‘I’ll Bring the Coffee and the Donuts’
On the return of ‘Twin Peaks.’
On Sunday night, Twin Peaks returned to TV after almost twenty-six years off air. The timing was perfect, which the show alluded to in the first few moments of the premiere, when they ran a clip from the original series finale, featuring a young Laura Palmer telling a young Dale Cooper that she’d see him in twenty-five years.
There are other callbacks to the original series: the wide, lingering shots; the theme music; the crackling silence you somehow can hear; and, of course, the “damn fine coffee.” Hawk, Andy, and Lucy represent the most familiar—in the cozy “home” sense of the word—aspect of the show, despite the absence of Sheriff Harry S. Trump (originally played Michael Ontkean, who is now retired). When Hawk receives a call from the Log Lady (played by Catherine Coulson, who died in 2015 after filming her scenes in the revival), which he politely and earnestly responds to, he allows Lucy and Andy to ramble about their son before asking them to set up the Special Agent Dale Cooper files (who has been dubbed missing), adding, “I’ll bring the coffee and the donuts.” From here, the series drastically splits from its 1991 incarnation, with a darker shade cast over the Twin Peaks universe.
When the show left off, Cooper’s evil doppelgänger (BOB) had escaped the Black Lodge (Red Room), while the real Cooper remained stuck inside. Season 3 continues with this Cooper-centric point of view, but branches out in a way that seems to be taking this supernatural force out of the town of Twin Peaks and into the bigger picture, the world at large. This is, in a way, a natural progression for Twin Peaks, since the driving force behind the show was the, since resolved, question of “Who killed Laura Palmer?”
The presence of David Lynch and Mark Frost, the original creators and current writers/directors behind Twin Peaks, placated some fans’ fears, since the two have spent much of their professional lives preserving the show’s memory. They’ve always been aware that Twin Peaks is more of an idea of a TV show, an experiment in television. This provides some levity to the all-out horror genre that the show has assumed, but the small town vibes that people first fell in love with were for the most part missing.
When the late David Foster Wallace visited the set of Lynch’s film, Lost Highway, in 1996, his observations about the director’s movies ran true for his television venture too. He deemed Lynch’s best works most notable because they “don’t really have much of a point.” He added, “You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to ‘entertain’ you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.” Foster Wallace credits this unsettling feeling with the notion that “if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t.” By these standards, the ones that we all became addicted to when the show premiered, David Lynch’s return to TV is a success.
As cliché as it sounds, Twin Peaks is still unlike anything else on TV. The show helped create contemporary television, laying out the thematic brickwork for a number of programs, like The X-Files (which premiered almost two years after the Twin Peaks finale) and, more recently, Lost, Westworld, and Legion. It’s both a legacy creator and a legacy in itself, the kind of work that other programs don’t bother to outright copy, instead emulating certain elements or paying direct homage.
While this was by no means a perfect return, Twin Peaks is back, and it’s delivering the same spectacle and all-around insanity as it did a quarter century ago, which—considering the levels of innovative content produced in the era of pique TV—is something worth watching. It is happening again.
