Check Book: Lynch Dossier Deluxe

Plus, a survey of the most bonkers moments in network TV history

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Dec 09, 2024

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

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THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Bonjour, mes blankies. I am writing this week’s dispatch from Paris, ancestral homeland of Griffin Claude Beresford Dauphin Newman and location of thee original David Lynch-designed Club Silencio. I don’t believe I’ll be making it there this trip (parce que je suis old et boring), but will snap a photo of the outside if I walk past it.

I am, however, planning on visiting the Cinémathèque Française, and I did discover that the hotel I’m currently staying in was the location of the first public screening of the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory. I need to tell JD.

ANYWAY - Today’s BPR is inspired by my experience listening to this week’s mainfeed episode:

Outside of multiple Twin Peaks plotlines and Charlie Sheen being exploded by a train and then coming back as a ghost but in the form of Kathy Bates in Two and a Half Men, what are some of the strangest moments in Network TV history?

The finale of Dinosaurs (1994)
- To be honest, it’s kind of a tossup between this episode and the episode where a female brontosaurus named Monica gets sexually harassed at work - but, the sheer bleakness of the Dinosaurs’ ending tips the scales. Global warming is real, our planet will eventually be destroyed by our greed, and Baby Sinclair will freeze to death off camera because his father’s corporation sprayed the world with poison. Also, the reporter’s last name is Handupme. Because he’s a puppet.
The two-part episode where Haley Joel Osment has AIDS on Walker, Texas Ranger (1997)
- Immortalized by the Walker lever on Conan, we all know and love HJO’s delivery of “Walker told me I had AIDS.” But did you know there was so much more than that?!? You can’t get AIDS by being friends with someone.
The Halloween episode of Family Matters where Urkel and Carl Winslow get their souls devoured by evil ventriloquist dummies named Stevil and Carlsbad (1997)
- Stevil (the evil Steve Urkel puppet) was introduced in a 1996 Halloween episode of Family Matters, but things really go off the rails the following year in “Stevil II: This Time He’s Not Alone.” This time, Stevil is joined by Carlsbad (the evil Carl Winslow puppet) and they both go off to Vegas to start a variety show.
The fourth and final season of ‘Til Death (2010)
- This was a Griffin selection, and it’s a doozy. After getting inexplicably renewed for a fourth and final season, the Brad Garrett / Joely Fisher sitcom that no one liked and no one watched went fully meta, having one of the characters realize that he is in a sitcom. You can read our beloved Emily St. James on it here.
TGIF Time Warp (1997)
- Do you remember the week when Salem the cat hosted a multi-show “time travel” block of TV in which Sabrina, Boy Meets World, You Wish, and Teen Angel all aired episodes that took place in bizarro timelines? I shit you not, Boy Meets World did a Pearl Harbor episode.

SOME HONORABLE MENTIONS: The “time travel” arc on Felicity, Screech’s robot on Saved by the Bell, the lottery / “it was all a dream” season of Roseanne, the episode “Home” from The X-Files (just gross), the episode of The Cosby Show where men get pregnant, the musical episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and the entire nine episode run of The Jim Henson Hour in 1989.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

No dossier was made for this week’s episode, so instead we have some selected bonus cuts from the dossiers made for previous episodes in our Lynch series.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet marked the first collaboration between David Lynch and future Diane portrayer Laura Dern. Despite being a relative newcomer, Dern told AnOther in 2020 that she didn’t have to audition for the role of Sandy Williams. (In fact, Dern says, “He’s never auditioned me. Shit, if he does now, I may never work with him again.”) But when Dern first went to see Lynch, she naturally presumed that their meeting was an audition for the film. And, as she told W Magazine in 2017, when Lynch first walked into the room, Dern “was startled by every aspect of him.” But any tension was quickly—and oddly—cut: “He looked at me, and I was waiting for some magical words. He said, ‘I have to pee,’ and disappeared.” When Lynch returned, he and Dern discussed “life and high school and meditation,” and before she knew it, Dern was at Bob’s Big Boy eating “malts and french fries” with Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan, feeling that she had found her people: “A girl either thinks, These are bizarre men, or, I am in love with both these people and want to spend the rest of my life with them. Needless to say, I fell in love.” But the news of her (audition-free) casting was of some surprise to co-star Isabella Rossellini, who gave the following incredible quote to IndieWire in 2018: “Laura is such a good actress that when David called me and said, ‘I found Laura Dern,’ I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t imagine that character to be blind.’ When I met Laura for the first time…I would grab her hand and walk and at a certain point I would whisper to her, ‘There is a step.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I can see it…Why did you think I was blind?’ I told her because of [Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 film] ‘Mask’ and she said ‘But I’m an actress!’ I’m Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, I should know when an actress is pretending, but she’s so convincing!” Rossellini should win the Oscar this year—and every year—for this quote alone.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

