Mark Frost makes crowded television stories worth following by taking their characters seriously. His work with David Lynch earns our warm recommendation, with some patience required; Fantastic Four is a reminder that his dialogue can also be disappointingly ordinary.
Fi1m perspective
In Twin Peaks (1990), jealousy can be funny without ceasing to hurt. David Lynch and Mark Frost fill their rural soap with people whose strange behaviour makes it harder to dismiss their familiar wants. We were moved more than we expected by the care it takes with people it also invites us to laugh at. The writing gives us reasons to stay beyond waiting for answers.
The crowded police drama Hill Street Blues (1981) was an important preparation, with Frost on its writing staff from 1982 to 1985. We recommend it for its compassion as much as its police work, while recognising that some of the characterisation has dated. Its overlapping stories helped shape his approach to ensemble writing. That is a useful connection to remember when considering Twin Peaks. Frost was its first-season showrunner, and wrote and directed that season's finale.
The partnership with Lynch drew on Frost's work with structure, dialogue and character. Those contributions help explain why Twin Peaks can move between soap, mystery and the supernatural without losing our interest in the people. The discipline is not infallible: we would willingly shorten the stretches where the programme's patience becomes drift.
Those strengths are much less apparent in Fantastic Four (2005). Frost and Michael France's screenplay leaves too many exchanges at the first obvious response. Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis provide welcome warmth, but the relationships need surprises that the writing rarely supplies. Reed Richards and Sue Storm are particularly poorly served, with too little in their exchanges to make either character memorable. We would not recommend it simply because Frost's name is on the screenplay.
Writing and directing Storyville (1992), then turning increasingly towards books from the mid-1990s, widened his work beyond ensemble television. The collaboration with Lynch continued: they co-wrote all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). For a first encounter, choose the original Twin Peaks. It rewards patience, though there is no shame in wishing they had occasionally got on with it.
Biography
Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, television producer and director. He is best known as the co-creator, with David Lynch, of the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991, 2017), on which he also served as writer, director, teleplay writer and story contributor. He previously worked as a writer and executive story editor on the police drama Hill Street Blues (1982–1985) and wrote episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (1974).
Frost was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Carnegie Mellon University. He began collaborating with Lynch in the mid-1980s. Their partnership produced the series Twin Peaks and the feature film Storyville (1992), which Frost co-wrote and directed. He later wrote the screenplays for Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and adapted his own non-fiction book as the film The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005). Frost has also published several novels, some under the pen name Eric Bowman.
