I'm not so sure about that assessment of Twin Peaks. Look at the back half of season 2, where the "weird and wonderful characters" become the focus of the show. It's barely watchable.
When Lynch came back for the final episode of that season he refocused it on Laura Palmer and brought back characters that hadn't been seen for many episodes, like Laura's mum or Audrey's brother. They weren't much fun, one being wracked by grief and the other mentally disabled. But that's what Twin Peaks is really about and what gave it staying power.
Everyone (including Diane Keaton when she directed an episode) seemed to think it was this kooky place and the weirdness was the point. There's plenty of fun there, but Lynch really understood it: hence Season 3 which gives you all of half an episode of Fun Dale Cooper before pulling the rug out from under you and reminding you that a girl was murdered and we shouldn't move on from that.
I got the impression at the time that Lynch was figuring it out as he went along. Some days that worked; some days it really didn't but mostly carried through on the strength of its performances.
I admit I haven't seen it since the original airing. I would likely evaluate it differently now.
He absolutely was, quite famously. He'd be writing the episodes in the diner week-to-week.
For me it's the pattern for a lot of shows that went off the rails: starts with a strong premise and setting, but gets an indefinite run so the writer(s) can't actually terminate any story arcs and end up floundering badly. It got dramatically better again when he had to wrap it up.
Some shows start off in that state (like Lost - I was familiar enough with the pattern then to avoid getting sucked into that one); some drift into it (Twin Peaks and BSG at least). It usually takes getting cancelled to pull them out of it, which is really sad.
It is a condemnation of americas modern media culture that Netflix kept turning down David Lynch's ideas in the years before he died. Who knows what weird interesting art we could have had if they (or anyone else) had simply given Lynch (and countless young new artists too) a bag of money and a deadline.
Series 2 did overfocus on the characters, but the eccentric characters were there at the beginning. Log Lady was the most outlandish but Pete Martell and Audrey Horne get introduced early on and are quirky. Dale Cooper himself is pretty strange.
I always thought the most boring major character in Twin Peaks was James Hurley, the would be biker.
I never watched the third series. I think I got part way through the first episode and never bothered with the rest.
Log Lady is weird but not quirky. The back half of season two had Nadine mentally regressing to a high-schooler but with superhuman strength (played for laughs); Dick Tremayne, a pompous menswear salesman wooing Lucy (played for laughs); and Benjamin Horne reenacting the Civil War (played for laughs). It's all very cartoonish.
If you watch season three, Log Lady gets quite an emotional farewell as the actress was dying of cancer. It's Lynch's insistence on treating even the quirky characters as real human beings that makes all the difference.
Even if a manager can just conjure the software they want instantly using AI, they are still going to prefer having a nerd to manage it for them - to know how to prompt engineer or even just organise it all.
It might not look much like software engineering, but it's still going to be nerd stuff that most people don't want to bother with.
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
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