Twin Peaks Review

Nothing on American network television had looked or sounded like this. Lynch and Frost took the structure of a daytime soap, a small town, a dead girl, a dozen affairs, and ran it through dream logic, sustained silence and Angelo Badalamenti's score, which does more tonal work than any other element in it. Kyle MacLachlan is the key decision, because Cooper is played with unironic wonder rather than detachment, and that sincerity is what keeps the surrealism from reading as a joke.

The pilot and the episodes Lynch directed himself contain images the medium had simply never carried. The collapse is well documented and entirely real. Once the network forced the Laura Palmer reveal midway through the second season, the show had nothing left to organize itself around and spent months on a beauty pageant and a chess game. The 2017 revival is a separate and largely uncompromising work that many viewers found impenetrable. The best twenty hours here changed everything that came after them, and the worst are genuinely hard to sit through.