My favorite show of all time and a note on wisteria

My favorite TV show is Twin Peaks. I watched the pilot live on ABC in 1990 and was hooked immediately. The show came along at the right time for me, just as I was beginning to develop a passion for the moving image. It introduced me to David Lynch, who would become one of my favorite filmmakers. It opened my eyes to what could be done with a wild imagination. Its mix of mystery, humor and horror seemed like the perfect genre hybrid to me; it wasn't just one thing. I came to believe, and still do, that the famous "weirdness" of the show combined with other elements to create a kind of realism missing from pretty much everything else I had seen to that point. I didn't understand how that worked; I don't know if I understand it now, how Lynch gets away with the insane tonal shifts in his work, how they seem to make the work stronger and more meaningful. Plenty of people disagree, of course—but for me, it was a life changer, probably the most influential work of my youth.

The show is wildly uneven. The best episodes, by far, are those directed by Lynch himself. Of the 30 episodes across seasons one and two, Lynch directs just six. He was not always involved and it shows as lesser directors and writers attempt to keep the show moving forward. But the Lynch-directed episodes and the overall arc are so extraordinary, with some of those episodes among the best television ever aired, that the show became a cult object.

For the most part, the two original seasons stand as a bizarre parody of the primetime soap opera and, despite occasionally being the scariest show ever, with an unmatched intensity of violence and dread, most of the time it's a gentle, even silly, mystery show. It's a quirky show with quirky characters and quirky obsessions (coffee and cherry pie, for example) that, briefly, became a cultural phenomenon.

Lynch followed up the cancelled series the following year with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a feature film prequel that bombed with audiences and critics. The tone of FWWM is considerably darker and scarier than the show, apart from a few key moments of the series. It did nothing to resolve the cliffhanger ending of the show, which probably pissed off some viewers, who were also largely unprepared for what an actual David Lynch film could be like. The film features graphic violence, nudity and sex and spends a large chunk of time not in Twin Peaks at all, nor does Agent Cooper play a major role. It revels in the crazy mythology Mark Frost and Lynch created for the show, digging deeper, but explaining very little. And it's a horror film. It's not without humor and fun surprises, but in its telling of the last days of Laura Palmer it's about as dark as you can get.

FWWM is a tour-de-force, a cult film that was eventually reassessed beyond the context of the original series and placed alongside Lynch's other films. Particularly after Lost Highway, and especially after Mulholland Drive (when Highway was reassessed), FWWM could be seen as an important piece in the development of many of Lynch's eternal themes. It's full of characteristic stylistic flourishes; it also features a Sheryl Lee performance for the ages, as the doomed homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. More importantly—and a big part of its eventual critical reassessment—is its framing of the killing. The show is about the aftermath of Laura's death and the ultimate identify of the killer is terrifying, but FWWM clarifies the intent and makes the subtext text. Twin Peaks is a story about the horror of child sexual abuse, the pure evil of it; the film makes this powerfully clear. It shows us the generational tragedy—that abused children become abusing adults—the psychological dissociation and destruction, and the unwillingness of other people to accept the truth. It's utterly devastating, the ultimate horror, and it's fascinating to see how the film enriches the show, making it darker and stranger, too.

As a superfan, one of the happiest days of my life was when I could finally turn on Showtime on May 21, 2017, and begin watching Season Three, officially called Twin Peaks: The Return. Unlike the original series, the entire eighteen hour season was directed by David Lynch and written with original co-creator, Mark Frost. As soon as it was established that Lynch would direct the whole thing I was ecstatic. On pay cable, with Lynch in control of everything, I knew we were going to get something much more like Fire Walk With Me than the original series. I wondered if the executives even had any idea what they were doing. They were handing one of the greatest filmmakers and artists, a master surrealist indifferent to audience expectations—who, in fact, often has seemed to delight in trolling his audience in a way not seen since the heyday of Jean-Luc Godard—eighteen HOURS of network time and the freedom to do whatever the fuck he wanted (within budget constraints, of course). Eighteen hours is NINE MOVIES, give or take. Previous to The Return, Lynch had directed ten feature films. So over the summer of 2017 David Lynch essentially doubled his career output. Lynch fans might not be the biggest cult, but we rejoiced. This was what they call a magnum opus.

Having watched The Return, I consider it to be the greatest television work ever. I am not alone in this, though it was absolutely true that it turned out to be some of the most hysterical audience trolling of Lynch's career and plenty of people did not watch, or watched a bit then stopped. Forget FWWM: on the David Lynch Strangeness Scale, The Return is sometimes at Eraserhead levels. For Lynch fans, this is nirvana. Now I find myself watching it again and I thought I'd keep a bit of a running journal of my rewatch on this blog. Stay tuned.

And speaking of staying tuned, in doing a little web research tonight as I wrote this, I discovered that it appears Lynch is actually filming Season Four for Netflix right now. This is a totally secret, unannounced thing. There have been strong rumors of a Netflix series in the works from Lynch, but nothing to suggest it's related to Peaks. However, as of this past summer, many, many Twin Peaks actors and some key production personnel have made oblique social media references to "wisteria," which is the known working title for the Lynch/Netflix project. Mark Frost has denied involvement in Lynch's new show, but he did the same thing with reference to Season Three after he had already started writing it with Lynch. This possibility is so very exciting!