Damon Lindelof on Twin Peaks: It Was Transmitting at Exactly My Frequency

May 2024 · 5 minute read

As part of Variety‘s 100 Greatest Television Shows of All Time issue, we asked 12 of our favorite creators of television to discuss the series that inspire and move them. Check out all the essays, and read our full list of the best TV shows ever made.

Every once in a while, I find myself wandering through a modern art museum, mostly so I can tell people that I go to modern art museums. It’s not that I don’t appreciate modern art, but most of it is transmitting on a frequency that is beyond the range of my particular tuner. (I apologize to the youngs — these are broadcasting terms. “Broadcasting” is an old-fashioned thing that happened before cat videos.)

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Now and then, hidden in the corner of an exhibit, there is a doorway to a dark and twisty maze. At the end of the maze, people stand in a small room, watching a film, kind of like that dude standing in the corner at the end of “The Blair Witch Project.” It does not matter if I arrive at the end of the film or the beginning, for it is on a loop. The film’s meaning is unknown, something to be debated after multiple viewings. Only one thing is certain. Because it is here, in a museum, it is most certainly art.

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I believe David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks” is the greatest piece of art ever to be broadcast on a television screen. It was transmitting at exactly my frequency. And I have spent the better part of my career fiddling with my tuner in an effort to channel that exquisite art into my own.

“Twin Peaks” chewed up genre and spit out paradox: Drama yet comedy, terrifying yet absurd, old-fashioned yet cutting-edge. It was crimey and soapy and thrilling. It was a heavily serialized whodunit that was infinitely more interested in what done it, a simultaneously procedural and existential mystery that could only be solved by the greatest lawman in the history of television, Special Agent Dale Cooper. As played by Kyle MacLachlan, Coop was brilliant, sexy and obsessed with pie. As we watched him navigate the increasingly weird townsfolk, we gradually began to understand he might very well be the weirdest of them all.

And when the show returned for its third season, nearly two decades after the unforgettable cliffhanger of its second, it dared to surprise, tickle and horrify all over again. That season’s eighth episode is my favorite of the entire series, maybe of all series, but if you ask me to explain what happens in it to you I will sound like an insane person…

But that’s OK. I am more than content to stand here in the dark room at the end of the maze, transfixed by the glorious loop of art that is “Twin Peaks.”

Damon Lindelof is the creator of TV series including “Lost,” “The Leftovers,” “Watchmen,” and, most recently, “Mrs. Davis.” 

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