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"Distant Signals" Tales From the Darkside S02E08 Retro-Review

I mentioned Darren McGavin and this episode in my recent Kolchak review. So to keep the good thing going, here's a review of another of McGavin's performances.

Which brings us to "Distant Signals" an episode of the 80s anthology series Tales From the Darkside. The show started in 1983 and was arguably the successor to Twilight Zone, until CBS did the TZ revival in 1985. It ran through 1989 with a hiatus or two, beating out Tales by a year even though Tales ran one more season. Tales ran in syndication through all four years, and was typically the kind of show you'd catch on a late-night channel, back when syndicated non-talk shows were still big.

Tales
had the kind of writers Rod Serling could only dream of. Stephem King and Harlan Ellison had stories adapted for Tales and the 80s TZ shows, and Clive Barker adapted one of his short stories for Tales as well.

If Tales had any faults, there were two. A descent into comedy on occasion which was about as funny as Serling's stuff (not very), and a low budget. Unlike TZ, Tales did a lot of horror, with vampires and mummies and werewolves. But not always, which brings us to one of my favorite episodes, "Distant Signals".

"Signals" is basically a fan boy's dream. A mysterious man (Lenny Van Dohlen, an 80s actor probably best known for Twin Peaks) shows up at an agent's office and offers him bars of gold to set up a meeting with a famous Hollywood director who's clearly a knockoff of Steven Spielberg. Our mystery man, Mr. Smith, wants the director to finish up a cancelled series from the 60s he created, Max Paradise, about an amnesiac wanderer turned hard-boiled detective. He claims there's a foreign audience for the revival and won't take 'no' for an answer.

Lenny Van Dohlen, Tales From the Darkside S02E08

As they say, money walks, nobody talks. However, Smith wants the original actor, Van Conway, to play the same role. After his career went downhill when the show was cancelled 20 years ago, Van is now a drunk who works as a bartender. The ex-actor has no interest in recreating the role, but again, Smith won't take 'no' for an answer.

Van is played by Darren McGavin, a genre favorite, and is the kind of actor who should have been on TZ. By which I mean he's a character actor who seemed like the kind of guy Serling and the Stalmaster-Lister casting company seemed to be fond of in the 60s. Old school, classically trained. You could see him doing the kind of roles Jack Klugman and Jack Warden ended up with. Maybe McGavin never linked up with Stalmaster-Lister, and they never added him to their inventory of available actors.

McGavin had played two hard-boiled detectives in the past—Mike Hammer and David Ross--so Max Paradise is no great stretch for him. But "Signals" isn't about the show-within-a-show. What McGavin does here with Van, is show the downside of an actor with a famous onscreen character: typecast and trapped when the show ends. McGavin is as good here as he is in everything else. Van loses his nerve after he goes cold turkey, Mr. Smith steps in with some special 'vitamins', and Van is soon being filmed in black and white, which brings out "his haunted look." Van rises to the challenge, they wrap up the series, Mr. Smith is extremely pleased and assures them his backers are as well, and he departs.

If the ending is flawed, it's because Van somehow knows what is going on and explains everything to the director. Mr. Smith comes from a wandering planet 20 light years away. The alien inhabitants went gaga over the character of Max Paradise, a fellow wanderer. When the "distant signals" of Max Paradise stopped coming before the end, they sent Smith to Earth to get the series finished so they could learn the ending.

Basically "Distant Signals" taps into the fantasy of bringing back a cancelled show. It's not quite as big a fantasy as it was in the 80s, now that we've had shows like Doctor Who and Veronica Mars make their return. And even Star Trek, sort of. But it takes a different look at the idea of bringing back a show: for closure rather than continuation. One imagines the aliens held a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to send Smith to bring Max Paradise back.

Darren McGavin, Tales From the Darkside S02E08

So "Signals" is about closure and redemption. Like some of the best Twilight Zones, Van Conway gets a second chance. Unlike the short story "Signals" is based on, Van makes a new life for himself. In the story, the alcoholism cure is temporary and the actor slides back into a stupor. The teleplay giving Van redemption improves on the original story character as well as Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith comes across in the episode as more than an obsessed fan boy like he is in the story. He gives Van redemption and he gives the Spielberg stand-in, Gil Hurn (David Margulies) a second chance as well: closure on the "poetry" he was trying to present back in the 60s.

Lenny Van Dohlen, despite only working as an actor since 1981, holds his own against McGavin. Which is a pretty impressive feat. McGavin is a strong actor. Not the way William Shatner or Adam West is, and by all accounts he was careful to make sure his co-stars got equal time. But Van Dohlen matches him despite being a much younger and less experienced actor.

Andrew Weiner, who penned the original story, is a relatively obscure Canadian SF writer. Ted Gershuny, who did the much-improved teleplay, had a very brief career in Hollywood writing thrillers. He married cult actress Mary Woronov (who appeared in a couple of his 70s movies), worked very briefly as a story editor on The Equalizer, and did a handful of other Tales and Monsters episodes. None of them are as good as "Signals."

Darren McGavin, David Margulies, Tales From the Darkside S02E08Tales' low budget doesn't hurt this episode, since there are no special effects. And they're filming a continuation of a low-budget TV show, deliberately taking pains to keep it low-budget.

Anyhoo, Chiller is still showing Tales in repeats, and the DVD set is out there. So if you can, check it out some time. "Signals" is one of the best of the Tales episodes.

Written by Gislef on Feb 15, 2019

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