Twin Peaks originally aired in 1990 and 1991 and revolutionised television storytelling. David Lynch had no intention in doing television at first, but couldn’t resist the temptation of an ongoing storyline. To an artist who relied on intuition and organic story progression, television offered possibilities above the 2-hour restriction to which cinema was chained. He met with Mark Frost for numerous idea-forming lunches, and at one particular meeting, according to Lynch, there was “this dead girl in their collective mind’s eye,” inspired by Frost’s retelling of a high school memory of a friend’s sister being murdered, the consequences of grief and tragedy of which were obviously deeply ingrained into his mind. 

What separated Twin Peaks from many other crime shows and their countless murdered women, is the portrayal of emotional consequences and the effect of an unbearable loss on the community. This is how the concept of an isolated town in the Pacific Northwest came about - armed with a self-made map of the town and the idea of a murdered girl that starts to unravel those town’s dirty secrets - Lynch and Frost made their pitch to ABC, and modern American TV would never be the same again.

So-called “auteur television” had essentially started six years earlier with Micheal Mann’s revolutionary Miami Vice in 1984; like Miami Vice, Lynch clearly defined his show’s visual language, establishing the unique, dreamy, timeless atmosphere of the town, while Frost took control of the showrunning and story structure elements. The simpatico, uniform vision of the two creators made it possible for the show to be consistent, both in tone and storytelling quality (at least for the first half of it, of which more will be written later). Perhaps most importantly, Twin Peaks abolished the usual episodic, “case-per-week” or “monster-of-the-week” structure that was more typical of crime shows in the past, and introduced a continuing story arc where every episode was an important puzzle to the overall plot, whose connecting tissue was the ultimate mystery: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

TSPTR presents TWIN PEAKS : A Limited Capsule Event