Ultimately, I think Twin Peaks was always a streaming TV series at heart. It was a streaming TV series when there was no streaming TV, the internet was still in diapers and buying VHSes of movies and TV series was such a novelty that you'd pay a lot of money for two episodes! The series was way ahead of its time. The reason the first season is so great is that it's a mid-season replacement that runs for eight episodes, which gave us a tightly-focused bullet of a season. It's basically a Netflix season. If it had always been eight episodes a year, with a very clear focus for each season, it would have been glorious. If Twin Peaks had started life as a 22 episode season, I reckon it would never have made it to episode 22.
The first season is like an 'episodic movie'. The year the series was first shown, I recorded the lot on Betamax while I watched it weekly. I was poorly over Christmas, between UK showings of the seasons. My family had gone out to Sunday lunch and I (decades prior to the use of the now-popular term) 'binged' the entire first season in one day, basically giving it a rewatch after reading Laura's diary.
The network series was doomed, really, when it got its first 22-episode order. Twenty two episodes means filler episodes and episodes where main characters often have to be given a small role in order to have a break one week, an over-reliance on subplots and a lot of walking the treadmill between about episodes 14 and 20, where the sweeps period has gone past and you're waiting for the lead up to the season finale.
The way Twin Peaks was treated by the network was unfortunate, but really I can't really blame the network. In 1990, their job was to create series where companies wanted to advertise in the (many) breaks during episodes, because there were big enough audiences.
The first season was astonishingly well received and they expected the same reaction the next year. But you've got an avant-garde filmmaker as the 'face' of the project, who will be wanting to do other things. No way was Lynch going to be sitting around in a writers' room all year for seven years, playing showrunner. And Laura Palmer took on an unexpectedly popular (after-)life, so any side stories got met with 'Yes, very nice, but what's all this got to do with Laura Palmer's murder?' Audiences wanted all the Laura they could get, which dramatically reduced the series' lifespan.
And that perhaps became the unexpected aspect of Twin Peaks: Cooper and Truman were meant to be the main characters, but in fact Laura was the main character, even in absentia. She was meant to be this iconic, phantom character in the background, but she became something more, haunting every frame. Look at Episode 17. It doesn't feel like an episode following the reveal of a murderer: it feels like a TV show where the lead actor has left and they're relying on supporting actors and scrabbling for new storylines. It's like The Office the episode after Michael Scott leaves or the first episode of Season Eight of The X-Files, when Mulder has switched to being a recurring character and is clearly no longer the lead. It's a sink-or-swim moment and Twin Peaks sank as soon as Cooper got suspended.
ABC did what they had to do in the end: a series that tanked in the ratings was put out of its misery. It's astonishing the 22 episodes got made at all.
Twin Peaks was too oddball to exist in the normal network TV environment. A decade or so later, it could have comfortably been on the AMC, HBO or Showtime original series lineup. Fire Walk With Me was a taste of what HBO or Showtime Twin Peaks might have been in the mid-1990s.
That first eight episodes will always be special to me. The next eight are still decent, but episode 17 just feels perfunctory. 'OK' says Cooper, 'We're going to catch Laura's killer!' And they do. The End! For all that there were great, great moments in the rest of season two and its deranged finale, I wish Lynch had directed episode 17 and the series had ended there.
Sorry for the rambling post...
