At a time when television is passing through a well-acknowledged Renaissance, when stars as deep in the game as Kevin Spacey (House of Cards) and Matthew McConaughey (True Detective) are bringing their magic to the small screen, when shows as diverse as Game Of Thrones and Transparent are reimagining the narrative and technical space, it is fitting that the original Big Daddy of long form fiction programming is being resurrected.
The creators of Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost, its original creators, have announced a third season that will air in 2017. The drama that took America by storm ran for two crisp but intensely satisfying seasons in 1990 and 1991.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) comes to the fictional town of Twin Peaks near the Canadian border to solve a murder mystery. The body of local sweetheart Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) has been discovered near the lake, and after the police fail to come up with a theory, Cooper is tasked with solving a case that will get increasingly complex.
When Twin Peaks came around, Lynch was already an established name due to the cult success of the 1986 movie Blue Velvet (his other major peek into the surreal, Mulholland Drive, was still years away). Yet, such was the scope of the series, so finely etched its characters and its mix of public piety and private quirks that it remains a far bigger achievement than Lynch’s films.
What a sprawling cast the show has! There is Sheriff Harry S Truman (Michael Ontkean), who plays deputy to Cooper as the duo come upon levels of sleaze that would make a big metropolitan blush. There are the teenage cohorts of Laura, budding men and women whose stories are inextricably mixed up with hers. There are the adults living lives of unquiet desperation as they battle marital infidelity, drug abuse and mental illness. And then finally, there are the spirits, which,as in every Lynch production, are the real stars of the show, whispering secrets and working plots for which there is no explanation.
Twin Peaks works on so many levels. At its heart, of course, is the murder mystery that unravels the sleepy town’s neuroses. Parallel narrative strands all converge around Laura’s murder. There is the local oligarch, Ben Horne, who wants to build a county club on the land on which a saw mills stands. There is the owner of the saw mill, a woman of Chinese descent called Josie Packard, who is battling intrigues from the sister of her dead husband. There is Leland Palmer, Laura’s father and lawyer to Ben, whose love for his daughter blinds him to the darkness she is fast approaching.
There is lots more: a prostitution ring, sinister bird owners, a broken-heart necklace…At the centre of it all, like a seraph, sits Laura, untouched by the waves of grief and unease her death has unleashed. By setting its drama in a small town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone’s life is entwined with everyone’s, Twin Peaks is able to achieve what other shows like Dexter are unable to: exploit a network of organic relationships that, while giving the story a satisfyingly finite scope, opens into a nearly endless spool of connections.
That would have been good enough. But the triumph of Twin Peaks goes beyond its being a damn good murder mystery. It showcases a time when America was still a place of mills and old-time snacking joints where locals met and shared news and gossip. If it were not for the murder, Twin Peaks, with its redolent Douglas firs and giant water falls, would have been the perfect site for a lazy romance.
By situating its storyline in such a relatable place, Twin Peaks proceeds to subvert our expectations of it. It puts paid to any notion that places that fall off the map are somehow less interesting than the much-lauded hubs of arts and commerce. The murder investigation becomes a ruse to showcase a society breaking apart, whose inhabitants pass their days in the hope of discovering that one true moment of transcendence, but whose lives are instead marked by crushing disappointments.The 2017 reprisal will see several original cast members return. Klye MacLachlan, who was terrific as a man who relies on both hard logic and hallucinatory visions to crack cases, is expected to don the mantle again. The show will doubtless be technically superior to its last avatar but its success will lie in its ability to take viewers back to the dark, coiling menace of a town on the Pacific Northwest where little happens on the surface but a lot goes on underneath.
