Wild Palms is a five-hour miniseries which was produced by Greengrass Productions and first aired in May 1993 on the ABC network in the United States. The sci-fi drama, announced as an "event series",
- 1993-05-17: "The Floating World" (title not used in ABC airing) (approx. 48 minutes; 95 minutes in original airing) - directed by Keith Gordon
- 1993-05-17: "Rising Sons" (approx. 49 minutes; 95 minutes in original airing) - directed by Kathryn Bigelow
- 1993-05-19: "Hello, I Must Be Going" (approx. 48 minutes) - directed by Phil Joanou
Cast
- James Belushi as Harry Wyckoff, a Beverly Hills based patent attorney and later, CEO of the Wild Palms group.
- Dana Delany as Grace Wyckoff, his wife, suburban housewife and owner of Hiroshima, a retro fashion boutique.
- Ben Savage as Coty Wyckoff, their 11-year-old son, a child actor on the verge of a breakthrough to stardom.
- Robert Loggia as Senator Anton "Tony" Kreutzer, former sci-fi author, founder of the Wild Palms group and the Synthiotics cult.
- Angie Dickinson as Josie Ito, Grace's mother, a celebrated interior decorator with numerous connections and secrets.
- David Warner as Eli Levitt, Grace's father, former history professor imprisoned for terrorism. Founder of the Friends.
- Kim Cattrall as Paige Katz, PR director of the Wild Palms group, Harry's former love and Kreutzer's fiancée.
- Ernie Hudson as Tommy Laszlo, Harry Wyckoff's childhood friend, an eccentric entrepreneur.
- Nick Mancuso as Tully Woiwode, infamous and popular painter and toast-of-the-town, Tommy's secret lover.
- Bebe Neuwirth as Tabba Schwartzkopf, Academy Award-winning actress who befriends Grace, and is part of the Wild Palms group.
- Aaron Michael Metchik as Peter, a street urchin with mysterious connections to Harry, Grace and the Fathers.
- Brad Dourif as Chickie Levitt, Eli Levitt's son from another relationship. Virtual reality boy genius and technology wizard.
- Charles Hallahan as Gavin Whitehope, Harry's associate at the Wild Palms group. Reformed alcoholic and Synthiotics devotee.
- Robert Morse as Chap Starfall, erstwhile pop star reduced to lounge singer status until the Wild Palms group revives him.
- Beata Pozniak as Tambor, the Wyckoffs' dutiful au-pair.
- Bob Gunton as Dr. Tobias Schenkl, Harry's psychiatrist.
- Rondi Reed as Eileen Whitehope, Gavin's wife, a "Lady-who-lunches" who also alerts Grace to a danger in her own home.
- Charles Rocket as Stitch Walken, a stand-up comedian who is also a surreptitious agent of the Friends.
- Eugene Lee as Lt. Bob Grindrod, a corrupt LAPD detective under contract to the Wild Palms group.
- François Chau as Hiro, Grace's childhood sweetheart from her years spent in Japan, and an enemy of Kreutzer.
- Monica Mikala as Deirdre Wyckoff, Harry and Grace's silent four-year-old daughter, who gets kidnapped and used as a pawn later on.
Cameos
- Cyberpunk author William Gibson has a cameo appearance as himself. When the author is introduced as the man who invented the term Cyberspace, he remarks, "and they won't let me forget it".
- Wild Palms producer and film director Oliver Stone also has a cameo. In a fictitious interview he appears as himself and comments on the release of files pertinent to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, revealing that the theories in his film JFK were right.
- Wild Palms director Kathryn Bigelow has an uncredited cameo. She plays the character Maisy Woiwode.
Production
Oliver Stone had originally planned to film Bruce Wagner's novel Force Majeure, but then decided to film Wagner's comic strip Wild Palms, published in Details magazine, instead: "It was so syncretic. It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn't your wife, maybe your kids aren't your kids. It really appealed to me." Wagner referred to his creation as "a sort of surreal diary […] a tone poem", set in an "Orwellian Los Angeles". ABC agreed to finance the project on a budget of $11 million, but, remembering the eventual decline of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, insisted that the series had "a complete story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end". Filming began in July 1992.
