Twin Peaks

(Presenting a special guest post by Andy Burns of Biff Bam Pop!) This Sunday, May 21st brings us the long-awaited return of Twin Peaks. The surreal show, set in the Pacific Northwest, was co-created by Mark Frost and David Lynch and, for brief period in the early 1990s, was the biggest television show in North America. An audience of 34 million watched the hypnotic two-hour ABC premiere, which felt more like a movie than a television show. There, we were introduced to Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), sent to the town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of the homecoming queen, sixteen-year-old Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Over the course of two seasons, Twin Peaks would meld auteur cinema with soap opera storytelling; myths and conspiracy theories; aliens and the supernatural; coffee and cherry pie. However, the series would quickly flame out thanks to network interference, and both Lynch and Frost’s other interests. When the final episode aired in the spring of 1991, fans were left with multiple cliffhangers, most notably Agent Cooper’s body now in possession of the malevolent spirit, BOB (Frank Silva). While David Lynch would release the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me one year later, it served as a prequel rather than sequel, leaving so many questions unanswered. Season two wasn’t meant to be the end of Twin Peaks, though. In fact, David Lynch appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in an appeal to fans to write in to ABC to give it a third season order. It didn’t work, but what if it had? In an interview back in July 2007, with the Twin Peaks Archive, artist Matt Haley revealed he and Twin Peaks producer and Fire Walk With Me co-writer Robert Engels were working on a graphic novel that would have incorporated various ideas […]