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Twin Peaks RevisitedThe second season is not what it seems.

By Jessica Winter
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 1:56 PM ET
Twin Peaks Season Two DVD

David Lynch's Twin Peaks was one of those improbable, instant phenomena that almost give you nostalgia for the days when network television had an iron grip on American culture. Centered on the murder of a homecoming queen with dark secrets, the 1990-91 mystery drama landed Lynch on the cover of Time and made a backwards-speaking midget and a schoolmarm seer known as the Log Lady into the subjects of heated water-cooler debate. To its commercial detriment, though, the show that asked, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" … just kept on asking. In fact, Twin Peaks dithered and lingered over nearly everything—all it did in a hurry was get cancelled. After waiting patiently for answers through the show's eight-episode opening run, viewers fled in droves. ABC banished the second season to the ratings Siberia of Saturday nights at 10, and "Peaks mania" was officially over by the time America finally discovered the culprit in episode 14. Lynch and company managed to deliver another 15 episodes, but few of those who realized the show was still on the air thought to complain when it was killed, scarcely a year after its huge debut.

Today, the lame-duck second season is remembered fondly by only the most die-hard of Peaks fans. But time has been kind to Lynch's TV turn. Free from the inescapable hype that once surrounded the series, the unlamented later episodes contain a lot to admire and enjoy. And now both cultists and the merely curious can watch the second act, finally available on DVD as a six-disc set from CBS.

The very peculiarities of Lynchian temperament that made Twin Peaks stand out—its waterworks emotions, inch-by-inch pacing, and surfeit of red herrings and general abnormality—became liabilities as the series went on. But much of what played poorly then holds up well for an audience lacking the itch to know whodunit. It's certainly easier to forgive co-creators Lynch and Mark Frost for dragging their heels when one watches the singular working methods of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper—an adherent of Zen practice and dream logic—proceed over the course of a few evenings, rather than a year. And the earlier episodes in the set maintain the sensational first season's balance of levity, sudsy intrigue, and undercurrents of terror—the last personified in the bogeyman Bob, whose demonic rictus was a special effect unto itself.

A bizarro blend of police procedural and soap opera, Twin Peaks also remained a strongly character-driven drama throughout. The series is justly credited as the template for both the paranormally inflected serial (The X-Files, Lost) and the cockeyed ensemble melodrama (Desperate Housewives, Six Feet Under), but its most important legacy may be that it got deeper under the skin of its characters than ever before on the small screen. The show brimmed with searching, leisurely conversation; at times it was as content as a French art film simply to observe people as they talk, listen, and think.

Consider these set pieces: Paragon of stoic decency Ed Hurley delivers a touching monologue on how he and his soul mate ended up married to different people. Goody-two-shoes Donna Hayward inherits Laura's sunglasses and promptly rebrands herself as a femme fatale—a hilarious case study of adolescent self-dramatization, realized to flinty perfection by 20-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle. Acerbic forensics specialist Albert Rosenfield, whose character functioned as in-house critic of both the homespun quirk and supernatural gobbledygook native to the series, comes out of the closet as an unrepentant pacifist.

Video file.; The rise of the interjection 'Awwa'!; Marlon Brando in a scene from Reflections in a Golden Eye.; Brando; marlon brando; Reflections in a Golden Eye; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid533275934http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=78144477

Crucially, the second season also intensified the queasy pathos of Laura's father, Leland, that lover of show tunes, so quick to tears but quicker to break into unscheduled song and dance. Especially in the set's four Lynch-directed episodes, music is a shape-shifting character unto itself, whether in Angelo Badalamenti's ominous synthesizer instrumentals or in the retro-minimalist ballad that sultry biker-boy James plucks out in the Palmers' parlor. This was a show that would just sit back and watch a young girl, dressed as a fairy princess, performing Mendelssohn on the family upright, with only Lynch's floating, almost imperceptibly trembling camera to destabilize the anodyne domestic tableau.

Video file.; The rise of the interjection 'Awwa'!; Marlon Brando in a scene from Reflections in a Golden Eye.; Brando; marlon brando; Reflections in a Golden Eye; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid533275934http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=78144477

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Jessica Winter is a writer in New York.
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