In the coming days and weeks, much will be made about David Lynch’s gargantuan contribution to cinema. This will be undeniable and well deserved. However, there is the argument to be made that David Lynch was able to master every medium in which he chose to work. His music, for instance, sounded like music that only he could make. And, sincerely, in both his daily weather report and his Today’s Number Is lottery draw, he deserves to be remembered as a pioneering YouTuber.
However, in terms of pure influence, it might end up being the case that Lynch’s most important realm was television. In his lifetime, Lynch only ever worked on four TV projects. Two of them were cancelled after just three episodes. But the other two were Twin Peaks. And the impact both Twin Peaks series had on TV as a medium is hard to overstate.
We’ll start with the original. Hot from the career-defining success of Blue Velvet, David Lynch was initially hesitant to work within what he at that point felt was the lower form of television. But after teaming up with former Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost, he realised what the pair could be capable of together. Frost’s more formalised, drama-driven narrative chops paired well with Lynch’s murky surrealism, and they went to work producing a small-town murder mystery. A girl next door. An idealistic detective. A peripheral cast of oddballs. And The Red Room, an unknowable antechamber connecting the real world to another dimension, that Lynch claimed to have thought up by touching a warm car on a cold night.
To say Twin Peaks was a sensation would be to do it a huge disservice. The show seemed to have something for everyone. Those raised on the tropes of traditional TV found themselves invested in the murder of Laura Palmer, but a younger and hipper generation saw the game behind the story. This was Lynch stretching his legs, getting to explore the dark underbelly of America in more depth than ever before, and having fun with it. Twin Peaks riffed on tired old genre beats in an irresistible way. Some of it was affectionate, some of it scornful. And in Bob, played by the show’s malevolent-looking set dresser Frank Silva, he hit upon what might be the most genuinely terrifying character ever to reach network television.
The first two episodes, broadcast together as a pilot, qualified as the highest-rated movie on television that year. The next gave ABC its highest ratings for four years. It was nominated for 14 Emmy awards. It has a 91% Rotten Tomatoes ratings – which, for a show broadcast in an era where every show was reviewed by every publication, is huge.
Twin Peaks’ glory days wouldn’t last long. Pressure to wrap up the murder mystery, along with what seemed like a declining interest on Lynch’s part, meant that ratings dropped off precipitously in the show’s second season, leading to its cancellation. But look at any prestigious programme made during the so-called golden age of television and Twin Peaks’ fingerprints are all over it. The surreal turns of Breaking Bad. The visual motifs that run through The Sopranos. The mysteries of Lost. The deliberate, steady pace of Mad Men. All of these, and so many more, owe a heavy debt to Lynch.
But Lynch’s adventures in television didn’t begin and end with Twin Peaks. In 1992, Lynch and Frost tried to do for the sitcom what Twin Peaks did for the detective show, and came up with On the Air. Made for ABC, On the Air still defies any form of proper explanation. It was slapstick, satirical, absurdist and – in parts – as nightmarish as anything Lynch ever made. It bewildered viewers to such an extent that ABC pulled it off-air midway through its run, leaving four episodes that have never been seen by a mainstream audience. Parts of it can (and really should) be seen on YouTube. The following year, Lynch made The Hotel Room for HBO. A half-hour drama, with every episode set in the same hotel room at a different point in time, three episodes were made with the intention to turn it into a full series, but interest was muted and those initial episodes were left orphaned.
And that was it for David Lynch and television until, once again, Twin Peaks came calling. At the time it was announced, Showtime’s David Nevins described 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return as “the pure heroin version of David Lynch”, and, well, he wasn’t wrong. Ferociously uncompromising, The Return was able to stretch television into forms that it had never reached, and may never reach again. Lynch used the new Twin Peaks to deny the viewer any guide ropes whatsoever. Scenes went on for much longer than they had any right to. Favourite old characters like Dale Cooper returned in deliberately warped and unsatisfactory versions of themselves. Logical endings were set up and ignored.
And then there was episode eight, which truly deserves to go down in history. Ostensibly a mythology dump designed to explain the entire show, it instead dragged us into the mushroom cloud of a literal nuclear explosion and blasted the frightening atonal shrieks of Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima at us. In terms of structure and narrative, the episode told us nothing. But those who saw it were left with a knot in their gut that exists to this day. Episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return wasn’t just the high point of the series, or even the high point of David Lynch’s career. It was the high-water mark of the entire medium, a moment that is unlikely to ever be equalled, let alone bettered. Talk about a legacy.