Actor James Belushi compared the series (among others) to the British TV serial The Prisoner, and stated: "It's very tough, very challenging—a lot of viewers probably won't dig it." Dana Delany suggested that viewers should "let it wash over you, enjoy each scene, and by the end it'll make sense". Robert Loggia compared it to the Elizabethan play The Duchess of Malfi and the ancient Greek tragedy Medea. ABC, bound to make sure that viewers wouldn't lose attention, had a supplemental book, The Wild Palms Reader, published and offered a telephone hotline with the show's initial run.
William Gibson later stated that "while the mini-series fell drastically short of the serial, it did produce one admirably peculiar literary artifact, The Wild Palms Reader" (to which he contributed). Both Stone and Gibson called Wagner the creative force behind the series. The Los Angeles Times reported that although Stone was "touted heavily in the promotion for the miniseries as executive producer," he "served primarily as a script and casting consultant to Wagner once the project earned ABC's go-ahead."
Production design
The United States of the year 2007 as depicted in the series shows a strong influence of Japanese culture, such as in dress and interior and exterior design. Holograms of Miss Alabama and girl group The Supremes even bear Japanese facial features.
Other interior details show the influence of Scottish designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928). Deliberately anachronistic elements include 1960s cars (like Studebaker police vehicles) and Edwardian fashion. Cerruti 1881 provided costumes.
The futuristic Los Angeles of the series is two environments, the "Wilderzone" inhabited by the city's poor and the world of its rich. Some of the "Wilderzone" scenes were shot in burned-out stores destroyed during the 1992 riots. Camera filters were also used to distinguish the two worlds: brown to make the destitute areas look smoggy, blue to make the elite characters seem to be breathing cleaner air.
By contrast, Howard Rosenberg in The Los Angeles Times panned the show severely, calling it "this punishing six hours of gibberish... this cosmically pretentious, self-important, imitative goulash about technology incestuously screwing over the very humanity that created it... this bizarre, symbol-slogged piffle". He acknowledged "surface similarities" to Twin Peaks, but felt that a more valid comparison was to Lynch's disastrous Dune: "Although Frost and Lynch employed a myriad of confusing artistic and literary feints to tease and have fun with "Twin Peaks" viewers, even at its most obtuse that series dribbled out a seductive whodunit... that kept you hooked. "Wild Palms" offers nothing comparable to compensate for its suspenseless, unfathomably fragmented, laboriously eked-out plot."
Mary Harron of the British Independent suggested that viewers "forget about the message, and about what the rhino means. Wild Palms should be watched like opera; for its gorgeous images, its emotional set-pieces and its high style." while David Flusfeder called it a "Gripping futuristic soap".
The Daily Telegraph was positive about Belushi's work in the lead role, and the technical aspects, but disliked the show's fundamental ethos: "By linking the television moguls of the future with a conspiracy to kidnap children, and with random and brutal arrests on the streets, the scenario spiralled out of control into one of those Big Brother fantasies in which all power is centralised and all evil emanates from a single source. There's nothing wrong with Big Brother fantasies per se, but they do need to be developed with a certain intellectual rigour if they are to carry conviction. All we got here was paranoia."
Readers of the British trade weekly Broadcast were even more negative, calling it one of the worst television shows ever exported by the U.S. to the U.K. It placed fourth on their list, exceeded only by Baywatch, The Anna Nicole Show and The Dukes of Hazzard. TV Guide also blasted it, offering the interpretation that Oliver Stone was condemning television while covertly lauding cinematic films.
Ratings/Share
Night 1: #24, 12.3/20<br />
Night 2: #45, 9.7/15<br />
Night 3: #32, 11.0/19<br />
Night 4: #42, 9.9/17<br />
Home media
- Wild Palms was released on VHS cassette in the UK by BBC in 1993, where it aired between November 15 and December 7 the same year. The series was released on VHS on February 8, 2000 on two separate VHS tapes.
- It was released as a Region 4 DVD in Australia in 2004, a Region 1 DVD in the U.S. on October 4, 2005 by MGM Home Entertainment, and a Region 2 DVD in the UK in 2008.
- It was re-released as a two-disc DVD special edition and on blu-ray for the first time by Kino International on June 30, 2020.