TWIN PEAKS: Season One (1990)

"I'll see you in my dreams."

"Not if I see you first."

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” became one the most asked questions in the land of water cooler conversations for a very brief time in the early 1990's.  Created by Hill Street Blues' head-writer Mark Frost and Blue Velvet director David Lynch, Twin Peaks' legacy grew into a pop culture phenomenon that would go on to influence many other hit cult-TV shows for several decades to follow.

In simple, it's about a seemingly sleepy Pacific Northwest town that is turned upside down when the homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, is found dead, wrapped in plastic.  Enter FBI Agent Dale Cooper (decorously played by Kyle MacLachlan) who whisks in and innocently begins unraveling not only the mysterious murder but several of the community's seedy little secrets.  It's a real amusing collection of bizarre characters too, including barking teenagers, ladies with logs and backwards talking dancing dwarfs.

Half quirky satirical soap-opera and half dark twisted mystery, Twin Peaks came at just the right time when television was becoming overly boring and predictable amongst it's hordes of stand-alone episodes.
Right off the bat, the series proves itself to be a very unique addition to the primetime line-up with it's gloomy cinematic feature-length pilot episode.  Filmed near Seattle, Washington, Lynch made the best of the grey skylines, the wind dancing through the dense haunted forests and the ever-present foghorn in the distance.  The moody atmosphere is instantly hypnotizing but lures the audience even further down the rabbit hole with it's humorously bizarre dialogue, oddball character quirks and now-iconic music that switches between cool-cat jazz to melodramatic soap opera themes with great ease, courtesy of Lynch-mob regular Angelo Badalamenti.

Character highlights include the bromantic relationship between Agent Cooper and the local Sheriff Truman, played a refreshingly under-stated performance by Michael Ontkean.  There's the always quirky and humorous banter between Deputy Andy Brennan and the bubbly  secretary Luck Moran.  And let us not forgot the seedy but charismatic Brothers Horne. 

Sadly, after the pilot episode, the series opted to film in California and, like The X-files after it, the series loses quite a bit of it's mood amid the bright and sunny woodlands, which look nothing like the Pacific Northwest.  Thankfully the quality of the writing upholds, with the exception of some red-herring storylines that seem like a lot of the characters were created to add to the strangeness of the town but could never find anything worthwhile beyond that.  Hints of the supernatural begin emerging, especially with the introduction of the unforgettable Red Room and that dancing dwarf I mentioned before, which completely separated Twin Peaks from anything that had ever been seen on American network television ever before. 

In addition to all the bizarre scenarios the series conjured up it also offered some rewarding philosophies and very touching character moments that painted a certain beauty into the world that at times seemed nothing but doom 'n gloom.  A healthy balance of the dark, the humorous, the weird and the compelling helped attract a wide audience that had no idea what was to come, and that was the allure (until a certain point) that had every body talking week after week.

In just 2 months of airing the entirety of it's first season, Twin Peaks was that show everyone was talking about and most couldn't wait to what was next after it's cliff-hanging season finale.  The question was, could it keeps it's perfect balance of unpredictable weirdness and high quality writing?