how we let television completely redefine the world for us without questioning it. It’s in the tradition of all the great cautionary tales, and it’s kind of true now with the entire country coming home and sitting in front of the box. And it’s a wonderful satire of where the country is going. I read articles about the future, and I say, ‘That’s “Wild Palms.” ’ I can see people sitting in front of their virtual-reality games, and the question is: At what point do you lose touch with actual reality?”

But Wagner--who said that his TV viewing these days is limited mostly to an addiction to C-SPAN and that his epitaph is likely to be the lament, “He didn’t watch enough”--is loathe to make any big pronouncements about the dangerous power of television.

Sure, the mass addiction to images he chronicles suggests a sickness as debilitating as any drug addiction. And sure, Wagner said, “there is this idea that people can be quieted and have their development arrested, especially those living in poverty and squalor; that they can work during the day as a drone somewhere and then at night be kept off the street unquestioning and placid by images that are far more compelling than their reality.”

As he sees it, however, the focus of the miniseries is on the characters and the strange saga of power, intrigue and good versus evil. The cyberpunk aspects and the references to Robert Longo, Julian Schnabal, Aristophanes and Yeats, he said, were often merely a way to keep himself involved. The main point, he said, is to show the awakening of one man, Harry Wycoff--who wants nothing more in life than a beautiful wife and a house on the beach but finds that he must fight for justice and his family.

Not that the miniseries is that simple. “Dynasty” had cliffhangers; “Wild Palms” might leave some viewers wanting to hang themselves. Even in a rave recommendation, Entertainment Weekly wrote: “The labyrinthine interconnections and opaque plot are exasperating at first, but stay with it. You can’t miss an episode; you can’t even go to the bathroom.”

“I heard that a lot of people are not going to get it, that it will be very controversial,” said Cattrall, who plays the femme fatale used to lure Wycoff into the wicked world of the “Wild Palms” cult. “Most people get scared or angry at what they don’t understand. But I think that this has both those serious social comments as well as this wonderful Greek tragedy melodrama that makes it something not only very brave, but very smart and very watchable.”

Perhaps one of the miniseries’ greatest strengths is its visual appeal. To create the year 2007, the design team avoided most futuristic devices, aside from the hologram technology. Instead they stole fashion from the past--the men wear Edwardian long suits and the women dresses from the 1940s. Cars were either vintage 1960s Corvette convertibles or jet black Range Rovers or Jeeps. Music such as the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” and the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” comes from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Everything is “tweaked” so that it doesn’t quite look like 1993, Wagner said, but the designers avoided getting too futuristic because they wanted people to see that the story related to today. “The more futuristic weirdness you lay on, the easier it is for the audience to dismiss it as just some future deal,” said director Gordon. (“Wild Palms’ ” other directors are Peter Hewitt, Kathryn Bigelow and Phil Joanou.)

The future of L.A. is depicted as a tale of two cities--one rich and gleaming, one destitute and filthy. Scenes of what’s called “the Wilderzone” were shot in burned-out stores created by last year’s civil disturbances. Camera filters were used to make the air look brown and smoggy in the Wilderzone, while blue filters were used to suggest that the rich had found a way to make the air in their neighborhoods pure.

But will all this stylish intrigue and Orwellian urgency grab a TV audience weaned on real-life crime dramas and happily resolved family sitcoms?

“I think that our show is very seductive,” said Wagner, who is planning on creating another limited series for ABC, with Francis Ford Coppola as executive producer. “And I like to think that there’s a vast audience out there, underrated and untapped, that is hungering for something different. That sounds like a bad cliche, but I hope so. If they put a fourth Amy Fisher movie against us and it won out, then you will know the answer, but it would be sad.”

Belushi believes that even through all the weirdness and mayhem, the audience will ultimately find a familiar and comforting ring to “Wild Palms.”

“I was in tears watching the end,” he said. “I thought it was so moving, so affirming and uplifting. There is great hope in it. That last image of the four of us, the weirdest little family. They all got screwed over so bad, but you have this moment that says it doesn’t matter how dysfunctional your past is because you can still make a family.”

Even if audiences flock to “Wild Palms,” however, this kind of risky programming on network television is likely to remain limited.

ABC’s Iger conceded that the network’s success depends primarily on its regular weekly series. And network programmers have learned in the last few years that “the tried-and-true traditional drama series are more likely to work than the real groundbreaking shows that are relatively inaccessible to many on a weekly basis.

“But such efforts tend to have a rejuvenating effect on the entire industry,” Iger added. “We have to dare to go places programmers and viewers have not gone. It’s essential. There is a real need in our business for that because no one has all the answers. We don’t know what will work and what won’t work, and so we have to put things on that look different just to see.”