‘Closure. I keep hearing that word,” David Lynch told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1990, just as Twin Peaks was beginning its run. “Everybody knows that on television they’ll see the end of the story in the last 15 minutes. It’s like a drug. To me, that’s the beauty of Twin Peaks: we throw in some curve balls. As soon as a show has a sense of closure, it gives you an excuse to forget you’ve seen the damn thing.”

Lynch had the last laugh. Forced to cut Twin Peaks short 14 months later, he left everything wide open. Actually, it was Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI agent, Dale Cooper, who literally had the last laugh. The show’s final scene saw him cackling maniacally into the bathroom mirror he’d just smashed his head against, blood running down his forehead, apparently possessed by the show’s demonic spirit, Killer Bob. As series endings go, it was the textbook opposite of “closure”.

And, as Lynch predicted, nobody ever forgot they’d seen the damn thing. Like Laura Palmer, the corpse at the heart of its story, Twin Peaks became as beguiling in death as it was in life, to the extent that it has been dug up and resurrected, finally ending what must be the longest cliffhanger in entertainment history. It would be poetic justice if Twin Peaks peaked again, but it returns to a television landscape radically transformed, and a major factor in that transformation was Twin Peaks itself.

In retrospect, Twin Peaks was the darkest hour before the dawn of the TV golden age. Even before it was broadcast, it was being billed as “the series that will change TV”. Today, its influence has seeped so deep into TV’s box set, binge-watch DNA, it is almost unnoticeable. Everything is “a bit like Twin Peaks” now: every time we see a brutalised female corpse whose murder takes a whole season to solve; every time we visit a small community disproportionately populated by eccentrics and suspects; every time we’re disoriented by surreal dream sequences and occult mysticism; every time we’re presented with a sprawling puzzle of a plot that prompts fevered fan speculation.

The mirror crack’d … Kyle MacLachlan in the final scene of season two of Twin Peaks.

None of these things were particularly in vogue in the early 90s, when the cutting-edge detective series was Murder, She Wrote and the schedules were dominated by sitcoms such as Cheers, The Simpsons and The Cosby Show (which admittedly looks a little Twin Peaks in hindsight). So little faith did Kyle MacLachlan have that the show would be a hit, he faithlessly signed a five-year contract before shooting the pilot, as did the rest of the cast. “We all signed, thinking: ‘Well, this is kind of a formality but it really doesn’t mean anything. This is probably not going to go any further.’” As Lynch’s regular leading man, MacLachlan was familiar with failure, after Dune, but they had also tasted success with Blue Velvet, the movie that introduced Lynch’s trademark – “sunny Americana with a dark, festering underbelly” – into the post-Reagan national consciousness. It was one thing to do that in an R-rated arthouse movie, though; Twin Peaks was mainstream prime time.



“We thought: ‘There’s just no way that people are ready for this,’” remembers MacLachlan. “Not that the story itself was so unusual – it was a murder mystery takes place in this small town – but the people that populate that town, and what they do, and how they behave, and what’s going on under the surface … that was not expected. And when it happens on television, that has a great impact because it’s right there in your living room. Television was supposed to make you comfortable and make you feel good, and this was not about being comfortable. This was about something else.”

Lynch made Twin Peaks like he was making a movie. Compared to the cheap TV visuals of the era, it is still gorgeous to behold: consciously styled, dressed, lit and colour-coded, with surprising angles, ominous tracking shots and mood-establishing imagery. The tone was as important as the content: disorienting and ambiguous, veering between detective procedural, soap opera, occult horror, black comedy, even slapstick. “Everything that David does is cinematic,” says MacLachlan. “He’s an artist and he works in a lot of different types of media: painting, sculpture, photography. I think he looked at TV as just another canvas for telling stories.”

Watch a trailer for the new series of Twin Peaks.

Lynch's storytelling is very pure. He doesn't imitate Kyle MacLachlan

Opinions vary as to the exact moment Twin Peaks peaked. Was it when David Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine? When Japanese fans started holding mock Laura Palmer funerals? When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly asked President Bush senior to find out who the killer was?

But everyone can agree about when the show troughed: 10 November 1990, when Laura Palmer’s killer was finally revealed. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost didn’t want to solve the mystery so soon. They didn’t want to solve it at all, in fact, but their network, ABC, was getting impatient. Mainstream viewers were getting impatient, too. Confused by scheduling changes and backwards-talking dwarves, their attention was shifting to other things, such as the Gulf War over on CNN. Lynch’s attention had also shifted, to his new movie Wild at Heart. Once the killer was revealed, interest tailed off further. As Lynch said: “It was like we had a little goose that kept laying golden eggs, and then we were asked to take that little goose and snip its head off.”

Twin Peaks’s demise was arguably as influential as its existence. For one thing, no TV programme would ever again wrap up its defining mystery halfway through the series. In retrospect, said Bob Iger, president of ABC, Twin Peaks should have been a seven-hour show. “And when hour seven ended, we should have found out who killed Laura Palmer and it should have faded into history … as one of the more significant shows that ever aired on network television.”

