How All Of Television Is Still Taking Place in Twin Peaks
In Memoriam: David Lynch
Author’s Note: For the record I was planning to begin a rewatch and reviewing Twin Peaks at some point this year, mainly because it is the 35th anniversary of the debut of the original series. However with the news of the passing of the iconic David Lynch I now have an added motivation to write about a series that holds a very special place in my heart to this today.
There will no doubt be countless tributes to Lynch in the days and weeks to come, but I suspect the majority will deal with his movies first. This piece will pay tribute to the influence his vision for Twin Peaks has had on television for the last thirty five years, which is incredibly wide- ranging for such a brief series. I suspect the tributes will start pouring in from quite a few of the talents I mention. As a viewer and a critic I think there are far more and I will try to reference them here.
As someone named David I’m always struck by just how many showrunners and creative force in the era of Peak TV share that first name. We are all familiar with Messrs. Chase, Simon and Milch whose creation of HBO’s holy trinity of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood helped usher in the era of the Golden Age. David Mills doesn’t have the recognition these three do but he worked very closely with Simon and Milch on shows such as Homicide and NYPD Blue and worked with Simon on Treme before he died at the premature age of 47. He was also the writer of the miniseries The Corner which served as a bridge between much of those shows. And of course David E. Kelley has been dazzling viewers for nearly four decades, mostly in legal dramas but also in the world of limited series to the point I don’t know when he has time to sleep.
In a way David Lynch’s creative output pales in comparison. He only created one show for which he only wrote a handful of episodes (he was busy making movies during that period) and then wrote a sequel to it nearly twenty-five years later. That show only ran two seasons and just about thirty episodes before it was cancelled. But no one would dare call Twin Peaks ‘just one show’. Its influence can be felt on television to this very day and will no doubt go on even after the original series is long forgotten (which I seriously doubt will ever happen.)
I was only eleven when Twin Peaks arrived on ABC in the spring of 1990 but even someone who wasn’t paying attention to television at all would have been hard pressed to say that they hadn’t heard of Twin Peaks back then. I didn’t even watch the original series when it was first on the air but I sure as hell knew that everyone was asking the question: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” I didn’t know that Lynch himself was never intended to answer that question which might explain why the bubble for this phenomena started to dissolve so quickly.
The world wasn’t ready for Twin Peaks in 1990. I’m still not sure its ready now. Even after so many years of television with mythologies and mysteries and serialized drama, there’s a still part of the audience that wants everything to be tidied up in a bow by the end of the series. By the time Lynch created Twin Peaks in 1990 anyone who had seen his movies knew that he was not the kind of filmmaker who believed in making coherent stories with a beginning, middle and end. I suspect that so much of the frustration that so many viewers would have about the endings of so many series from The Sopranos to Lost to Mad Men would make him bursting with pride at their commitment. I suspect he might admire Chase for ending The Sopranos with a cut to black by saying that he stole his original ending for the series. One suspects he might be irked at how so many mythology series built where people like Damon Lindelof and Joss Whedon engaged with the audience and promised them answers. “No!” he’d probably shout. “Never explain anything! You have to leave your audience completely baffled!”
So much of television that followed bears a Lynchian stamp. The clearest starting point is The X-Files not only because of David Duchovny’s link to both shows but because it begins with mysterious happenings in a forest. Indeed so much of the brilliance of those Monster-of-the-Week episodes shows Mulder and Scully wandering through dimly lit areas and vast stretches of ‘the most beautiful tress I’ve ever seen” (Amazing how much Florida could look like Vancouver.) Joss Whedon acknowledged how great an influence Twin Peaks was on Buffy and we can’t forget that the show was set in a mysterious small town called Sunnydale which had so much darkness even when you didn’t know it was set on the mouth of hell. (Lynch would have approved of the women being the strong characters.) Lost is almost directly an ancestor text of Twin Peaks and was more stylistically similar to it, particularly when it came to its stirring musical score which was more melodic that Angelo Bandeminiti’s themes but no less dark. And it’s clear that Damon Lindelof took as much of Twin Peaks into The Leftovers which starts out with two percent of the population being raptured and gets weirder from there. During much of the series Kevin Garvey can distinguish whether he is in reality or a dream world and so many of the episodes in the final season involve a surreal aspect; at one point one of the characters boards a boat to Australia and actually thinks that God is on board. (That’s the kind of conversation I can imagine happening on Twin Peaks.)
The most recent series to embrace this kind of mystery and lunacy combined, in my opinion, is Yellowjackets which has a surrealism to it that I think out Lynches even Lynch. I wonder if Lynch saw the season 2 episode where, among other things, Christina Ricci’s character has a dance sequence with the human version of her parrot played by John Cameron Mitchell. “That’s the craziest thing I ever saw!” he’d saw. “Bravo!”
