Twin Peaks returned after 25 years, and critics called it the decade's best film
Twin Peaks premiered on ABC in April 1990 as a small-town murder mystery and quickly became something stranger: a mix of detective story, soap opera and dream logic. Cancelled in 1991, it came back on Showtime in 2017, and Cahiers du Cinéma named the revival the best film of the 2010s.
Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the series opens in 1989 when a logger finds the body of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic beside a river in a fictional Washington lumber town. FBI special agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, arrives to investigate and finds a tiny typed letter R hidden under her fingernail, linking the case to an earlier killing. Laura's diaries reveal a secret life far removed from her wholesome public image.
What set the show apart was how Cooper solved crimes. He trusts dreams, including one in a red-curtained room where a dwarf in a red suit speaks in coded riddles, and a vision in which a giant gives him three clues, among them the line that the owls are not what they seem. The town is full of eccentrics, from a scheming hotelier to the Log Lady, and Angelo Badalamenti's score, composed with Lynch, sets its dreamy, uneasy mood.
The second season resolved the central mystery and then drifted into new storylines, including Cooper's vengeful former partner Windom Earle and two otherworldly realms, the White Lodge and the Black Lodge, hidden in the surrounding woods. It ended on a cliffhanger, with Cooper's evil double loose in the world. The 1992 film Fire Walk with Me served as a prequel.
Showtime announced a third season on October 6, 2014. Lynch and Frost wrote every episode and Lynch directed, insisting it was a continuation rather than a reboot, set 25 years after the cliffhanger. MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee and much of the original cast came back, joined by Laura Dern, Tim Roth and Naomi Watts. Across its run the show earned 27 Primetime Emmy nominations and two wins, and it is routinely ranked among the greatest television series ever made.
Source: Twin Peaks
