Talking about TV

It's a good season for trippy TV, Legion started us off really well, ended a bit disappointingly but was a good experience for all that, and now of course we have American Gods and Twin Peaks, shows which seem to be mentioned together in every review or thinkpiece about one or the other so far this year.

I like them both very much, but honestly outside of weird visuals the shows are basically completely different. American Gods very definitely has a story it wants to tell, and lessons it wants us to take from it, and it doesn't have room for a different interpretation really, there is one thing going on and while it doesn't reveal everything at once, it really isn't able to be read in another way. Twin Peaks also has a story to tell, but isn't interested in telling us what to learn from it, it is laying out the story for us all to see and then just letting us decide what it is we just watched.
American Gods holds your hand, Twin Peaks let's you learn for yourself.

That isn't a value judgement mind you, Gods is probably a better show speaking conventionally, one that you have more fun watching and that has an immediate emotional impact too, it's also prettier, with attractive people and tight editing. Twin Peaks is... not that, but it isn't trying to be, in a way American Gods is a fantasy while Peaks is, I dunno, and autobiography? Maybe a textbook, or a series of paragraphs taken without context from biographies, textbooks, and newspaper articles then strung together without regard for continuity or sense.

I realize that is a strange thing to say, of course American Gods is a fantasy, I mean, read the title. But what I mean by that is that it doesn't feel real either, this isn't a bad thing mind you, just a thing, but the characters are pretty, they always say the right thing and say it on time, they show up where they need to be and do what they need to do, they aren't interrupted by random events or happenstance. It feels like a story.
Or mythology.

Twin Peaks on the other hand is more like real life than a show that has a dude with the psychic power of predicting which slot machine will pay out has a right to be. It's messy and random, we know almost as little of how things fit together as the characters themselves, it's ugly, there isn't much glamor, no beautiful people doing things just so, there is empty space, characters say the wrong thing, the weird thing, or nothing. They interrupt and ignore what other people are saying not because they are bad people, but because they are people and aren't listening, not really. We can take from it what we want because it really isn't trying to give us anything.

It isn't fun, not in the sense that American Gods is, but it is compelling, it's voyeuristic almost in that we feel like we are watching real people do things, now those things don't make sense basically at all, but that doesn't mean we stop watching.

Like I said, none of this is a value judgement, they are both extremely entertaining, and while I know it seems like I am critiquing American Gods for being more conventional that really isn't the truth. Like I said, it knows what it wants to be and is working on being that, in this case it wants to tell it's story in a way that is very similar to how old tales were told of gods and monsters once upon a time. There is a sense of inevitability to what happens. The hero meets a guide, is given, or takes, gifts that will help his journey, he meets enemies, allies, or neutral parties and battles, ignores, or converts them, performs actions based on his sense of right and wrong and those things usually tend to be what has to happen. I love that, it feels... meaningful, I finish an episode and it has weight to it.

Twin Peaks doesn't even have a hero at the moment, it just has people struggling to make any kind of sense of the world they live in. I love that, I love that every piece of writing I have seen about it so far has a different explanation for what is going on, I love that none of them have MY explanation for what is going on, and I love that probably none of those explanations are right, and even if they are we may never find out unless Lynch or someone just straight up tells us in an interview or something.

The point is, they aren't the same, which is great because I don't think we can handle two Twin Peaks in the world, although another American Gods would be alright.