Allegedly, American television did exist before Twin Peaks. But there is an undeniable chop down the middle of it, with the likes of Lucy Ricardo, JR Ewing and Captain Kirk on one side, and on the other the body of Laura Palmer – the most beautiful phantom in the world, murdered, wrapped in plastic and burning with secrets. Nothing was quite the same after she washed up on the side of that riverbank in April of 1990. Twin Peaks co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost destabilised the entire television landscape with a series that was a murder mystery, a soap, a comic pastiche of the American heartland and your worst, weirdest nightmare all at once.
“There were only three networks back then,” says Frost today. “TV was designed to sell you products in the commercial breaks, then lull you into a state of sleep.” But a murdered girl, he and Lynch thought: “What if she was a trojan horse? And what if once we were indoors, inside our little horse, we could wait until everybody fell asleep and climb out and get to work?”
