Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition (Seasons 1 & 2, Pilot) (1990)

Starring: Kyle MacLachlan Director: David Lynch



Review:
Finally! A complete set of one of the most important series in the history of TV, August 20, 2007
By Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of TWIN PEAKS in the history of television. Although the eighties saw enormous strides in Quality Television, beginning with HILL STREET BLUES and continuing with series like CHINA BEACH, ST. ELSEWHERE, and L.A. LAW, none of these series took television took TV to the next level. To be honest, neither did TWIN PEAKS, since Season Two failed to deliver on the almost dizzying potential shown in Season One, but it clearly revealed television as a medium with more potential than anyone had ever imagined.

In my own take on the history of television, the full maturation of serial narrative television comes in four stages, each one represented by four key television series. Stage One was the debut of HILL STREET BLUES, with its intertwining of multiple story arcs. Previous to HSB, there had been no critically acclaimed series to leave conflict unresolved each week. Series worked exclusively in episodic format, wrapping up every major plot detail by the end of each episode, and with all the characters magically forgetting everything that had happened in the week before. There were multiple reasons for this, one of them being that the pure episodic format allowed networks to repeat episodes in any order, since together they did not tell a story. But HILL STREET BLUES, while it did not tell very long stories, always had multiple arcs that took 3 to 6 episodes to resolve. It was a dramatic improvement on previous television narrative. Stage Two came with TWIN PEAKS and the idea that you could use a series to tell a very, very long story over the course of one or more seasons. Unfortunately, despite an inconceivably exciting and very short Season One, TWIN PEAKS fell apart in its second season as unresolved mystery was piled on top of a series of other unresolved mysteries. By the end of Season Two viewers had been given few answers but had been presented with a staggering number of questions. More on the consequences of this in a bit. Stage Three was represented by THE X-FILES, which like TWIN PEAKS took a very long story arc over the course of several seasons, as over six years the series told a story of alien colonization and government collusion. Unlike TWIN PEAKS, the series provided answers, but like TWIN PEAKS it succumbed to internal contradictions and narrative confusions. As X-FILES creator Chris Carter admitted, they were more or less making up the mythology episodes as they went along. Also, while Mulder and Scully were riveting characters, the series was insufficiently concerned with character development and more concerned with plot. The correct blend had not yet been found. Stage Four came with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which perfectly blended long-term character development with very long story arcs. In developing the series LOST, Damon Lindelhof has stated that their writers would watch TWIN PEAKS and THE X-FILES in order to be aware of the pitfalls befalling long narrative serial dramas and BUFFY to observe the correct balance between narrative and character development.

[Usually at this point a BABYLON 5 fan will interject that B5 also introduced a long, character-based narrative into television. My reply is always that B5 took place in its own little universe, no pun intended. While THE X-FILES and BUFFY were changing the way TV envisioned the way to handle narrative, B5 was on, but it apparently had little or no influence on any other shows. I've never been able to discover another series that seems to have been indebted to B5, not even FARSCAPE, which seems to owe far more to BUFFY. So B5 aside, my point stands.]

TWIN PEAKS represented both TV at its best and its worst. Season One of TWIN PEAKS might be the most perfect season in the history of television. It was only a few episodes long, but each episode was more exciting than watching most movies. Prior to TWIN PEAKS all television was about talk. The focus of every show was on people standing around talking. Ironically for a visual medium, the visual was curiously unimportant. MIAMI VICE had anticipated many of the achievements of TWIN PEAKS by bringing the purely visual and aural elements of television to the forefront and by making silence -- mainly through the long, pregnant, almost overwhelming pauses of Edward James Olmos -- a significant part of the surface of television. But TWIN PEAKS made the specifically visual and aural elements of the show critically important in a way never before seen on TV. It was more like watching ballet than viewing anything else that had ever before appeared on the small screen. Unfortunately, all the magnificence of Season One was rapidly destroyed by the increasingly incoherent and self-indulgent second season. Not that there were not some wonderful moments in the second season, but more and more as the season went on, at least toward the end when Lynch and Frost seem to have realized that things had gone too far, the show devolved into chaos. Still, the genie was out of the bottle. Regardless of what the show became in Season Two, Season One had already altered the history of television.

TWIN PEAKS is also, more than any other series, responsible for introducing surrealism into prime time. Although NORTHERN EXPOSURE (which was filmed only a few miles away from where TWIN PEAKS was -- the two series in fact featured opposite sides of the same mountain range in their background shots -- NORTHERN EXPOSURE also made an explicit shout out to TWIN PEAKS near the end of its first season) started off odd, it didn't become truly surreal until after TWIN PEAKS enormous success. Without the magnificent strangeness of TWIN PEAKS we might never have gotten the oddity that we found in shows like ALLY McBEAL.

Famously, the reason we have never seen a complete collection of TWIN PEAKS before was that the rights to the pilot was held by a different production company. An oddly truncated edition of Season One was briefly available, but without the initial, and utterly glorious, pilot, it just didn't seem right. The pilot was available separately, but the quality was so low as to be more irritating than satisfying. Now we will finally get the entire series together in one wonderful set.