Hey guys, sorry for the delays this last week. I'm back on some medications I've been off of for a while and it's been altering my mood and I've been physically kinda blah. That's all just from readjusting though, so don't worry. I'm back today with my first TV review! I hope you enjoy!
When I originally decided to start this blog, I absolutely wanted to talk about television as well as movies. Today, it feels like those two mediums go hand-in-hand. Many shows are almost like movies with their budgets and production values. Actors famous from films will now do Amazon Prime TV shows. David Fincher was/is an acclaimed film director, but also was the mastermind behind the Netflix hit shows House of Cards and Mindhunter. But this wasn’t always the case.
Things were different back in the day, including the angles we'd sit at to watch TV
Image via Flickr
Back in the day, you might have some people get their start on TV before moving onto films. And you had falling stars transition to television after their box office appeal drops. If you look at the filmography of nearly anyone you can think of, you’ll see both TV and movie credits in their resume. But it’s a pretty solid fact that most actors and actresses and directors and such were either a film star or a TV star. Very few were known for both. That all really began to change in the 90s.
The first show I wanted to review for this blog was the animated series The Critic. It ran for two short seasons from 1994-1995 on ABC and then FOX. Jon Lovitz voiced the main character, a film critic, and the show poked fun at many movies and celebrities of the day, showing clips and trailers for fake movies Howard Stern’s End (parody of Howard’s End) and Speed 2: Speed Reading. I thought that, since this blog is a review of movies from this time period, what better show to start off with than this one? But I realized I needed to talk about another show first: Twin Peaks.
The obsession of America
In thinking about other shows in the next few months that I was going to write about: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even animated flair like Spider-Man: The Animated Series… I decided the first thing I should talk about was the show that helped transition into the type of ongoing narrative that these shows all had in common.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. The magical thing about Twin Peaks wasn’t in that it created any individual part anew. But rather how it combined certain things and, with sharp writing and acting, created something that had never before been seen on television. Twin Peaks was a phenomenon in 1990, and it’s hard to explain today. But I’m going to try.
Let’s start with the story. The show was created by notable filmmaker David Lynch and his partner, TV writer Mark Frost. At its core, Twin Peaks is a murder mystery. A young high school student, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is found dead by a river, wrapped in plastic. The local police can’t make anything of it, so they call for help to the FBI and they send in Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). The show descends from there into a dozen different storylines. I don’t want to go into detail on them here, because half the fun of watching the show is seeing where it takes you. In one of the videos I’ll link below, Lynch describes Laura’s death as a tree with all these different branches springing out of it.
One of Lynch’s core storytelling tropes is the unraveling of the “American Dream.” You see that in his movies like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. You’re presented with a beautiful, picturesque, ideal version of American life. Then you see something shocking and disturbing. And suddenly, the layers start to come off, like an onion. And as they peel away over and over, you see that the onion was really rotten on the inside and you realize that, even though you might not have seen it on the surface, this onion was dark and disgusting underneath. Laura has been presented as a do-no-wrong, straight-A Queen of the Prom who loves to do charity work and loves her boyfriend and the further the authorities and characters investigate her murder, they see how dark her life really was. And the branches that come out of her tree get darker as well. Some of them are explained by ordinary criminals. Some branches are the result of more… supernatural activities. As Cooper and the police investigate, they get further and further swept into the unknown, a dark evil presence that resides in the woods and lives in a place called “The Lounge.” The show gets incredibly surreal at times, with The Lodge and its inhabitants using vague metaphors and exhibiting behavior and movements that are… a bit off.
Photos don't do this justice. These scenes are weird. Just watch the show...
Who killed Laura Palmer? That was the question on everyone’s minds. It was a literal watercooler discussion the next morning at work. There’s an urban legend that a huge fan of the show was none other than Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s said that he actually called up US President George HW. Bush and asked him to find out who did it. Bush contacted Lynch who refused to tell them. It seems a little far fetched, apparently since Gorbachev doesn’t even recall the show today, but I digress. Read about it here. The point is, America was obsessed with knowing who did it. And this is where Twin Peaks brought in the biggest change to television in the 90s: Long-form storytelling.
