Twin Peaks at 35: How David Lynch paved the way for all your favourite TV

Sydney Morning Herald

23-04-2025

When you step off Southeast Reinig Road, in the picturesque Pacific northwest town of Snoqualmie, Washington, the valley trail crosses the river at an old railway bridge, its rust-brown beams an industrial relic from a bygone age.
But in popular culture, the bridge, long stripped of its tracks and sleepers, and the surrounding town endure as the real-life reflection of what was Twin Peaks, a now 35-year-old postcard-perfect town that sat on a fictional fault line between the light and the dark.
This is where Laura Palmer's body was found in 1990, wrapped in plastic, washed up on a riverbank. This is where Ronette Pulaski walked across that railway bridge – one small piece of a larger, grotesque mosaic.
And this is where, in 1990 and 2017, for 48 one-hour episodes, director David Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost hypnotised a television audience by taking them into a community paralysed by grief and horror, and underscored it with an acoustic requiem by Angelo Badalamenti that remains haunting to this day.
In Twin Peaks, over a 'damn fine cup of coffee', we met FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), and his absent secretary Diane, spoken to only via dictaphone; dependable Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean); Double R Diner owner Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton); and Maddy Ferguson (Sheryl Lee), the mysterious look-alike of the murder victim.
Such personalities were the tip of the iceberg: the deeper we delved, the stranger they became. The Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson); The Giant (Carel Struycken); The Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson); and Killer Bob (Frank Silva), a demonic force who seemed to manifest in dreams. In deference to a 35-year-old spoiler, we will not reveal Bob's real-world identity.
Twin Peaks could have just been a jumble of genre tropes, music cues, doughnuts, coffee and random abstracts, but under Lynch's hand it was transformed into something greater: a slowly moving oil-on-canvas, every brushstroke revealing another layer of the mystery, every plot twist steeped in subcutaneous horror.
It was ground-breaking when it premiered on television back in 1990. As a television critic, journalist and TV geek, it fascinated me. I somehow persuaded an American TV publicist – by fax, no less – to post me a VHS preview tape of the pilot. It gripped me, from its opening, haunting frame to its last.
Three-and-a-half decades later it remains one of the most artistically significant works ever produced. Long before the emergence of HBO and the first signs of television's golden age, Twin Peaks was simply unlike anything that had come before it.
At the heart of the story sat a lingering question – who killed Laura Palmer? – which pivoted on the riskiest tool in the story toolbox: withheld closure. The not-knowing was the heart of the audience's paralysis and compulsion. Revealing the answer, ultimately, destroyed the spell that had held the entire work in thrilling suspension.
'Let's say you have a goose, and the goose lays golden eggs. Pretty soon, you've got a lot of golden eggs, and someone comes along and says it's time now to kill that goose,' Lynch told me, in one of several conversations we shared over the years. 'That was not a good thing.'
The brilliance of the series is that it bent an iconic American image – the small-town, filled with ordinary, everyday folks – into something malevolent and dark.
Unlike Mayfield, location of Leave it to Beaver, or even the eponymous and scandal-soaked Peyton Place, when you pricked the surface of Twin Peaks, you found layers of shadow and darkness. The nearby woods – usually a benign playground – were transformed here into a dangerous wilderness, inhabited by disturbing entities and things that go 'Bob' in the night.
The original series ended in 1991, cancelled after just two seasons. A film, Fire Walk With Me, followed in 1992. And then, in 2017, we got a sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. The latter was foreshadowed in the original series when Laura Palmer, in a dream, speaking backwards, told Agent Cooper: 'I'll see you again in 25 years.' Lynch, like Laura, was true to his word.
Thirty-five years after the fact, Twin Peaks remains significant as much for it tonal notes (red rooms, mysterious strangers and cryptic monologues) as it is for the raft of imitators which followed: Northern Exposure and Carnivale, and more recently, Riverdale, Top of the Lake, Wild Palms, True Detective and Wayward Pines. Even in 2025, The White Lotus still dances with the fire of withheld closure.
Lynch, for his part, never saw Twin Peaks as an assembly of pieces. 'There are classes of screenwriting where they reduce things down to formulas, but there's shouldn't be any rules,' he said.
'The ideas dictate everything … You don't worry about a form, you don't worry about any rules, you follow the ideas that you fall in love with, and you try to stay true to those ideas. They tell you everything.'
And yet, Twin Peaks laid the groundwork for cinematic television: cable masterpieces such as Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Oz and Deadwood, and, in the streaming age, The Crown, Squid Game, Succession, The Handmaid's Tale and Andor.
As with most great artists, Lynch left his signature on Twin Peaks, in an Alfred Hitchcock-esque cameo, playing FBI boss Gordon Cole. Like The Log Lady and The Man From Another Place, he became a small but perfectly crafted piece of the living jigsaw.
'When you act, even if you're not really an actor, you realise how special the actors and actresses are,' Lynch told me. 'What they go through to make it real from a deep place ... it opens up the thing where the actors become very special to you.'
And Gordon, I asked. 'Gordon is pretty fantastic, you know,' Lynch replied, with a wry smile.
As is Twin Peaks which, for me, survives not just as a notable chapter in the annals of television history, but a town I visit every Thanksgiving – up the road from where we stay in Maple Valley, Washington – for a yearly fix of something I cannot quite articulate.
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The Double R Diner (real name: Twede's Cafe) has only a handful of surviving clues to its history: notably, a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie painted on the wall outside. The 'Welcome to Twin Peaks' sign, about a mile down the road from the railroad bridge, is long gone.
In common with every TV ghost town, the streets are inhabited by memories of fictional moments, made substantial by stepping through the fourth wall. Yet something intangible remains in every corner of Snoqualmie, as it is in Twin Peaks, and you sense it in every sideways glance.
Amplified by the remoteness and the harsh cold and snow of winter, there's a lingering, otherworldly feel – the quality that first drew Lynch and Frost to this place. Something that rides on the mist at twilight; an echo of a mystery, from long, long ago.