Thirty-four years ago, Special Agent Dale Cooper entered the town of Twin Peaks to solve the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death—and we still haven’t left. Portrayed by the seminal Kyle MacLachlan (currently starring as Hank MacLean in Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Fallout), Dale Cooper brought viewers along with him into a revolution of narratives, visuals, and soundscapes.
Save for some eccentric ancestors, Twin Peaks was stand-alone in what it tried to achieve with the serialised format. It pushed the boundaries of what was expected so assertively that the goalpost is exactly where creators David Lynch and Mark Frost left it. From a sea of sitcoms and mystery of the week-based programs emerged a show committed to its own trajectory and unique devices, a world apart from that which had come before, and setting the standard for those that dared follow.
Tracing Twin Peaks: Its Predecessors
In trying to find evidence of Twin Peaks in shows that came before, you will only find equivalencies in how strange a plot was, as opposed to similar narrative structures. The most obvious contender is The Twilight Zone. First aired in 1959, The Twilight Zone dealt with disturbing and bizarre circumstances: waking up to find that you may be the last man on earth; a college professor who had been alive for 2000 years; five people trapped in a cylinder, trying to escape, later revealed to be dolls. Such occurrences were indicative of having entered ‘the Twilight Zone’. Twin Peaks more or less takes place in a permanent Twilight Zone, with the scenes in the red room and the figure of BOB adding a supernatural element to the show, and Agent Cooper’s frequent revelations while in dreamlike states further unhinging the show from reality.
While The Twilight Zone was, and is, undoubtedly weird and entertaining, it did not brush up against the novelistic feeling that Twin Peaks achieved through its sustained mystery, a cast of peculiar characters who all accrued depth as the narrative evolved, and refusal to cave to obvious plotlines. Each of these devices differentiated Twin Peaks from its contemporaries and antecedents, with Lynch exploiting the serialised format to fuel suspense and speculation around an unfolding narrative. This would change the rhythm of the TV show. Fading was the appeal of the thirty-minute cycle: beginning, middle, end, a new plot introduced and concluded within the same episode week in, week out. In prototype over on ABC was true visual storytelling, a tale that began one week, and defied a simple ending even over the course of a season.
Current State of the Networks
We hear a lot now about ‘prestige TV.’ Breaking Bad is an obvious one, and has recently experienced a social-media-based renaissance. Mad Men is a personal favourite of mine. We have to mention sprawling narratives such as Lost, and beloved entries such as The Sopranos. More recently, White Lotus has been dubbed ‘prestige’ for luxuriating in its aesthetics: high fashion (if we ignore Portia), gorgeous scenery, high drama; all the trappings of sticking about a dozen wealthy people in a resort and letting their entitlement run rampant.
What constitutes ‘prestige’? There are some rough guidelines: narrative complexity, considered cinematography; most, if not all, elements of the story being of consequence. While Twin Peaks does not evoke, in particular, ideas of ‘prestige’ as it has come to be understood, what the show achieved within the confines of a regular network slot laid the groundwork for these well-loved shows to flourish.
As well as telling a story that unfurled over the course of the series as opposed to a single episode, with plenty of twists and red herrings only giving further dimension to the world of Twin Peaks, the emotional range of the storyline was that which was truly novel to the small screen. The undercurrent of Twin Peaks’s fantastical surface was sexual abuse, drug addiction, prostitution, domestic violence, and exploitation. In the shows mentioned above, there is hardly a shortage of this sort of grit, underbelly, and grey morality, all handled without the overt moralising of the ‘Very Special Episode’ framework particular to sitcoms in which everything is neatly resolved and put back in its right place after half an hour, but instead allowed to simply be as part of a narrative in which its characters are taken seriously.
“There Was a Fish… in the Percolator!”
Laura Palmer was not presented to viewers as a mystery to be solved or a door to be unlocked as part of an infinite stream of similar, depthless victims, forgotten about by the time the next episode aired. If anything, the characters became more obscure as the series progressed. Such is the price to pay for writing characters fit to carry a show as consistently engaging as Twin Peaks was. The viewer, and the scriptwriters, had to put in more work to solve a mystery that refused to be solved in the straightforward manner expected from TV shows at the time.
Though Twin Peaks lasted for only two seasons during its original run, it paved the way for long-form narratives to be executed in a visual format. Five seasons of Breaking Bad, six seasons of Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Lost (whether you liked it or not). An ongoing story at the core of each show, explored to their furthest extents, characters pushed to the limits of being engaging and sympathetic, all underpinned with emotions and issues which were not too overt, nor willingly dismissed as too uncomfortable to unpick or sustain throughout the series’ course. Had Lynch not taken the step to incorporate these elements in Twin Peaks, we may well not have the abundance of ‘prestige’ we find readily available for our enjoyment today.
Twin Peaks was weird, wonderful, and, most importantly, it was different. Lynch and Frost’s brainchild set itself apart from the surrounding noise by delivering characters made with care and complexity in a package of angelic music, offbeat humour, and interludes in a dreamscape. It was a fish in the network TV percolator, infusing the landscape with a new sensibility.
