‘Twin Peaks’ Was the Most Bizarre Show on TV — and David Lynch’s Biggest Success
When it debuted in the spring of 1990, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was inarguably the strangest show to have ever been made for American television. It was, simultaneously, a gothic horror story, a murder mystery, a supernatural thriller, a throwback to 1950s soap operas and movie melodramas, and a goofy comedy. Its stories intermingled human-scale nightmares like sex trafficking, drug addiction, domestic abuse, and incestuous rape with demonic possession, psychic visions, and periodic trips to another dimension where a dwarf hung out in a very red room. And every third or fourth scene would feature a joke as unexpected as it was funny: a pot of coffee being spoiled because a fish somehow got in the percolator, or an FBI supervisor, played by David Lynch himself, enthusiastically greeting a subordinate by telling him, “You remind me today of a small Mexican chihuahua!”
But the strangest part of Twin Peaks was this: For a hot minute there, it was a huge, huge hit — easily the greatest commercial success of the late David Lynch’s long, distinguished, but decidedly niche career.
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More than 36 million people — one-third of all households watching television on April 8, 1990 — were tuned in to pay the first visit to the Pacific Northwest hamlet of Twin Peaks, where homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was found dead, wrapped in plastic. The extra-long pilot episode was ranked as the top-rated TV movie of the 1989-90 season. And even though the ratings for the regular episodes gradually dipped in direct competition with juggernaut sitcom Cheers, it was still a huge hit, and one of the most talked-about shows television had seen in years. Its stars were on magazine covers (Rolling Stone included), and ratings stories in the Hollywood trades began taking the unusual step of noting how many people were recording episodes to watch or rewatch later — which was previously unheard-of behavior for all but the nerdiest of TV viewers. How big a phenomenon was it? Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti later claimed that Queen Elizabeth blew off an event with Paul McCartney so she could watch an episode.
Looked at in the context of Lynch’s larger career — among the most remarkable in film history, but also among the most idiosyncratic — such wide-sweeping popularity almost feels like a practical joke by the universe on David Lynch, or perhaps vice versa. Lynch was not a filmmaker who made things with a mass audience in mind. He made things that would provoke a deep emotional reaction within himself, and to the cinephiles who happened to operate on his peculiar wavelength. Twin Peaks was a stew of things Lynch and/or Frost loved, but neither of them went into it assuming it was going to be a hit. Years later, when I asked Frost about the much messier second season, he told me that he and Lynch were shocked there even was a second season, and admitted that they had never really prepared for the idea.
There were aspects of Twin Peaks that were superficially commercial: the murder of a beautiful young woman, a town full of secrets, and romantic intrigue among both the teen and adult characters, among others. But they were always presented in the weirdest, most Lynchian fashion possible. One early episode includes a dream sequence where an older version of heroic FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) finds himself in the Red Room, where Laura Palmer and the Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) — both of them speaking and moving oddly, because Lee and Anderson performed their dialogue backward and then the audio and video were reversed — told him what happened to her. This was shot as a way to provide closure to the story for foreign markets, which would just air the pilot episode as a standalone movie. But Lynch incorporated it into the main story, where Cooper gathered local cop Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) and his deputies and told them about the dream — and they all took it absolutely seriously and agreed to let it guide their investigation. (Harry Truman: both a classic straight man and one of the great “yes, and …” characters in television history.) Cooper would dictate his every thought into tape recordings meant for his unseen assistant Diane; sometimes, they were important details about the case, while at others, he would say things like, “Diane, I’m holding in my hands a box of chocolate bunnies.” He later received advice from a cryptic giant (Carel Struycken), and began to suspect that the crime was in some way tied to an evil spirit called BOB — played by set dresser Frank Silva, whose physical presence Lynch found so striking, he made him into the series’ arch villain.
And BOB was expected to coexist in the same series as bumbling, tear-prone deputy Andy (Harry Goaz), teenage temptress Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn), and Nadine (Wendy Robie), a bitter, one-eyed housewife obsessed with inventing silent drape-runners, among many other characters who all seemed to belong in different shows. Somehow, a whole lot of people wanted to watch whatever crazy ideas Lynch and Frost decided to unleash upon them — perhaps because even if so much of it was inscrutable, Twin Peaks still possessed that extremely Lynchian quality of being more emotionally raw and affecting than almost anything else you could find on the big or small screen. Even when it didn’t make a lick of sense, it could easily move you to tears.
