Today (April 8, 2020) marks the 30th anniversary of when the hit TV show Twin Peaks first hit our television sets. Twin Peaks was a major cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s. As an innovative TV show, it was a victim of its own success, being canceled after its second season. TV viewers coming out of the 80s, accustomed to Soaps and episodic storytelling, were simply not ready for a long form narrative spanning multiple episodes without resolution to the central inciting mystery—who killed Laura Palmer? Additionally, being in part the product of filmmaker David Lynch, famous for quirky, creepy, and bizarre films, TV viewers of the time did not have the palette for Lynch’s niche vision of the world. After the show was canceled, Lynch made a prequel film in 1992 called Fire Walk With Me, which was summarily booed and trashed at the Cannes film festival. At the time that seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. However, in the summer of 2017, after the improbable growth of a cult following of Twin Peaks—thanks in part to the rise of the internet, the publication of a fan magazine called Wrapped in Plastic, and some annual fan summer festivals—the show returned to Showtime for a third season. In this episode, John Anthony Dunne chats with The Two Cities team member Kris Song about their love of this show that is both wonderful and strange.
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