L _ 6 The List 5—I8 November 1993
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They said the revolution wouldn't be televised. They were ii'mng.’ — Tony K reutzer, Wild Palms.
he sun blazes down on the freshly- mown lawns of Beverly Hills. picking out the whitewashed picket fences as it has throughout American popular culture. from Norman Rockwell through Happy Days to LA Story. Patent attorney Harry Wyckoff. stiff- necked in a high Dickensian collar and cravat, cruises slowly down the street in a blood-red Mustang convertible, radio tuned to a classic 605 soul station. Elsewhere in the Los Angeles of 2007, a nightclub singer is crooning his way through a lounge bar arrangement of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, while on the streets straggly-haired hippies in paisley frocks are handing out leaflets denouncing the ‘New Realists’. For a drama set in the future, Wild Palms does a hell of a lot of flirting with the past
Over the next month or so, take my word for it, you are going to find it difficult to escape Wild Palms. Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner’s four and a half hours of politics. Buddhism. Virtual Reality and televisual scaremongering is the
Television that is more real than life. That’s the vision ofWild Palms baddie Tony Kreutzer. Tom Lappin zaps a couple of weeks into the future to preview BBC2’s let century ‘cybersoap’, and discovers a work of
accidental brilliance.
and has already been acclaimed as ‘the
hottest property to hit BBC2 since Twin Pea/<ch