The first season finale brought a variety of stories to a head, and ended with a big cliffhanger: Our square-jawed hero Cooper shot and left for dead by an unknown assailant. By that point, the ratings had drifted down to more modest levels, having lost more than a third of the audience that watched the premiere. But ABC still had high hopes for it, jumping from eight episodes in the first season to 22 in the second, and assuming Lynch and Frost could keep things exciting for years to come.
That is … not what happened. Though the creators didn’t want to solve the Laura Palmer mystery for a long time, if ever, ABC executives pushed them to give resolution to the audience. The episodes leading up to that answer — Laura’s father Leland (Ray Wise) killed her, but only because he was being possessed by BOB — are among the most shocking, moving, and funniest of the series. But the answer also seemed to give all the normies who were still watching an excuse to stop. And without the case as a unifying element, the second season became even stranger, but much less satisfying as a whole. Among that year’s storylines (I swear I am not making any of these up):
Nadine suffered a head injury that convinced her she was still a teenager, so she went back to high school, developed superstrength somehow, joined the wrestling team, and had an affair with one of the popular jocks
Local sawmill owner Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) faked her own death and adopted trans-racial drag to pose as Japanese businessman Mr. Tojamura, as part of her revenge plot against Audrey’s father, Ben Horne (Richard Beymer)
Ben had his own mental breakdown and for a while believed he was a Civil War general
Josie Packard (Joan Chen), who had married Catherine’s brother and later had an affair with Sheriff Truman, made many terrible decisions, wound up in the orbit of BOB and the Man From Another Place, and was eventually turned into a drawer knob (Yes, a drawer knob.)
There were some excellent moments in there, notably an ahead-of-its-time subplot guest-starring a young David Duchovny as a trans woman FBI agent. But too much of it felt like it was made by people trying to re-create the superficial weirdness of Lynch without understanding the emotional heft that had to support it. Accounts differ as to how much Lynch and Frost were involved that season, perhaps because no one wants to take the full blame for it. But Lynch was definitely behind the camera for the finale, which included a spellbinding sequence where Cooper found himself stuck in the Red Room and spent more than 11 minutes — an eternity for television at any time, but especially for network TV in the spring of 1991 — roaming around in circles, unable to find a way out. Laura Palmer’s spirit promised that she would see Cooper — or us — again in 25 years, and the story seemed to conclude with the revelation that Cooper was still trapped there, while BOB had reentered the real world, impersonating Cooper.
By that point, all but the most serious die-hards had stopped paying attention. Lynch then made a prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, set primarily in the days leading up to Laura’s murder. It strips away all the quirky flourishes that had been such a big part of the series’ initial crossover appeal, and instead presents an unflinching look at what life would have been like in those final hours for an abuse victim like Laura. Though its reputation has been reclaimed over the years, at the time it left many critics and fans baffled, and seemed to exhaust whatever interest remained in the property. And Lynch moved on to other things, some of which struck a chord (Mulholland Drive, which began life as an ABC pilot — one final attempt by him to merge his sensibility with network television), some of which did not (Inland Empire, his last feature film).
But even so, memories of that first batch of episodes, from the pilot through the end of the Laura mystery, remained strong, even among many of the casuals. So when Lynch and Frost made a deal with Showtime for a sequel series, 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return — timed to more or less live up to Laura’s promise to see us in 25 years — all thoughts of Teen Nadine, or of Ben Horne trying to save the pine weasel (don’t ask) vanished, and all that remained was excitement and curiosity about what all our favorites had been up to since last we saw them.
So, of course, Lynch and Frost then produced a season of television that was so defiantly weird, it made the original run of Twin Peaks look like NCIS in comparison.
