Arguably the greatest two hours of television aired on June 10, 1991, when ABC broadcast the finale to Twin Peaks’ second season—and, as it turned out, to the series as a whole. Having lost a hefty chunk of its viewership after revealing the culprit behind its initial mystery (Who Killed Laura Palmer?
) and meandering through a subsequent narrative involving dull psychopath Windom Earle (Kenneth Walsh), the show closed out its run with a peerlessly surreal, convention-defying masterpiece courtesy of its co-creator, David Lynch. Back at the helm following a lengthy absence, Lynch thrust the show into a morass of dark, delirious, surrealistic madness, roundly dispatching with Earle and, at hallucinogenic fever dream’s end, having his protagonist, do-gooder FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), become possessed by demonic evil. It was a cliffhanger send-off of astounding, perplexing terror and insanity—and, in the process, it paved the way for our current era of auteur-driven “prestige TV.”No surprise, then, that Twin Peaks is being revived by Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, who’ve assembled most of the original cast for an 18-episode reboot, directed entirely by Lynch, premiering on Showtime beginning May 21. It’s a perfectly timed resurrection, given that the airwaves are now awash in shows that are spiritually, if not literally, indebted to Lynch’s TV masterpiece. From their visual daring, to their serialized whodunit narratives, to their distinctive directorial signatures, to their sprawling all-star casts, acclaimed series as varied as The Killing, The Knick, Mad Men, Fargo, Mr. Robot, and Breaking Bad all owe a debt to Twin Peaks, which illustrated the immense benefits of—and, to be fair, also the drawbacks to—giving visionary storytellers free reign to create an expansive small-screen world in which to operate.
At its best, Twin Peaks was like Days of Our Lives as filtered through a bad acid trip, and its trailblazing idiosyncrasy emerged immediately, with its two-hour pilot on Sunday, April 8, 1990. That debut focused on the discovery of the corpse of local teen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), and the start of an investigation carried out by Cooper alongside Twin Peaks sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean). Introducing a raft of wackadoo characters and their intertwined relationships, and full of sadistic murder and deviant sexual undertones, it was part murder mystery, part soap opera, and part eerie waking dream. As a tale about the strangeness, and ugliness, lurking beneath the cheery facade of every day American life, it resonated as a successor to Lynch’s own 1986 noir thriller Blue Velvet. And it became an instant phenomenon, notching the 1989-1990 season’s highest ratings for a TV…
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