Meanwhile, all this is taking place in an environment, per Davis, that historically has been “the stage for a strange and steady parade of utopian sect, bohemian mystics, cult leaders, psychospiritual healers, holy poets, sex magicians, fringe Christians, and psychedelic warriors.” Weird shit is part of the status quo, and New Age concepts that would make you a complete fruitcake in East Coast intellectual circles are dinner-party conversation in Los Angeles no different from recommendations for a good dog walker. It stands to reason that such a strange and seemingly self-contradictory beast would search for guidance from less conventional avenues. And add to that the managerial skills to simultaneously oversee hundreds of people within multiple different departments spanning prep, production, and post-, while shooting several times the material of a feature film at several times the pace. Add to that the political intelligence to navigate the Byzantine and inscrutable vagaries of the entertainment industry (I once spoke with a ranking member of the Intelligence Community who expressed polite bafflement trying to understand Hollywood).
Being a “creative writer” in and of itself is deeply suspicious, requiring the unlikely union of left-brain linear reasoning and right-brain intuition and imagination, not to mention an unseemly desire for solitude. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors.” Fair enough. As quoted in Brett Martin’s book on the subject, Difficult Men: “This isn’t like publishing some lunatic’s novel or letting him direct a movie. In my view, if Esalen is the embodiment of California consciousness, then the connection can be attributed to the simple fact that both Weiner and Pizzolatto share one of the most paradoxical jobs imaginable: showrunner. But the first real example of television being used as a medium for radical experimentation in form and aesthetics came ten years before that in Twin Peaks, the vision of David Lynch, one of the more famed exponents of California consciousness (and who, appropriately, is gearing up for a return).
FINALE 26 BIG SUR SERIES
So, what is it about Esalen that could be so essential to stories so divergent that it would figure so prominently in both? I would submit that both series have had in their DNA what writer Erik Davis refers to as “California consciousness,” which he defines as the “imaginative, experimental, and often hedonistic quest for human transformation by any means necessary.” Further, I would say this spiritual ethos is in fact inseparable from the origins of prestige television: Mystical overtones only become more prominent over the course of The Sopranos, which was for Nic Pizzolatto an influence and for Matthew Weiner a proving ground. In fact, so egregious is the similarity that one of the establishing shots of the Panticapaeum Institute in True Detective includes a hillside meditation that would almost certainly have to be a call-and-response to the Mad Men finale if the premiere of the former series had not been shot prior to the finale of the latter. (Not a slight: The same can be said for some terrific movies.) And yet, both the series finale of Mad Men and the season premiere of True Detective (which is the opening chapter of a new discrete narrative) prominently feature a coastal California holistic retreat center that is a thinly veiled stand-in for the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. On the surface, one could hardly ask for two shows with less in common in both subject and style: One is an elliptical, 92-episode meditation on the possibility of personal transformation within the American identity, the other an esoteric procedural that, beneath its generous budget and often-grade-A execution, is really pornography with a thesaurus. Per one of the more quoted tautologies of recent memory: “Time is a flat circle.” In television terms, this means that nothing will be scrutinized for demiurgic intent more than premieres and finales.
Endings and beginnings are very similar, if even separable.
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