Twin Peaks

• 1. Introduction

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  Twin Peaks premiered on ABC on the 8th of April 1990, and within hours the television landscape had shifted in a way critics were struggling to describe. A naked body, wrapped in plastic, washed up on the bank of a river near a small Pacific Northwest logging town. The victim was Laura Palmer, homecoming queen and high school senior. Who killed her? That question pulled millions of viewers into a show unlike anything American television had attempted before.

  The creator David Lynch had initially resisted making television at all. His agent Tony Krantz took him to Nibblers restaurant in Los Angeles and made the pitch: do a show about real life in America, the same vision Lynch had brought to Blue Velvet. Co-creator Mark Frost, who had spent three years writing for Hill Street Blues, wanted to tell what he called a Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area. The partnership that emerged would win the show fourteen Emmy nominations, spawn a prequel film, a 2017 revival, and a devoted cult following that endures decades later.

  What made Twin Peaks so unsettling? And why did its enormous early success collapse so quickly, leaving one of television's most famous cliffhangers unresolved for twenty-five years?

• 2. The Making of a Town

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  The show nearly never took place in the Pacific Northwest at all. Lynch and Frost originally titled the project North Dakota and set it in the plains region of that state. After screening Peyton Place together in a rented Beverly Hills screening room, the three creators decided to develop the town before its inhabitants. The lack of forests and mountains in North Dakota pushed them to change both the title and the location to Washington state.

  Frost started their location search in Snoqualmie, Washington, on the recommendation of a friend. Lynch and Frost drew a map. They decided the town would have a lumber mill, and then came up with the image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake. Lynch later recalled that knowing where everything was located helped determine the prevailing atmosphere and what might happen there.

  The towns of Snoqualmie, North Bend, and Fall City became the primary filming locations for exterior footage, about an hour's drive from Roslyn, Washington. Many exterior scenes were filmed in wooded areas of Malibu, California, while most interiors were shot on standing sets in a San Fernando Valley warehouse. One notable exception was the soap opera Invitation to Love, shown within the show, which was filmed at the Ennis House, a Frank Lloyd Wright landmark in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles.

  Agent Cooper states in the pilot that Twin Peaks sits five miles south of the Canadian border and twelve miles west of the state line, placing it near the real-life Salmo-Priest Wilderness, close to Metaline Falls, Washington. In 2018, the mayors of Snoqualmie and North Bend declared Twin Peaks Day to be held on February 24, the date mentioned in the first episode of the series.

• 3. Casting Accidents

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  Sheryl Lee was originally hired to play a dead girl. Lynch intended to cast a local from Seattle for the role of Laura Palmer because of budget constraints, and Lee was that local. Lynch later said that no one had any idea she could act, or that she would be so powerful just being dead. Everything changed during the filming of a home movie that the character James takes of Donna and Laura. Watching Lee in that picnic scene, Lynch recognized she had something special, and she was brought back as a semi-regular cast member, appearing in flashbacks and as Laura's cousin Maddy Ferguson.

  Isabella Rossellini, who had worked with Lynch on Blue Velvet, was originally cast as Giovanna Packard, but she dropped out before shooting began. The character was reconceived as Josie Packard, of Chinese ethnicity, and the role went to actress Joan Chen.

  Frank Silva, the set dresser who became the show's most iconic villain, was never supposed to appear on camera at all. Lynch overheard Silva moving furniture around in a bedroom set, then heard a woman warning him not to block himself in by moving furniture in front of the door. The image struck Lynch immediately. When he learned Silva was an actor, he filmed two panning shots, one with Silva at the base of the bed and one without. Later that same day, a camera operator told Lynch that a shot was ruined because Frank Silva was reflected in the mirror. Lynch said: "Things like this happen and make you start dreaming." Silva became the terrifying Killer BOB.

  Michael J. Anderson, who played the Man from Another Place, was first noticed by Lynch in 1987 in a short film. Lynch had originally wanted to cast Anderson in the title role of a project called Ronnie Rocket, which never got made. The character Phillip Gerard, played by Al Strobel, was originally intended only as a homage to The Fugitive. Lynch envisioned Strobel reciting the "Fire walk with me" speech in the hospital basement, a scene that surfaced later in Cooper's dream sequence and gave the character a far larger role than planned.

• 4. Lynch and the Red Room

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  Cooper's dream at the end of the third episode, which held the key to Laura Palmer's murder, was never scripted. The idea came to Lynch one afternoon after touching the side of a hot car left out in the sun. Lynch recalled: "I was leaning against a car, the front of me was leaning against this very warm car. My hands were on the roof and the metal was very hot. The Red Room scene leapt into my mind. 'Little Mike' was there, and he was speaking backwards. For the rest of the night I thought only about the Red Room."

  The footage was actually shot alongside the pilot episode, originally intended as the conclusion if the pilot were released as a European feature film. When the series was picked up, Lynch incorporated some of it into the fourth episode. In the pilot itself, a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp above the table where Cooper examines Laura's body flickered constantly. Lynch decided not to replace it, because he liked the disconcerting effect it created.

  The recurring motifs Lynch and Frost built into the series, including trees, coffee and doughnuts, cherry pie, owls, logs, ducks, water, and fire, were deliberate, along with numerous embedded references to other films and television shows. Standards and Practices objected to one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up of Cooper's hand as he slid tweezers under Laura's fingernail and removed a tiny letter "R". They wanted the scene shortened because it made them uncomfortable. Frost and Lynch refused, and the scene remained intact.

