Luminary director David Lynch has passed away, and while every Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive fan has something to mourn, over on YouTube, viewers will be missing one of his most beloved artforms: his weather reports.
At Tubefilter, we’ve have had our eye on Lynch for almost two decades, because while he was known to most for his TV and film projects, to us here in the world of digital content, he was recognized for being possibly one of the first people from Hollywood’s upper echelon to embrace online video.
His weather reports caught the internet’s attention when he started posting them to his YouTube channel, DAVID LYNCH THEATER, in May 2020. But that wasn’t the first time he blessed viewers with a little friendly meteorology. Way back in 2005, he used to post similar video weather reports on his now-defunct website, DavidLynch.com.
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Lynch would go on to launch his own members-only website in 2008—years before Patreon was a twinkle in Jack Conte and Sam Yam’s eyes. There, people could pay $9.97/month to access things like a 2006 video diary of Lynch’s time at the Cannes film festival and episodes of his animated comedy series Dumbland, and directorial experiments like Coyote #1, where the titular canid sniffs around an empty living room with the caption, “The coyote is hungry and wants to kill and eat the small creature. The coyote doesn’t yet know the creature’s powers nor what surprises this environment may hold.”
Lynch was also supposed to produce a webseries with new media company ON Networks that was based on his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, but the show never materialized. That wasn’t the first nor the last time he struggled to put out a project; in the wake of his passing, there is much discussion about the roadblocks he faced trying to make films over the last decade.
Anyway, we knew him back then, but like we mentioned above, the younger and terminally online crowd got new exposure to Lynch when he joined YouTube during COVID lockdowns.
His weather reports always featured him in sunglasses, talking about Los Angeles’s skies and giving glimpses into his life and little bits of insight about his creative process. He often talked about the small things, like being excited to get a hot coffee to combat the chilly weather.
Lynch was sincere more than anything in his work, I think that’s a big part of why it’s hitting so hard for everyone. His weather reports were/are a distillation of his love for art and humanity. Thank you for your never ending journey to express yourself, David. pic.twitter.com/IyqZvMnk5i
— sam (@icecreamyoga) January 16, 2025
He posted daily reports through the end of 2022, racking up over 400,000 subscribers and 26 million views.
As Dexerto points out, however, Lynch’s reports weren’t only viewed on YouTube. They were often reposted same-day by fans to Twitter and TikTok. Even after Lynch stopped making the reports, people would sometimes repost them on the same day the next year, revisiting what he’d said.
Now that he’s gone, fans are memorializing him by sharing their favorite reports–including his very last one, which opens with Lynch cheerfully shaking the camera and ends with him letting viewers know the weather will be “partly cloudy all along the way.”