Now, “long-form storytelling” existed before this show. Soap operas had been a thing since the days of radio. Hell, books used to be serialized in newspapers back in the 1800s, that’s how many literally classics from people like Charles Dickens got their work out there. In the world of television, there were soap operas. There were prime-time soap operas like Dynasty and Dallas, the latter of which was famous for its “Who shot JR?” mystery. And there were shows like Hill Street Blues and Cheers that let storylines sizzle over episodes, but there was always a return to the basic status quo after an episode or two. Twin Peaks was one of the early shows to buck that and keep the show evolving and changing from episode to episode. Later shows, like The X-Files, created a fusion of the two concepts, so where you would have an ongoing storyline throughout the run of the series, but also individual stand-alone episodes. Twin Peaks though, every episode was must-watch, otherwise, you’d be lost in the flow.
The show can turn your brain to this. It's wonderful!
Sadly, the series ended after only 30 episodes and two seasons. The last episode airing on June 10, 1991. Unfortunately, while they were pushing for a third season, declining ratings caused the network to cancel the show. The sad truth is, the second season is good, but not quite as good as the first. The network forced Lynch to wrap up the Laura Palmer murder storyline early and he basically stepped away from the show until the end of the season. Sad, really, since the show ended on a huge cliffhanger and had many, many loose plot threads. But don’t let that deter you from watching that, especially since that would not be the end of Twin Peaks.
With a cliffhanger it would take over two decades to resolve!
Let’s talk about the cast. Twin Peaks has a huge, ensemble cast. Ready? Okay, here we go, try to keep up. In addition to Cooper and Laura Palmer, some of the other standout characters: Laura’s mother and father, Sarah and Leland (Grace Zabriskie and Ray Wise). There was Laura’s boyfriend, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), and her two friends Donna Hayward and James Hurley (Lara Flynn Boyle and James Marshall). Leland Palmer was also the lawyer for businessman and the owner of the Great Northern Hotel, Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), who works with his brother Jerry (David Patrick Kelly) and has a daughter, Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn). They are involved with a land-deal with a lumbermill owned by Josie Packard (Joan Chen) and her sister-in-law Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) and her husband Pete (Jack Nance). Let’s see… oh, there is also the Double R dinner ran by Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) who employs a young waitress, Shelly Johnson (Madchen Amick). They are both married to unscrupulous individuals, Hank Jennings (Chris Mulkey) and Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re). Shelly is friends with Bobby Briggs and Norma has a past with Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) who is married to Nadine (Wendy Robie) and is also Bobby’s uncle. Then, of course, we have the local police force, led by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), and Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse). Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) is the station secretary. Assisting Cooper and the local police are FBI Special Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) and Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (played amazingly by David Lynch himself). Then there are the supernatural characters: Killer Bob (Frank Silva), The One-Armed Man (Al Strobel), The Giant (Carel Struycken), and The Man from Another Place (Michael J Anderson). Other important characters include psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tomblyn) and The Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson). And we also had some small roles from Heather Graham (Norma Jenning’s sister, Annie Blackburn) and Billy Zane (John Justice Wheeler, involved in business with Ben Horne). And there are dozens of smaller characters I didn’t mention. And what’s amazing is they’re all important, some more than others sure, but you need them all for the story to work. And it’s easier to keep track of them and their relationships with each other than you might think. And really, except for a bad egg here and there, all of them play their parts well and do their characters justice.
There were a couple of other characters that I wanted to mention separately because I wanted to elaborate on them a bit more. Sheryl Lee was originally supposed to play Laura Palmer’s dead body and also some camcorder footage. The thing is though, she’s captivating. And Lynch recognized that. So what did he do? He wrote the actress back into the show with a new character, Laura’s identical cousin, Madeline Ferguson.
Again, a still shot doesn't do this justice. Watch the show, she's captivating in this small bit.
