Twin Peaks: 20th Anniversary on April 8th

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks pilot went to air on the 8th of April 1990. That means that in 16 days it will be the 20th anniversary of this landmark TV series.

Twin Peaks was one of the Top 5 TV series for 1990 in the USA and was also a huge success internationally in the UK and Australia.

I wasn’t too sure that there would be much around about Twin Peaks twenty years after it disappeared from the TV—well nineteen anyway after factoring in season two in 1991. But when I considered doing this little post about Twin Peaks’ 20th anniversary and did a few searches I was pleased to find that it was being remembered by some people here and there. Time Online has put up an article titled “David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, 20 Years On”. The Twin Peaks archive blog is doing a 20th anniversary countdown featuring something about Twin Peak each day. Total Film have done a feature on “The 29 Greatest Twin Peaks Moments”, and the UK Guardian—which regular readers will know is one of my favourite newspaper sites to visit—has put up a great article titled “Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer’s death marked the rebirth of TV drama”.

Looking around for new-ish Twin Peaks stuff I found a couple of other great links. For anyone who likes the amazing music that accompanied Twin Peaks, and I have both the Julie Cruise CD of her music that was featured in Twin Peaks and the Twin Peaks soundtrack CD, I found this rendition of the Twin Peak theme performed on a baritone guitar. I found it mesmerising.

There is also this site, The Rebel Prince TV Blog, where he/she/they are doing what they call a Twin Peaks Retrospective Review. In the retrospective review of episode one the author of the site writes, “So to begin, of course, we turn to those two hours that revolutionised television on that quiet night in April 1990: the Twin Peaks pilot”.

It is generally accepted that Twin Peaks changed TV programming forever. Twin Peaks had such an impact on other series writers and production techniques that the TV timeline is basically broken up into two eras: everything up until Twin Peaks; and then everything after Twin Peaks. No series since Twin Peaks has had such an impact. Shows like Picket Fences and Northern Exposure followed the path pushed through by Twin Peaks.

The following lead-in to the UK Guardian article confirms this.

“Twin Peaks was a sensation from the moment it first aired… and still, 20 years later, the influence of David Lynch's groundbreaking series can be felt in TV drama, from The Sopranos through to Lost.”

Desperate Housewives is one of the best known running series based on the Twin Peaks format that, while everything tends to look nice and neat from a distance, as you get closer it is far from nice and neat and there is more unseen “bad” going on than there is good. This follows David Lynch’s observation of life:

“I discovered if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants [nasty things] underneath.” (David Lynch)

I have every DVD edition of Twin Peaks that has been released in Australia. I have watched the entire series through at least ten times.

Maybe I should try and arrange a Twin Peaks 20th anniversary party. All I would need to have there is doughnuts and coffee.