Palmer pilot … Sheryl Lee in the first episode of Twin Peaks. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

It wasn’t quite that simple to perfect the formula, as ABC found with its 1993 miniseries Wild Palms. Its similarities to Twin Peaks went beyond just the title: big-name film director (Oliver Stone), cinematic production values, and a sprawling plot full of strange characters, mysterious clues and arcane references; this time with a definitive ending. Of course, it failed to capture the imagination, as have myriad other Twin Peaks knock-offs ever since, including 2010’s short-lived Happy Town or M Night Shyamalan’s recent Wayward Pines.

But the trail Lynch blazed from the arthouse to the small screen became an expressway – to cinema’s loss and television’s gain. Look how many 90s auteurs are now working in television: David Fincher (House of Cards), Jane Campion (Top of the Lake), Baz Luhrmann (The Get Down), Steven Soderbergh (The Knick), even Spike Lee and Woody Allen. And for the next generation of TV auteurs, Twin Peaks became the defining text. Here’s Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner: “I was already out of college when Twin Peaks came on, and that was where I became aware of what was possible on television.” Here’s Lost creator Carlton Cuse talking about Bates Motel: “We pretty much ripped off Twin Peaks … I loved that show. They only did 30 episodes. [We] thought we’d do the 70 that are missing.” Here’s David Chase, creator of The Sopranos: “As surreal as Twin Peaks could be, and as particular as it could be, as it was it felt more like real life to me than the average hour-long television show.” And here’s Donald Glover on Atlanta: “I just always wanted to make Twin Peaks with rappers.”

Walk with me … David Lynch directs Jake Wardle and James Marshall in the new series. Photograph: Suzanne Tenner/Showtime

It’s not just the way Twin Peaks was made that changed television; it’s also the way it was watched. The early 1990s was a time when “the internet” was still the stuff of sci-fi movies and military bases. Few people had access to it, even fewer knew what to do with it if they did. You couldn’t stream video or even upload a decent-resolution cat picture, but one thing you could do was communicate with other people about shared interests – such as TV programmes.

Henry Jenkins had just started as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Twin Peaks was on air. Being a fan, and away from his family, he found himself spending time on the alt.tv.twinpeaks group on Usenet, the virtual water cooler of the era. He was fascinated by how fans were attempting to decipher the show’s puzzles collectively, offering their own theories as to who killed Laura Palmer, pooling insight from various disciplines: literature, movie lore, psychology, the occult.

“As a media scholar, it was such a rich site for getting insight into how people were processing television,” Jenkins says. “The way they were approaching Twin Peaks was, in part, as a problem-solving activity: crack the code, solve the mystery but, beyond that, try to be a few steps ahead of Lynch and Frost. It was the way the authors were structuring this narrative so it was about decipherment, about solving something together, that led to that community’s interest.”

The internet paved the way for a more complex kind of television series. Programmes such as Lost and Game of Thrones have courted that level of “forensic fandom”, but the approach is only really made viable by modern media tools: streaming services, YouTube, video editing and social media.

Peaks performance … (left to right) Mädchen Amick, Peggy Lipton, Everet McGill, Wendy Robie, Kyle MacLachlan. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

In that sense, Twin Peaks arrived just too early. “What’s interesting to me,” says Jenkins, “is that the TV critics and much of the general public were saying it was just becoming too complex that they couldn’t follow it any more, whereas the fans online were saying it was starting to become too simple and obvious!” And unless you knew someone who’d been assiduously videotaping it, there was no way to catch up or rewatch or jump in halfway.

“It could only lose viewers,” Jenkins observes. “Whereas, in today’s streaming environment, when we discover there’s a show everyone’s talking about, we can go online and watch the earlier episodes.”

The internet has at least kept the Twin Peaks flame burning in the interim, growing a fan community considerably larger than the small town itself, and sustaining the prospect of a revival. So will the fans finally get their “closure”? Do they even want it? It is hard to see how, now that it’s returning, Twin Peaks can live up to expectations. But it could remind today’s audience-tested, strategically mapped-out TV industry what it’s missing. Just as Dale Cooper identified suspects by throwing stones at bottles with his eyes shut, so Lynch has spoken of creating the show as a process of discovery and intuition. Killer Bob, for example, was only incorporated into the story because Lynch accidentally caught a set dresser (Frank Silva) in shot and decided to give him a role.

This mix of oblivious innocence and mysterious intention is part of both Lynch’s genius and Twin Peaks’s enduring appeal. Nobody really knew how much he had it all figured out and how much he was making it up as he went along. We still don’t. Even MacLachlan doesn’t. He can only describe Lynch’s creative process as “vague”. But, like the rest of us, he was happy to follow Lynch into the woods one more time: “His storytelling is very pure. He doesn’t imitate anything, he’s not trying to follow a certain formula. I don’t think he knows how to do it any other way.”

Twin Peaks starts at Monday 22 May at 2am on Sky Atlantic & Now TV, and at 2pm AEST on Stan in Australia – the same time as it premieres in the US. It repeats from Tuesday 23 May at 9pm