Image by ABC/Showtime via Medium.com
The same thing happened with the One-Armed Man, played by Strobel. The character was supposed to be just a one-off, but Lynch wrote him in after being so impressed by him. And of course, Killer Bob, Frank Silva… Frank was a set dresser and, at the end of the first episode, was accidentally reflected in the mirror of a scene where Laura’s mother was having a nervous breakdown. Lynch loved it and wrote the Killer Bob character for Silva to play throughout the run of the show. Don Davis plays Bobby Briggs’ father, Major Garland Briggs. He’s in the air force and ends up being important to the plot. I think it’s hilarious because there are three roles that I know this actor for. Twin Peaks (air force major), playing Scully’s father in The X-Files (navy captain), and being the leader of the Stargate project in Stargate SG-1 (army general). Literally, everything I can easily remember seeing him in, he’s been an officer in some branch of the military, but Twin Peaks was his first big break.
Speaking of first big breaks and the X-Files, David Duchovny shows up in this as well as a DEA Agent…. Denise Bryson. Duchovny plays a Transgender. In 1990 on network television. And if I’m honest with you, I think it’s handled extremely tastefully. Sure, at the time, it fit the overall “weird” vibe of the show. But it’s not played for laughs. When asked about it, Duchovny’s character explains that she had to dress in drag to go undercover and it really just felt natural to her afterward. And it’s not something that’s really… I mean, it isn’t completely ignored on the show, but it’s not like every scene is “Hey! Look! A man in a dress! That’s funny and weird and unnatural!” Most of the time it’s just… treated normally. Pretty progressive, especially for the time.
I think she's pretty, I don't care what anyone might say
Psych was another show Twin Peaks had a strong influence on, even having an episode called “Dual Spires” that was a tribute to Twin Peaks, containing many references to the show and having much of the original cast guest star in the episode. The Killing, Bates Motel, and Gravity Falls are other contemporary programs that have cited Twin Peaks as a reference. It was parodied by The Simpsons in the episode “Lisa’s Sax” as well as “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Saturday Night Live, Northern Exposure (which was filmed in Roslyn, Washington, near the Twin Peaks locations), and Sesame Street of all things have all done parody scenes or made references to Twin Peaks. The Sesame Street in particular one is hilarious, as Cookie Monster plays “Agent Cookie” travels to Twin Beaks and eats some “darn good pie.” He’s trying to find out why the town is called Twin Beaks and asks birds David Finch and Laura and doesn’t get a “darn fine answer.” And the Twin Peaks influences extend to video games as well, notably in Alan Wake, Deadly Premonition, Life is Strange, and the Silent Hill series. But also on Max Payne, Mizzurna Falls, and even parts of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Many bands have also written songs about the show, including “Laura Palmer” by Bastille and “North Bend” by Lovely Bad Things.
Twin Peaks references are fun to keep an eye out for
The show was originally going to be set in, and titled, North Dakota. Then they moved it to the Pacific Northwest and called it Northwest Passage, before finally going with Twin Peaks. The idea for the Laura Palmer murder sprang from the real-life unsolved 1908 murder of Hazel Irene Drew in Sand Lake, New York. You can see more about that here. Lynch and Frost met and became friends while working on a Marilyn Monroe biopic that was later shelved by Warner Bros. And it was Lynch’s manager, Tony Krantz, that convinced Lynch to do a show about his vision of America like he did in Blue Velvet. Lynch and Frost worked on the concept and pitched it to ABC in 1988. ABC greenlit the project and they filmed a pilot. An interesting note about the pilot is that they filmed an actual ending. The idea was, if ABC didn’t want to pick up the series after seeing the pilot, they could use it as a made-for-TV movie. This version did actually see a release in theaters and home video. Honestly, it isn’t all that amazing. But if you’re curious, it’s on YouTube, you can see the Alternate Ending here. I don’t recommend watching it unless you’ve seen the show already.
Actual screenshot from the alternate finale
Image via Flicker
The fictional town of Twin Peaks is in Washington state “five miles south of the Canadian border, and twelve miles west of the state line.” That would put it in the Salmo-Priest Wilderness. The shooting locations were mostly in Washington also, the towns of Snoqualmie, North Bend, and Fall City. Living in Portland, I am 3-4 hours away from these towns, and absolutely plan on making a pilgrimage to what is my own personal Mecca. Some locations were shot in Malibu, California, and some interiors in a warehouse in San Fernando, CA. In August 1992, Lynch decided to have the premiere of the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in North Bend. It was an exciting festival and some fans of the show thought it would be great to have an organized event there every year, thus Twin Peaks Fest was born. Every year, hundreds would congregate and they would have organized tours, meet and greets with various actors, and screenings of other David Lynch films. In 2019, CBS decided to move in and make the Twin Peaks Festival an official event, moving its location to Memphis, Tennessee. The festival was supposed to take place in April but was moved to Halloween weekend due to COVID-19. You can read about the announcement of the move on this website and also visit the old Twin Peaks Festival site for more info about the old event.
