How Laura Palmer’s Death Sparked the New Golden Age of Television

A sorta-brief look at how Twin Peaks influenced the prevelance of the character-driven drama

When Matthew McConaughey took the stage at the 2014 Critic’s Choice Television Awards, he had a lot to say about the quality of television today and praised HBO for being trailblazers in the character-driven drama. While the premium cable network deserves admiration for its award-winning character-driven dramas, it was a little show on network television that marked the trailhead for them back in 1990.

For most of its history, television had been regarded as a launching pad but it’s been nearly fifteen years since George Clooney hung up his scrubs, saying goodbye to ER and becoming one of Hollywood’s leading men. So when McConaughey went into an anecdote about the questions surrounding his transition from film star to TV star, we were all ears.

“The answer has always been quick, very simple, and always the same: quality”, he said, elaborating that television is raising the bar on the character-driven drama series. He’s absolutely right. Though, HBO wasn’t the first to break convention; that award goes to ABC.

Shows like Roseanne were the top rated television programs prior to the debut of Twin Peaks

At the start of the new decade, the top shows in the United States were Roseanne, The Cosby Show, Cheers, A Different World, and America’s Funniest Home Videos. Audiences tuning in would have to choose between news and education programming or a handful of cliched genres—glorified soap operas like Dallas or serial cop-law dramas like Murder She Wrote.

Characters came and went. Stories were resolved every night. If there was any talk around the water cooler, it’s hard to imagine it would be about the latest episode of Designing Women. Yet by April 1990, everyone was asking the same question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

After the 94-minute pilot of Twin Peaks concluded, ABC had broken all the conventions of primetime network television.

Over twenty years before McConaughey made the move to television, the series employed the talents of veteran filmmakers. Actors, such as Richard Beymer and Piper Laurie, loaned their skills in front of the camera. Behind the camera, Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography and David Lynch’s directing introduced TV to the American Film Institute’s master class.

In terms of the story, 33-percent of Americans were left shellshocked after watching devastated family members and friends learn about Laura Palmer’s death. Making the trials and tribulations of the Huxtables seem laughable in comparison.

Also unlike network television at the time, the plot wasn’t spelled out for you in Twin Peaks. The seemingly normal townsfolk, each intertwined in a web of personal vendettas and conspiracy, generated more questions about themselves than they answered. As the series progressed, it continued to push the envelope.

Bizarre characters like The Log Lady and The Man from Another Place established a surreal atmosphere that sometimes made viewers wonder what the fuck they were watching. Agent Cooper’s weird obsession with coffee made them laugh out loud and they weren’t exactly sure why.

Seeing that most murder mysteries at the time solved the murder within 60 minutes, Twin Peaks broke the biggest convention of all when Laura’s killer wasn’t revealed until late in the second season.

According to David Lynch, Laura’s murder was never meant to be solved. It was a MacGuffin, a plot device to move the character-driven story along. So why was it solved—in the middle of the second season no less? Ratings, aka the Achilles’s heel of network television.

“The network was adamant that we should [solve the murder],” said co-creator Mark Frost, “Maybe we shouldn’t have solved the mystery.”

What’s done was done. After the killer was revealed, ratings continued to take a nosedive and ABC eventually cancelled the critically-acclaimed series after changing timeslots and putting it on a hiatus.

Over the next two years, network television returned to what worked before the Twin Peaks experiment—predictable sitcoms, primetime soap operas, and serial law dramas—but soon a new broadcast network would hedge their bets on a sci-fi character-driven drama to disrupt the status quo.

Fox’s X Files stretched a proverbial rubber band beyond the snapping point between characters Mulder and Scully, reaching its peak audience by the fourth season in 1997. Which, coincidentally, was the same year HBO decided it wanted to play ball, too.

Without Neilsen ratings breathing down their neck or the FCC’s prohibition of obscene, indecent, and profane content, HBO was able to create an unapologetic, gruesome prison drama with Oz. Broadcast networks followed suit with shows like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, but soon the Home Box Office would establish its dominance with The Sopranos.

The character-driven drama would continue to gain traction year after year but nothing was quite the nod to Twin Peaks until Damon Lindelof and J. J. Abrams created Lost.

Lost, like Twin Peaks, was filled with flawed characters surrounded by the surreal and supernatural. The mythical island, like Laura’s killer, was also a MacGuffin, but this time ABC let the show runners keep audiences guessing until the show’s finale in the sixth season. That didn’t stop the network from letting the ratings guide the show, though—ask any Lost viewer what they thought of Nikki and Paulo.

HBO also tried to rekindle the magic of Twin Peaks with John from Cincinnati, but not many remember it. Partly due to the premium cable network’s ability to consistently make hit after hit. Shows like Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Deadwood are engrained in pop culture. All thanks to their ability to ignore ratings and decency standards that give broadcast networks their handicap.

By 2007, audience segmentation paved the way for cable television networks to catapult the character-driven drama into a hot topic for water coolers across America. The anti-heroes of Mad Men and Breaking Bad redefined the genre and now there’s no turning back. Television has broken free from all the chains that once bound it. Internet-based companies are now producing addictive character-driven dramas and releasing an entire series all at once.

Damn, that was a good cup of coffee!

So while the broadcast networks struggle to hand creative control over to the storytellers, cable networks and internet-based television producers have proven that letting filmmakers turn Mr. Chips into Scarface over a five season duration pays off.

Still, no matter what character-driven drama dominates the water cooler conversations of the future, they’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants—or should I say, Twin Peaks.