Twin Peaks was a brilliant TV series that, nevertheless, peaked with its pilot. It would never be this good again in its original run. That’s the opposite of how it usually works today. The pilot always does the heavy-lifting of setting the scene and introducing the characters. It often either works too hard or it doesn’t work hard enough. After all, in network television, the makers of a pilot usually don’t know if they’ll ever get to make another episode. The beginning is often also the end. The pilot is a hurdle. It’s an audition, with all of the tentative presentation that such implies. The good stuff, luck willing, comes later when everyone is invested in keeping the train rolling.
Director, co-writer and series co-creator (with Mark Frost) David Lynch wasn’t having any of that, though. His opening chapter of Twin Peaks is luxurious, beautiful and confident. It’s a rich, detailed piece from a then-twice Oscar-nominated director. His pilot feels like a real movie and is a dreamy high against which the rest of the series would struggle to measure up. The series has many great moments and I would never discourage anyone from watching it (it did permanent damage on a certain 13-year-old named Jason in 1990), but it also slides downhill from here.
The reasons for this are obvious.
Early Twin Peaks catches Lynch in his sweet spot of setting up a mystery without having to solve it. It’s all questions, no answers. This series pilot gives Lynch, a man obsessed with mystery, the rare opportunity to make a film that has no ending, just a tease for the next chapter, whatever that is. As we’ve since learned, Lynch and Frost had no real master plan for the show. They were making it up as they went along. They thought they’d draw out their questions for years… until ABC decided that enough was enough. Fun’s over. Falcon Crest would never let a murder mystery play out this long and neither should Lynch and Frost. In the end, maybe the place for art isn’t between commercials for Doritos and JC Penney. The result of this was a second season that had its triumphs, but also had twice as many embarrassments. Lynch and Frost barely even showed up in the writing and directing credits anymore. They left Twin Peaks for dead.
Before all that mess though, you had this lovely piece of Pacific Northwest mist that’s packed with promise and doesn’t have a hint of ghosts and goblins.
Unless you watch the infamous international feature version. It attempts to wrap up the murder mystery in about twenty minutes of extra footage tacked on to the end (the international cut and the ABC TV cut are identical up until about the ninety-five minute mark). The reason it was made was so that if the series didn’t get picked up by ABC, they could sell the pilot (which had a big budget for the time) to Europe as the most uneven standalone movie ever made. The upside is that Lynch, trying to figure out how to fill that twenty minutes, came up with the one-armed man and Killer Bob and the dancing dwarf in the red room, all of whom ended up in the series proper with much of this same footage re-edited. Also, the international version has some priceless moments that feature Twin Peaks police department receptionist Lucy and Deputy Andy chilling out after hours in her home while she plays with a paddle ball and he blows clumsy notes out of a trumpet with one of his pant legs rolled up to the knee.
The downside of it was that the intended Twin Peaks pilot was unavailable on home video for about seventeen years, due to rights issues. Even when Season One came out on DVD for the first time, it lacked the pilot, which is sort of insane. This was all figured out eventually and today the fancy-schmancy Blu-Ray boasts BOTH versions. It’s got the real pilot for sinkin’ deep into the show and the screwball international version for scratchin’ your head.