Twin Peaks Invented Modern TV

“The sensational entrance into mass consciousness of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, 27 years ago, was an event that defies replication.”

“To begin with, back then there actually was a mass consciousness—or, at least, there were a lot of people watching the same shows at the same time.”

“No Netflix in 1990. No personalized viewing recommendations. Just the perennially white-hot maw of the popular imagination, into which—luscious and secretive as a fog bank—rolled Twin Peaks, with its unprecedented stew of occultism, irony, horror, deadpan, soap opera, canned narrative, dream logic, burningly beautiful young people, and postmodern diddling-about.”

“The show’s pilot had the feel of an initiation, as if some species of hermetic lore was now being diffused outward, gamma-saturating the frontal lobes of the public.”

“And now—the intervening quarter century having been, apparently, a mere blip, a quick writhe of Lynchian static across the screen—Twin Peaks is back for a belated Season 3 on Showtime, featuring many of the original cast members and helmed once again by writer-director Lynch and writer Frost.”

“It’s vulgar to query the creative impulse behind this resurrection, but somewhere in there, surely, is the sense that they kind of blew it the first time around.”

“Twin Peaks dominated 1990, must-see TV for a global viewership that included, apocryphally, Queen Elizabeth II. And then it fell to pieces in 1991, superseded as spectacle by the Gulf War and done in artistically by its own internal entropy, by the loopy plotlines, tonal wobbles, bad ideas, and out-of-control conceits that we now recognize as the symptoms of a long-form TV series entering its decadent phase.”

“That the organic breakdown occurred in Season 2—rather than in Season 4 or 5, as it might nowadays—only highlights the volatility and then-novelty of the constituent elements.”

“Because let’s be clear: Without Twin Peaks, and its big-bang expansion of the possibilities of television, half your favorite shows wouldn’t exist.”

“The absorptive, all-in serial, sonically and visually entire, novelistically cantilevered with deep structure and extending backwards into the viewer’s brain, was simply not a thing before Lynch and Frost.”

“With Twin Peaks they effectively renegotiated TV’s contract with its audience.”

“You tuned in psychedelically, as it were, ready to be transported.”

“The story arcs, the curves of character development, were long, longer than the show itself, receding into mystery.”

“If you missed an episode, you were disoriented. If you watched every episode carefully, you might still be disoriented. Remarkably, this has become something like the norm.”

“Thus the drama of Twin Peaks unfolded on two planes: what was happening in the show—who killed Laura Palmer?, etc.—and then, more subliminally, what the show was doing to the medium, to television.”

“And on both planes it was the same story, a reckless privileging of the irrational and the nocturnal, and a push to see how much of it we could take.”

“Stylistically, the most immediate posthumous effect of all this might have been the gnostic, everything-signifies vibe of The X-Files, but there are glimmering splinters of Twin Peaks in Breaking Bad’s trippy desert-sizzle; in the irruptive, disabling dreamtime of Bran Stark on Game of Thrones; and in the absurdist plot spirals, the gizmos and MacGuffins, of Lost. The Sopranos paid homage with Agent Cooper–esque fugue states and shots of trees blowing in the wind, rippling in their fullness and strangeness.”

“Then there was the garmonbozia. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the much-scorned theatrical-release prequel that Lynch made after the end of the series, the little red-suited man pops up again and slurs out something that gets subtitled as I want all my … garmonbozia (pain and sorrow). Moments later, we see him in horrible close-up, nibbling on a spoonful of something that looks like creamed corn. Deep as we are in Lynchian wackiness here, the meaning is not obscure: The little red-suited man and his fellow denizens of the dream realm have a taste for human suffering, which they call garmonbozia and consume in the form of a viscous, pearlescent psychic distillate.”

“Twin Peaks, as a narrative, had a core of almost blackout darkness.”

“For all its whimsy, Twin Peaks was piled high with garmonbozia.”

“Viewers, in fact, had never before experienced such (pain and sorrow) on the small screen, and this too was part of the show’s breakthrough—to blow open, in a subterranean way, the emotional range of TV drama. Dollops of garmonbozia have since become standard.”

“What can, or should, we expect from Season 3? To calmly anticipate another ream of seamless prestige television, of the sort that is now ubiquitous, feels like an insult to the raw wizardry of David Lynch. We will watch it, at any rate, not anchored to time and the boxy television set, but weightlessly adrift in our personal viewing cells.”

“It might be great. It might be a disaster. But it won’t blow our minds. It can’t, because that already happened.”