In 1990, famed French businessman Francis Bouygues founded the short-lived but much-awarded production company CiBy 2000. In its initial eight years of existence, the company would be involved with the production/distribution of four Palme d’Or winners: Emir Kusturica’s Underground, Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, and previous BC miniseries subject Jane Campion’s The Piano. But one of Bouygues’s first moves as studio head was tracking down the winner of the 1990 Palme d’Or David Lynch, whose film Wild at Heart counted Bouygues as one of its biggest fans. On the order of Bouygues, Pierre Edelman—the French film-journalist-turned-blue-jean-magnate-turned-inmate-turned-film-producer—crashed a party held in celebration of Lynch’s Palme win, urging the director to take a meeting with Edelman’s financier. Lynch was interested—largely, of course, as a way to finally make his long-gestating but never-made passion project Ronnie Rocket—and before the director flew back to France, Edelman had scheduled a lunch meeting with Lynch at Il Giardino in Los Angeles. In a very funny effort to impress the director, Edelman arranged for Clint Eastwood—the two had become fast friends while vacationing in Saint-Tropez a few months prior—to stop by the restaurant, playing it off as an incident and saying something along the lines of, “Oh my God, it’s Pierre!” But Lynch—who first got to know Edelman as a journalist covering the production of Dune—thought of the gambit as the most natural thing, writing in his autobiography, “I wasn’t surprised, because I knew Pierre by then and I figured Clint would show up.” In a career full of incredible ones, this is maybe my single favorite David Lynch image: out to lunch and totally serene despite the sudden appearance of an American screen icon. (Kristine McKenna & David Lynch, Room to Dream)

The Elephant Man

Let’s close this section with two very cool characterizations of the legendary British actor (and EGOT winner!) John Gielgud. In Lynch on Lynch, Chris Rodley’s book-length interview(s) with the director, David Lynch has nothing but praise for Gielgud, saying that the “guy was a saint to me” and that he “loved working with him.” Beyond his kind manners and his acting prowess, Gielgud left a lasting image on his director thanks to—what else—his preferred brand of cigarette. Per Lynch, Gielgud “smoked cigarettes that must have been made by a specialty shop — beautiful boxes, like hand-made for Sir John, you know.” But even more impressive to Lynch than the cigarettes themselves was the way Gielgud smoked them: “[T]he smoke would rush away from him. He never had one piece of lint on his clothing. Nothing was out of the place. He walked in a certain way, talked in a certain way. The cleanest man I’d ever seen! Ever! NO lint would come on him. It would come down and then suddenly it would arc off!” And if that wasn’t enough, Elephant Man producer Mel Brooks has this to add in his autobiography: “[A]lmost every day on set at the end of filming the great actor Ralph Richardson … would pull up on his big BMW motorcycle, blow his horn, and shout, ‘Hey, Johnny! I’m here!’ He was referring to Sir John Gielgud, his best pal. Sir John would wave goodbye to us and hop on the back of Ralph’s motorcycle and off they sped—two of the best actors that ever lived.” Sincerely… dudes rock. (Mel Brooks, All About Me!)

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

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Griffin Newman, Host: “Buc-ee’s, specifically the ‘Bohemian Garlic Beef Jerky’ and the ‘Beaver nuggets.’”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I also recommend Buc-ee’s”
*NOTE - Griffin did two GLTS shows in Texas this past week and AJ took him to Buc-ee’s and Whataburger to give him an authentic “consumeriffic” Texan experience.

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “Severance Season 2 premieres Jan 17 on Apple TV+. If you have not seen the first season, watch it. If you have seen the first season, rewatch it.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Shogun Showdown — If you are in the market for a rogue-like deck-builder that is not Balatro or Slay the Spire, you can’t do too much better than this one that’s currently eating up all of my free time. (Its runs are also perfectly timed for a morning exercise bike workout.)”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’m recommending the song “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” by Judee Sill, which is not strictly a Christmas song, but absolutely hits this time of year.”