‘Twin Peaks’ back to haunt
TWIN Peaks, David Lynch’s noir soap opera about murder in small-town America, returned to US TV screens on Sunday after 26 years away, prompting an outpouring of joy – and a collective scratching of heads.
M-Net will screen the first episode of this season three tonight on channel 102 at 9.30pm, after having recently run seasons one and two on its M-Net Binge channel 900.
Initial reactions, which have been mainly positive, kept #TwinPeaks among the top trending US hashtags for much of Sunday after the first four episodes were made available for viewing.
“Newsflash newbies: David Lynch goes at his own pace, not yours,” chided one Twitter user.
“For the two things that were answered, there’s a bajillion other questions jumping through my brain,” tweeted another, a comic store owner from New Hampshire.
Lynch has spent recent years directing music videos and dabbling in comedy acting, but hasn’t made a motion picture since the box office flop Inland Empire 11 years ago.
The compelling mystery of the original eight-episode Twin Peaks – who killed the beautiful cheerleader Laura Palmer – captured the imagination of a generation in 1990 and it was held up as frontrunner for a new kind of cinema-quality TV.
It quickly gained a loyal fan base and won three Golden Globes in 1991, including one for best television drama and another for actor Kyle MacLachlan.
Audiences and critical appreciation waned when the 22-episode second series unmasked Palmer’s killer and ABC cancelled the show.
A movie that followed, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, was a commercial and critical flop.
MacLachlan returns in his role as FBI special agent Dale Cooper along with much of the show’s original cast, with Lynch – known for his films Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive – directing.
“It is happening again,” MacLachlan tweeted as the show was about to begin in the US.
Lynch purists voiced their delight at the look of the premiere, which was as unsettling and replete with hallucinatory symbolism – from talking trees and people speaking backwards to moving zigzag floors – from the original series.
The story, written by Lynch with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, picks up with Agent Cooper in the red-draped Black Lodge, where Palmer (Sheryl Lee) told him she would see him in 25 years.
Hollywood Reporter described the debut broadcast in an early online reaction as “unsettling, weird, funny and basically impossible to review”.
“It’s too soon, ultimately, to conclude whether Twin Peaks’ will justify the investment or, like many a revival, should have stayed in limbo,” Brian Lowry of CNN said.
“The first two hours should, at least, pique any fan’s curiosity,” he added.
“And for a programme that never fit in a neat little box, Lynch and company have seemingly found the right time and place to reappear.”
Contemporary to The Cosby Show and Roseanne, the original Twin Peaks emerged as unclassifiable – a television series whose narrative style, rhythm and music took a striking departure from standard TV fare toward a more cinematic feel.
“You felt like watching a movie, but a movie that went on for hours and hours,” Damon Lindelof, creator of the hit TV show Lost, said. Neither soap opera nor crime series – but simultaneously a bit of both – the show defied all labels, adding to its recipe for success a pinch of the supernatural.
Madchen Amick, who plays the waitress Shelly Johnson, told the magazine Entertainment Weekly that the show “gave the audience what they were craving, which was intelligence and mystery and something different”.
The original series deliberately left gray areas when traditional television took pains to avoid them. Each episode lasted about an hour, “but it actually necessitated discussion following it”, Lindelof added.
The show quickly gained a loyal fan base, which has grown decades later thanks to a new generation of devotees who took to binge-watching episodes.
For MacLachlan, “the fans kept the memory alive and they’re about to be rewarded”.
When the actor went to work on other shows – including the hits Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City – he said writers would often come to him to sing the praises of Twin Peaks.
“The writers would say to me: ‘I didn’t really think it was possible to do this, but because of Twin Peaks, suddenly I felt empowered, this is my vision.”
But Gary Edgerton, a television expert at Butler University, said that while the show was in some ways “unlike anything that had been on television before”, the influence of shows like The Sopranos was “even more significant”.
“The idea of cinematic television really found its footing and became much more realised when the emphasis went away from broadcast networks and went into the cable and satellite sector,” Edgerton said.
There, he said, “audiences were relatively smaller, although still substantial, and the show runners had great ambitions in realising television as art”.
“But the question is, would we necessarily have had a Sopranos on television if we didn’t have Twin Peaks?” — AFP