Like Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks: The Return went out of its way to avoid giving the audience much of what they expected. Most of the original characters returned, but often briefly, and/or in indecipherable subplots. (Audrey, for instance, spent several episodes having exasperatingly circular arguments with a strange man, and eventually it was implied that she had been in a coma ever since the end of the ABC series, and this was her awful mental existence.) Badalamenti’s iconic synth score was used sparingly. Though Kyle MacLachlan played multiple roles, the Agent Cooper everyone knew and loved barely appeared, and instead we split our time between BOB in control of Cooper’s original body, and Cooper’s spirit trapped inside the dim-witted, childlike Dougie Jones, a duplicate BOB created years before as a contingency plan. MacLachlan’s work as Dougie is an astonishingly precise, funny comedic performance, but many viewers grew impatient waiting for the real Cooper to appear — which The Return withheld until the last two episodes of an 18-episode season.
Nearly all of The Return operated along a similar vibe of, “We’ll give you what we want, not what you want” from Lynch and Frost. There were subplots that came and went with no real explanation, at times involving characters we’d never met before and were given no context about. Michael Cera did an incredible cameo as Wally Brando, the Marlon Brando-esque son of Andy and sheriff’s station receptionist Lucy (Kimmy Robertson), which was very funny but perhaps only deeply meaningful to the five people who remembered a story from late in Season Two questioning whether or not Lucy had gotten pregnant by Andy or by the more theatrical Dick Tremayne. (Wally Brando is 1,000 percent Dick’s child.) One scene was just a custodian sweeping up a bar after a music show, playing out over the entire length of the classic soul track “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. And because David Bowie wasn’t alive to reprise his Fire Walk With Me role as teleporting FBI agent Phillip Jeffries, Lynch (who directed all 18 episodes) filmed a scene where we saw that Jeffries had transformed into a giant talking tea kettle. (Again, I swear I am not making this up.)
Yet as maddening and occasionally spiteful as The Return could feel at times, it was a spectacular achievement at so many others. The eighth episode is among the strangest and best hours of television ever produced. Much of it is in black and white, treating the detonation of the first atomic bomb as the event that unleashed true evil into the world. Parts of it briefly tie into the main narrative — BOB is glimpsed inside an atomic mushroom cloud, and a teenage girl whose body is invaded by a demonic bug of some kind is meant to be a young version of Laura’s mother Sarah (played as an adult by Grace Zabriskie) — but the images and sounds of it are so vivid that no prior Peaks knowledge is required to put jaws on the floor. And every now and then, Lynch and Frost even gave the fans exactly what they dreamed of from the new show, like Big Ed (Everett McGill) and Norma (Peggy Lipton) finally getting their happy ending, scored to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”
Showtime was so eager for Lynch and Frost to make a new Twin Peaks for them that the creators were essentially left to spend this blank check however they wanted. In many ways, it’s the pinnacle of Lynch’s work, one that keeps leaving you shaken emotionally, even if you could not explain much of what happened even after several dozen viewings, nor even after a conversation with the man himself.
The series concludes with Cooper defeating BOB and traveling back in time to prevent Laura’s murder. He and Diane (finally appearing in the flesh in the form of Lynch’s frequent muse Laura Dern) sleep together, and at a certain point, they appear to travel into another reality — one shot and lit to resemble our world much more than the one we recognize from either the ABC seasons or this one. Cooper takes a woman calling herself Carrie Page, but played by Sheryl Lee, to the Palmer house, which is occupied by its real-life owner, and is baffled by where and even when they are. (“What year is this?” he asks.) And then Carrie, or Laura, or whomever she is, looks up at the Palmer house and unleashes an ear-splitting scream. The lights go out on the house, then on the show, and then on Lynch’s work as writer-director.
What does that ending mean? Is it a meta commentary on the danger of returning to old stories to try to change them? Is it Lynch using every last reserve of his filmmaking powers to somehow bring his fictional creations into the real world? Just one final moment that the master can’t even fully articulate to himself, other than the way it makes him feel? Maybe it’s all of these. Maybe it’s none of these. Certainly, the many other bravura moments of The Return suggest a storyteller with enough juice to make even his most fanciful, esoteric ideas and characters into reality. And perhaps no other filmmaker, on the big screen or small, has ever had a greater capacity to make their audiences think, I don’t know what in the world I just saw, but I will never forget how it felt to see it.
As Dale Cooper helpfully told Diane on one of those tape recordings, he arrived in Twin Peaks at 11:30 a.m. on Feb. 24. In most ways, he never left. Nor, really, did David Lynch. And how lucky we are for that.
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