So I see in my list of Netflix streaming “currently trending” or whatever this old show from 1990 called Twin Peaks. I was a little kid in 1990 so I never saw this when it aired, but I started watching because I was curious about why it would be currently popular.
Well, the show is so bad by today’s standards. It starts with this drawn out 2-minute long opening credit sequence over music and a bunch of establishing shots (which is actually the intro on every single episode), with hideously ugly titles. Bored to tears before it even starts, but I keep watching out of curiosity. Painfully wooden dialogue full of cliches and characters based on (somewhat offensive) stereotypes, horrible overacting, characters literally talking to themselves to pound home exposition that should be obvious, heavily scored with distracting (usually smooth jazz) music in every other scene, the works. Yet apparently this was an acclaimed show at the time.
Anyway what I discovered is that this was some David Lynch project that ended on a cliffhanger after 2 seasons and now they’re going to continue it… in 2017, more than 25 years later, as a series on Showtime. And even going to include a lot of the original (now presumably geriatric) cast. Although I’m familiar with the lead actor, who more recently has played the mayor on the show Portlandia, which I like.
So that explains the current interest on Netflix for this old series. And after discovering this information, I watched some more episodes because, well, it’s not every day a TV show takes a 25 year break and then picks back up, so I’m curious how that will go. Will they make it less awful? I mean, they have to, right?
What? People still think it’s good? I just thought it was funny how much standards have changed since then, since I’m only just watching it for the first time now. In fact I’d never heard of it until it popped up in my Netflix list. I’m sure some people around here watched it back in the day and might feel nostalgic for it, and I’m curious to hear what they think of it coming back.
I can even see how stuff like this could have been seen as good at the time when you had nothing truly good to compare it to, but you can’t possibly watch this stuff today and think it holds up.
The pilot and second episode of Twin Peaks are pretty damn bad, but once it hits episode 3 (the one with the Red Room at the end) it hits its stride.
The thing about Twin Peaks is that it’s deliberately engineered so that everything is a bit… off. Everything is meant to be about weird, archetypal characters interacting in strange ways. Sometimes this works wonderfully, and makes the show super interesting and engaging. Sometimes (especially in the first couple episodes and a lot of the latter half of season 2, such as everything ever with James), it really, really doesn’t.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the show surrealist, but it borrows heavily from surrealist art in places, and tonally it always has that sort of warped funhouse mirror quality dreams have. Right down to the weird, overdone character archetypes.
It’s a very odd show, but it experiments a lot. That’s what makes it interesting. I’d certainly never say all of the show works. In fact, there’s a ton of “miss” in the hit/miss ratio of the show, but when it nails it it really nails it.
There’s a particular scene later in the series that’s especially haunting and amazing. You’ll know it by the words “it’s happening again”.
E: And I first saw it maybe a year ago, tops, so it’s not nostalgia. We’re about the same age it seems.
“She’s dead, wrapped in plastic.”
“New shoes!”
“That gum you like is going to come back in style.”
“Damn fine coffee, and HOT!”
??? Those are cliches ???
Granted, TP (I guess we can call it TP TOS) lost some of its sharpness and energy by the end - it eventually just started to feel randomly weird instead of focused, visionary weird. But those first few episodes were amazing.
I don’t think the pilot is really representative of the show. It feels more like a standard detective show with badly written characters for the first two, IMO. There’s some charm, but it’s not fully Twin Peaks weirdness glory yet. And that’s from rewatching it a few days ago.
And as for the second half of the second season being bad, there should always be the caveat: except the last episode.
There have been recent ‘leisurely’ shows recently. The Bridge comes to mind. And that one about the sheriff in Montana. It seems the shows that don’t cater to shorter attention spans tend to be cancelled.
But even in 1990, most shows weren’t slow-paced. Twin Peaks was different, which made it interesting to audiences back then. It’s not just the pacing, of course. Lynch has a definite style of filmmaking. (FWIW, I remember people being very irritated that Lynch took so long to resolve the you-know-what.)
‘Aw, look. It’s trying to think.’
I still use that one.
The end of the New Wave years, and the beginning of Grunge and coffee house culture. The nation was fairly prosperous, and we were not yet in the Gulf War. Different time, different sensibilities.
At first I didn’t realize it was one of his projects. After watching a couple episodes, I did notice the name during the year-long credits sequence (or probably at the end of it after fast-forwarding through), and thought to myself whether it was the same David Lynch who does the surrealist stuff. Then I saw the scene with the midget dancing around a room to smooth jazz and thought, “ah yes, it’s that David Lynch”.
Yeah that kind of thing I can overlook because of technology limitations (although even so), but what is hard for me to stomach, and I find is the case with most old shows is they just over-act the hell out of everything. Like any emotion a character might be feeling, they are gonna hit you over the head with it, firmly and repeatedly, to the point of them being caricatures (so far in this show, the rebellious “bad boy” teen character is probably the worst). I don’t know what has happened in the past couple of decades that made actors realize it’s better when they act like normal, real people.
At the time it came out, David Lynch’s work was a known quantity, with a built in fan base. For those of us in that camp, Lynch doing a TV show was an important moment. So, the tone look tempo style etc. of the show was pure Lynch. If you weren’t already on board, maybe it wasn’t as resonant. So, for fans of Lynch, the ups downs of the show were frustrating, but you hung on JUST IN CASE…
David Lynch has a fetish for overacted, wide-eyed delivery – just check out Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive”. That worked (for me at least) in TP, where he accentuated the underlying disease by putting a brittle, false finsih over it.
One of the first Internet boards I participated on was an alt.tv Twin Peaks board. If I google my name and go back a few pages I still can find some of my Twin Peaks theories!
Didn’t Sherilyn Fenn used to post on some of those boards? I know even nowadays she’s big on the fan interaction, she runs the cast-run Facebook for the show. (The weird thing is she posts how I imagine Audrey would post on the internet…)