• 5. The Sound of Twin Peaks

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  Angelo Badalamenti and Lynch created the score in fall 1989, and the signature theme took only twenty minutes to produce. Badalamenti called it the "Love Theme from Twin Peaks". Lynch told him: "You just wrote 75% of the score. It's the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks."

  While creating the score, Lynch described the moods or emotions he wanted and Badalamenti began to play the piano. The characters of the young men in the show were accompanied by what Badalamenti called Cool Jazz, enhanced by finger-snapping, cocktail-lounge electric piano, pulsing bass, and lightly brushed percussion. Several motifs were drawn from Julee Cruise's 1989 album Floating into the Night, which Lynch and Badalamenti wrote together. That album also served as the soundtrack to another Lynch project, Industrial Symphony No. 1, a live Cruise performance also featuring Michael J. Anderson.

  An instrumental version of Cruise's song "Falling" became the show's theme. The Guardian later described the score as marking "the summit of TV soundtracks." Lynch wrote the lyrics for five songs used in the show. A second volume of the soundtrack was released on the 30th of October 2007 to coincide with the Definitive Gold Box DVD set.

  The show's musical influence extended far beyond television. Cruise's compositions inspired Lana Del Rey. The score was a direct inspiration for dream pop duo Beach House, whose lead singer Victoria Legrand wrote one of the lyrics to their 2010 song "Silver Soul" as a result of the show. Bastille wrote a song called "Laura Palmer" after being drawn to what they described as the show's "slightly weird, eerie" atmosphere. The Black Lodge aesthetically inspired Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug's 2023 music video for "Up". Xiu Xiu released a 2017 tribute album titled Plays the Music of Twin Peaks.

• 6. Rise and Fall of a Phenomenon

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  Before the pilot even aired on television, a screening was held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Hollywood. Media analyst Paul Schulman predicted failure, saying the show was "not commercial" and "radically different" from what viewers were used to seeing. He was wrong about almost everything. The two-hour pilot became the highest-rated movie for the 1989-90 season, earning a 22 rating and seen by 33% of the audience. ABC's first-season broadcast scored the network's highest ratings in four years in the 9 PM Thursday time slot, with a 16.2 rating, each point equaling 921,000 homes with televisions.

  ABC's Bob Iger had fought for the show internally. He showed the pilot to a younger, more diverse group when older executives were skeptical. The result was seven episodes ordered at $1.1 million apiece. Iger won a final bi-coastal conference call showdown with a room full of New York executives, and Twin Peaks went to air.

  The collapse came quickly. The third episode lost 14% of the audience that had tuned in the week before. That same audience had already dropped 30% from the show's premiere, partly because the show had to compete against Cheers, which appealed to the same demographic. The show was moved around the schedule repeatedly. During the Gulf War, it was bumped from its usual time slot for six weeks out of eight, preventing it from maintaining audience interest. A week after the season's 15th episode placed 85th in the ratings out of 89 shows, ABC put Twin Peaks on indefinite hiatus.

  An organized letter-writing campaign called COOP, standing for Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks, kept the show alive long enough to air the final two episodes back-to-back on the 10th of June. The season finale ended on a deliberate cliffhanger. The network did not renew the show. The cliffhanger went unresolved for twenty-five years.

  Both Lynch and Frost later blamed network pressure for the decision to reveal Laura Palmer's killer mid-series, which they saw as fatal. Lynch said the resolution "killed the goose that laid the golden egg." Former ABC executive Bob Iger corroborated their account in his 2019 memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, writing that an immediate decrease in quality followed the premature revelation. A secondary factor was that Lara Flynn Boyle, who was romantically involved with Kyle MacLachlan at the time, had effectively vetoed the planned romance between Cooper and Audrey Horne, forcing writers to construct alternative storylines. Sherilyn Fenn confirmed this in a 2014 interview.

• 7. The Return and the Legacy

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  Season 3 was announced on the 6th of October 2014 as a limited series on Showtime. Lynch and Frost wrote every episode together, and Lynch directed all of them. Frost was explicit that the new episodes were not a remake or a reboot but a continuation, and that the passage of twenty-five years was a load-bearing element of the plot. Most of the original cast returned, including Kyle MacLachlan, Mädchen Amick, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Ray Wise. New additions included Laura Dern, Robert Forster, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Amanda Seyfried, Matthew Lillard, and Naomi Watts.

  The revival received widespread critical acclaim. Film journal Cahiers du Cinema named it the best film of the 2010s. The first season of the original run holds a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a critics consensus describing the show as a "beguiling and unsettling blend of seemingly disparate genres," and scored 96 out of 100 on Metacritic. The pilot ranked 25th on TV Guide's 1997 list of the 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.

  The show's influence on television was described by writer Mike Mariani in The Atlantic in 2016 as so pervasive that it would be tough to look at any given season's roster without finding several shows that owe it a creative debt. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, stated that "anybody making one-hour drama today who says he wasn't influenced by David Lynch is lying." Damon Lindelof, co-producer of Lost, said: "There is no show in television history that had more impact on me than Twin Peaks."

  The 1992 prequel film Fire Walk with Me was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. It has since been widely reevaluated as one of Lynch's major works. Lynch died in January 2025. Kyle MacLachlan had said in a Reddit AMA in June 2020 that Cooper was his "favorite role of all time" and that he would return to another season without even seeing the script.