But it is not merely the genre TV series that bares Lynch’s imprint. So many of the dream sequences in The Sopranos, from ‘Funhouse’ to ‘The Test Dream’ clearly show a Lynchian feel to them Six Feet Under starts with a character being killed when the hearse he’s driving is hit by a bus while the undertaker is using the dash lighter to light a smoke. I suspect if Lynch could have gotten away with Laura Palmer talking to Cooper in real life he would have done so; in that sense Alan Ball clearly outdid him.
So many of the episodes of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have a clear influence of Twin Peaks in them when it comes to direction and many times Vince Gilligan shows this by leading us down blind alleys with his teaser. The commercial for Los Pollos Hermanos, complete with the copyright symbol at one point, truly does make us feel the viewer is watching a real commercial. And considering how much of Fargo has always been a mix of the crime genre and the supernatural since at least season 2 (where UFOs seem to be stalking every major death( it’s hard to say that this show doesn’t take place in Lynch’s world. But interestingly I have found a huge amount of influence of Lynch in so many comedy series in the past decade more than anywhere else.
You could make a sound argument that everything that’s happening in the world of Donald Glover’s Atlanta is just having in a David Lynch world that is entirely populated by African-Americans. And from the moment I saw Teddy Perkins I could never trust anything I was seeing in any episode as reality. So much of Bill Hader’s vision for Barry also has that same note of dark surrealism, starting with the iconic ‘ronny/lilly episode and following that trend hard in the much darker third and fourth seasons. Jim Carrey’s Kidding a prematurely cancelled comedy, clearly took place in a surreal universe that while real clearly had Lynchian tones in its filmmaking. At one point when Jeff is under anesthesia, he begins to imagine he’s in the real life world of his kids show and the man who receives part of his liver begins to feel more like he got a personality transplant. And it’s impossible not to think of so much of the style of The Good Place as being the kind of afterlife that Lynch might imagine as well as visually stunning work as well. Janet is exactly the kind of benevolent deity Lynch has throughout Twin Peaks.
And in a way perhaps as a viewer I’ve been inoculated from so much of the controversy involving so many of these TV shows plot lines and endings because of what I was used from the world of David Lynch. I will grant you there are times I’ve shared my frustration with that, particularly with The X-Files or Lost. But maybe that’s because Lynch was never about explanations or coherence but entirely about atmosphere and aura. A coherent storyline was never something you got with a Lynch work and while I never truly liked it with the majority of his films, Twin Peaks is the sole exception to the rule.
That’s why, when the Return was announced in 2016, I looked forward to it with far more anticipation then so many of the reboots that had come before and would come since. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get with The Return but I had a feeling that he wasn’t just going to give us a reunion series with as many of the old cast members as he could get together. (That would have been difficult in 2016; quite a few of the stars from that period were already dead and many were ill and dying.) I’m kind of astonished when, after everything ended, in August of 2017 so many fans of the original series were upset that not only did The Return not answer any of the questions from the cliffhanger but basically spent the entire series mostly away from Twin Peaks and while Kyle MacLachlan was there, Dale Cooper wasn’t until the series was almost over.
To which I say to those people: had you met David Lynch? He does not do warm and sappy. He doesn’t wrap things up in a bow in his movies. Would it have been nice to see so many of the old stars happier 25 years later? Yes, but that was never going to be the kind of story David Lynch was interested in telling and he wasn’t going to do so here.
Even with that, my experience with The Return was one of astonishment. Lynch and Mark Frost managed to create an entire series that was almost, but not entirely, unlike the original. Sure a lot of the old faces were there and there were a lot of connections to the original series but as far as Lynch was concerned he had no intention of creating the feel of nostalgic familiarity the average viewer turns into a reboot for and he gave us exactly that. And he did so with a darkness that only cable could have provided and with a weirder mix that the original series couldn’t have. And rather than give even the possibility of closure, he went to an even darker and far less forgiving place with an even more ambiguous ending than the original. In both the original and the Return he had the opportunity to give closure that most series don’t. In neither case was he willing to do so. There’s bravery in that I admire.
In 2024 Lynch announced to the world that he had contracted emphysema and that because of the risk of infection from Covid, he was no longer able to make movies. The Return was therefore the final project of Lynch that was ever completed. In my mind that is a fitting valedictory to a creative force that has had, by and large, a more beneficial impact on the world of television then it ever did on the world of film. Lynch was one of the great talents in cinema but he rarely was given the freedom to create the world he wanted and far too often that vision was deeply incoherent. But with Twin Peaks alone, both the original and The Return was the kind of vision he wanted to realize fully delivered.
A final anecdote from myself: I spent a lot of time after the Return ended hoping that Lynch had more to say about this world and would return to it. I spent a lot of time in the last few years hoping he was working on another season or a film that told it. When I learned the truth of Lynch’s condition and realized that he would never make another work of art I was saddened. In that sense his passing did little to shock me — he was already approaching 80 and he did have a disease that was likely fatal. In that sense it’s perfect that his final vision for the world ended on a cliffhanger that will never be explained. Maybe it wasn’t intentional but its Lynchian to the end. Always leaving them wanting more and leave the explanations to those in the cheap seats.
See you in the White Lodge, Gordon. Maybe you can finally get your hearing aid fixed.