We live in what’s called a golden age of telly. All them great shows and we have access to the whole lot. Binge a season of Breaking Bad this week, tweet that meme from The Wire, remind everyone you know that you’re gonna start watching The Sopranos from the start again. Or if not that then Mad Men, yeah gotta finish Mad Men. Ironically none of those shows are still airing but, you know, the legacy lives on.

Like with Twin Peaks, which in many ways foreshadowed all of that – at least that’s the reputation. We’ve got all the ingredients, a quality cast but more importantly an auteur pair of showrunners (one of them with real movie cred!), a compelling plot driven narrative which holds up on rewatch (if it didn’t then this’d be a pretty dumb concept for a series of articles, right?), a recognisable setting with enough familiar places and characters to create the hint of an atmosphere which isn’t supposed to be possible in the cardboard-background world of television. Plus Twin Peaks always had that element of prestige, [cherry] stemming from the general air of quality that it held itself in. Concepts were high, scenes were shot with care and purpose, the acting was good enough… all them things.

Which is why it’s funny that the show is so heavily influenced by soap operas. Throughout the series characters are seen catching a glimpse of ‘Invitation to Love’, the local soapie, in which other characters, with their extra layer of fiction, are constantly betrayed and betraying, thrust into excessively dramatic situations. Yet Twin Peaks itself is a show about a murder in Small Town USA, population 51201. There are standoffs with guns, there are significant drug syndicates, there are passionate love affairs, there are nefarious deals being done. And everyone, repeat: everyone, is double-crossing someone.

Okay, so let’s try and put some of this into logical sense. Cooper is the FBI agent assigned to the town to try solve the murder. He’s working with Sheriff Truman who is having an affair with Josie Packard who owns the mill as the widow of Andrew Packard whose sister is trying to destroy the mill because she detests her sister-in-law (and suspects her too) and is plotting with her lover Ben Horne, who is the father of Audrey Horne and pretty much the richest man in Twin Peaks. Audrey went to school with Laura who also tutored her cognitively disabled brother and both Laura and Johnny Horne saw the same psychiatrist: Dr Jacoby. Audrey is also schoolmates with Donna and James, the former Laura’s best friend and the other her illicit boyfriend behind the back of her regular boyfriend Bobby who was also sleeping with Shelly Johnson, who is married to Leo the trucker. Shelley works at the diner with Norma Jennings, who is married but having an affair with Ed – James’ uncle. Ed’s married to Norma and runs the gas station plus he’s a member of the Bookhouse Boys along with Sheriff Truman. The Bookhouse Boys apprehend a fella by the name of Bernard Renault to try and get closer to his brother Jacques who has been running drugs into the city with the help of Leo Johnson, with Bobby and his mate Mike selling them to Laura, among other people. Laura had also been working at Benjamin Horne’s department store along with Ronette Pulanski who was the attempted second victim of the murder but escaped traumatised. Oh and Donna’s dad is the doctor who did the autopsy on Laura, whose father works for the Horne’s, and Laura has a cousin called Maddy who looks exactly goddamn like her… but brunette with glasses. Pete Martell is unhappily married to Catherine and likes fishing but ideally not out of his own percolator, he discovered the body, and Donna’s little sister writes poetry. Sarah Palmer has visions and Lucy and Andy at the police department are having a thing too. That’s about it for the main folks, now about MIKE & BOB and the Man from Another Place… nah jokes.

For spoiler’s sake, that whole long paragraph is only as complicated as things get in the first few episodes. Josie Packard sure makes things a damn sight more confuddling by the end of the first season.

I have a theory that the Invitation to Love scenes reveal more than they purport to. Like perhaps everything that happens within that soap opera is them mirrored in some way within the ‘real world’ of Twin Peaks. It’d make sense in a pretty David Lynch sort of way, films reflecting reality reflecting films… or in this case television. The Invitation to Love stuff is absolutely horrendous though, so I’m not gonna go searching out a supercut. Its terrible nature is the whole point, the excessive dramas made to look far too dramatic, far too excessive, but in comparison to the actual Twin Peaks happenings there’s not all that much separation on the surface… just re-read that fat-ass paragraph again about the various connections.

Which also means there’s gotta be a mention of the smooth melding of high and low culture here by Frost/Lynch. The television writer with the arthouse film director, although the TV writer was already a hugely acclaimed name within that medium and the film director was the one adhering to the smaller screen here. The melodramatic elements of the show that meld with the psychosexual nudgings, stuff that is way darker than you expect to see during primetime. Big screen production being broadcast onto 1990s tellies. And in contrasting itself with its tacky soap opera while also mirroring it you get once more another duality existing in this world.

A Few Other Dualities in Twin Peaks:

MIKE & BOB
Laura and her identical cousin
Lucy’s love life
The name itself: ‘Twin Peaks’
Black and White (a recurring motif)
The Most Beautiful Dream and the Most Terrible Nightmare all at once
Laura’s public image and her tortured private self
The two diaries (wait ‘til season two here)
Various truth vs fiction, light vs darkness stuff
Jacoby’s coloured lenses
“Once chants out between two worlds: fire walk with me”

Of course this show is far from mere soap opera. It’s every bit as much a crime procedural and a horror film and a piece of supernatural surrealism and, yeah, even a comedy. There are some moments in this show that are genuinely laugh out loud hilarious. A personal preference there is early on in season two when Big Ed is telling the tale of how Nadine came to wear the eyepatch while Albert Rosenfeld listens on trying his hardest to suppress the giggles. But hey, there are more than a few side-splitters in there to choose from. Fishes in percolators, Andy’s slapstick routines, Leland’s karaoke performances… it’s a funny show, man.

That might be the secret. When you combine so many diverse genres together – genres which are created in order to sort different productions apart from each other – then instead of coming to a definition you come to the exact opposite. Once again a commentary on Twin Peaks ends up on how weird and unique it is. I mean, I only watched it for the first time a year or two ago (yo but I saw Mulholland Drive in my mid-teens… which was a mistake…) but the show first aired in 1990 and there are scenes from then that instantly ingrained themselves within the canon of not just modern television but modern filmmaking.

Twin Peaks was probably ahead of its time in a way which didn’t exactly make it easy to keep piling on the quality. That’s an idea for another part. The first season of Twin Peaks ends with about a thousand loose ends but one connected and concluded masterpiece, as indefinable as it is enjoyable and as popular as it was transgressive. Anyone for coffee?

Rewatching Twin Peaks, Park I

Rewatching Twin Peaks, Park II

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