Wild Palms


This is one of my all-time guilty pleasures. Emphasis on guilty. There's really no justifying it: the wooden acting, the overblown melodrama, the substitution of vague double-entendre innuendo for narrative substance.

I love every minute of it. It came out 15 years ago when I was starting my career in media tech and I guess the film noir "blood on CD" quality appealed to my romantic self-image.

Set 15 years in "the future" (2007), the plot is, well it doesn't matter what the plot is. Harry Wyckoff is an attorney who gets embroiled in a mind control conspiracy involving a his old girlfriend, a PT Barnum-like senator and a band of misfit rebels called "the friends."

The series envisions a future where government officials use artificial depressions, planned terrorist attacks, secret detentions, high-precision media-message control and new-age mystical tech fetishism to subjugate the willing population under an oppresssive framework of hedonism, vanity and narcissistic self-involvement until resistance becomes impossible to conceptualize.

Whew. I'm glad THAT didn't really happen. Now, where did I put my sex goggles?