When you watch Twin Peaks today, you still sense that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s supernatural mystery series was like nothing else on television. In the opening minutes of the pilot — which is available in 4K on the re-released Twin Peaks: From Z to A Blu-ray — prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is discovered dead and wrapped in plastic on the riverbank of the small Washington town. Although we soon learn that darkness has long lived under Twin Peaks’ dreamy, kitschy atmosphere, Laura’s murder is an unignorable breach of cruelty and violence into a picturesque world.
A horrid murder tainting an artificially peaceful small town is not a novel premise, but the enduring power of Twin Peaks isn’t solely because Lynch and Frost turned it into a show about FBI hunting demons hiding among Douglas Firs and cosy family homes. Twin Peaks is fluent in the language of network soaps and procedurals from the ‘80s and ‘90s — episodes are defined by the interweaving of melodrama and feuds vying for our attention against a beautiful but haunted backdrop.