I mean, Memphis is great and all, I adore it... but Memphis doesn't have the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge in Snoqualmie, Washington, where the exteriors for the Great Northern Hotel was shot for the show
There is so much I could talk about, there are literally books written on this show. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of Twin Peaks, here are some recommended YouTube videos and websites. The Take’s What’s So Great About Twin Peaks, WhatCulture’s 10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn’t Know About Twin Peaks, CineFix’s 7 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Twin Peaks, Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer’s theme, Twin Peaks Stars Explain Why The Show Was A Cultural Phenomenon, Polygon’s Why Twin Peaks Doesn’t Need Jump Scares, ScreenCrush’s Twin Peaks - So You Think You Know TV?, Looper’s The Untold Truth of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost being interviewed by the BBC in April of 1990, and Lynch on Late Night with David Letterman on February 27, 1991. Phew. That's a lot, but it's all highly entertaining. If you really, really, really want to go down the rabbit hole… Twin Perfect has a 4.5 hour long video explaining the entire franchise, including the movie and Showtime series. You can see it here and his near 1.5 hour long “more evidence” video here. I haven’t watched them, I don’t want to watch 7 hours of someone telling me what a show means, but I thought their existence was interesting enough to include here. A great resource on the show is Welcome to Twin Peaks, very comprehensive news and fansite for the show, they have a lot of sections and it’s fun to poke around and see what’s on there.
There is more Twin Peaks after the two seasons aired in the early 90s. In 1992, David Lynch released a theatrical feature film called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. It serves as both a sequel and prequel to the show but does not resolve the cliffhanger ending or any of the loose threads. Honestly, it isn’t that good. I’ll review it more in-depth at a later time. But it is required watching for the next chapter of the franchise, Twin Peaks: The Return. An 18-episode event that aired on Showtime in 2017. And boy, is it a trip. I’m not focusing on that today because, while these seasons are set in the same story, the presentation is vastly different. If Twin Peaks was unique for 1990, then The Return is unlike anything ever done on television before. I highly recommend watching it.
Literally my face when I heard about Twin Peaks: The Return
The horses are not what they seem
Final Thoughts:
The show is for sure one of my favorite of all time. Groundbreaking and entertaining and something that I still think about years after seeing it for the first time. I can’t think of much more to say about it that I haven’t already waxed poetically about in the above talk. I guess I should add what I remember about the show when it was originally on the air. Not much. I was 8 when it debuted and had parents that were very strict with what I watched. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed or appreciated it anyway if I had seen it. I know my aunt was into it and I was aware of how popular it was. But I didn’t get around to watching it until years later. Remember, we didn’t have Netflix back then, I couldn’t binge it! My real earliest exposure to it was a Darkwing Duck episode called “Twin Beaks” where they travel to the mysterious town of Twin Beaks and find Bushroot wrapped in plastic. Darkwing has a dream where Launchpad tells him “The Cows Are Not What They Seem.” The episode honestly shares a lot in common with other creepy sci-fi, specifically Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead, but there are some strong Twin Peaks vibes here. It was one of the episodes that really stuck with me, since it was so odd and unusual and, honestly, a little bit scary. But anyway, I love Twin Peaks and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a quirky mystery.
Damn good show
But that’s just what I think. Have you seen it? I know some of you out there have. If not, visit Just Watch to see where it’s streaming. And remember to watch the movie if you want to tackle the third season, which I highly recommend also. Leave me a comment down below about your favorite character or episode or song used in the show or anything else you’d like to say. And check back eventually for a review of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and down the road, when I do my Lit Fam 2010's Blog, I'll talk about Twin Peaks: The Return. So, I guess I'll see you again in 25 years. Meanwhile...
No comments:
Post a Comment