The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘Twin Peaks’ Hall of Fame: “Pilot” With Joanna Robinson and Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Joanna Robinson and Sean Fennessey grab their tape recorders to revisit the ‘Twin Peaks’ pilot episode, “Northwest Passage.” They discuss what the series represents in David Lynch’s storied catalog of works, the mystery crime drama’s somewhat surprising level of mainstream popularity, and their personal history with the show (5:49). Along the way, they dive into Kyle MacLachlan’s role as Agent Dale Cooper (33:56). Later, they unpack the unforgettable final moments of the episode and the flawed international version of the episode (48:12). Email us! [e-mail] Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of ‘The Prestige TV Podcast’ and so much more! Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Sean Fennessey Producers: Kai Grady and Donnie Beacham Jr. Additional Production Support: Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the craftsmanship behind every bite. Borgeshead committed to craft since 1905. Diane, 1130 a.m. February 24th, entering the town of Twin Peaks. It's five miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line. I've never seen so many trees in my life. Welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Jonah Robinson. Joining me today's a very special guest. from not the Black Lodge, but a black spooky room. It's Sean Fennessee. Hey, Sean. How are you doing? I wish I could turn my language backwards in the fashion of Mike.

You know, that would be helpful, but I can't, unfortunately. We should do that. We should do a whole pod in backwards language. Sounds like huge investment for a little payoff. We're here today. Talk to you about the Twin Peaks pilot. We are entering the Twin Peaks pilot into the eclectic prestige TV Hall of Fame.

Sean, do any questions about the Hall of Fame process? No. As you know, the Major League Baseball just voted on their Hall of Fame and elected several new members, which was very exciting.

Their process is historically fraught, and so I'm hoping that things are less fraught here. As I think this is my first Hall of Fame episode on this show. Welcome. Thank you. The Hall of Fame process is quite whimsical

and how it works Today is that as fans of your podcast, Big Pick, certainly know, and hopefully everyone knows that the master, David Lynch, passed away last week, just shy of his 79th birthday. And Justin Sales, who does all the great behind the scenes work on the prestige TV feed, is huge Twin Peaks fan. And so he said, hey, guys, why don't we celebrate Twin Peaks in honor of David Lynch? So that's what we're here to do today. We're going to talk about the legacy of Twin Peaks a bit in sort of a big picture way.

how it sort of burnishes David Lynch's legacy and then talk about the episode itself as a sort of piece of art. Quickly, really quickly before we get into that, I just want to remind folks, if you're just tuning in to this feed right now, that Rob Mahoney and I are covering severance week-to-week on this feed, that we are checking in sporadically on the pit on this feed, and we will be wrapping up the agency. We're doing one last episode to wrap up the might. Michael Fasbender show The Agency later this week.

And then the spoiler warning for today, I'm just going to say all of Twin Peaks is on the table, though mostly we'll be talking about the first episode. Twin Peaks goes in wild and wonderful directions as it goes on, and I don't want us to limit ourselves to only talking about the relatively normal first episode when sort of the wild and wonderful weirdness of Twin Peaks is an important part of why it is stuck around in our legacy and our culture for so long. Last or not least, if you don't care about Twin Peaks spoilers at all, Andy Greenwald and I a couple months ago did an episode of Stick the Landing

about the Twin Peaks finale, both of the show itself and then of the return. So you can hear us talk about the Twin Peaks legacy and David Lynch, but as a sense of an ending. And I really like a book ending it with a sense of a beginning of Twin Peaks. That's a fabulous episode of podcast. podcasting that you and Andy did. So I highly encourage people to listen to this episode in full and then close the loop by listening to that episode. Thank you. I loved your episodes, Stick the Landing with Andy Greenwald. That was a great series that did on the screen. It was a good series. It's too bad Andy died and now we'll never have another episode again. What a shame. Well, but we should enter a podcast of his into the Hall of Fame in order to honor him. That would be, I think, the right thing to do. A lynchian effort in podcasting if we metastasize that. I think so. I think so. All right, so David Lynch, do you have a favorite David Lynch film? I'm sure you talked about on the big pick, but do you have, can you pick a favorite?

Changes every time. The only film of his that I've watched since he passed, other than the pilot, is Inland Empire, which I've always found a very sticky wicket because it's so challenging. And I absolutely loved it when I rewatched it a few nights ago and had nightmares and was pretty devastated by it. So it's a little hard to say, like, absolutely this one for me. You know, generationally, you and I, of course, were there for Mulholland Drive happening in real time. And it's kind of hard to overstate the impact that that had on me as a film fan.

And it was a date night movie for my wife and I. And we had like a five-hour conversation at dinner after seeing the movie. So it's a very strong personal memory that I have of his. But I like them all, you know, all 10 films, all the TV stuff, the short films. It all deeply resonates with me in different ways. So what about you? What's your favorite? I have plans the next couple of week to revisit Elephant ManorRacerhead,

ones that I haven't seen in a long, long time. I think it's blue velvet for me, though. A bit of a basic bitch answer, but here we are. So we're here. Talk to you about the Twin Peaks pilot. April 8, 1990. It was a two-hour TV movie called Northwest Passage, written by series creators, Mark Frost, and David Lynch, and directed by David Lynch.

And I just, this is fun. I like to occasionally play the role of Professor Fentasy on this podcast. And we're not necessarily creating a syllabus, but we are giving like a little bit of TV history. And we did this a bit with a pit when we were talking about the impact of ER for younger listeners who weren't here when ER happened. So if you weren't here, and, you know, Sean and I were quite young when Twin Peaks hit the first time. But if you weren't here for when Twin Peaks debuted, it got 34.6 million viewers. And as I did with the ER premiere, I want to compare that to Landman, which I think is the closest I can come to, like a ratings phenomenon, like a ratings phenomenon that people are touting. So Landman for context, a smash hole ahead, reached 14.9 million households through the first four weeks.

The first episode of Twin Peaks gets 34.6 million viewers. We were living in a very different time in terms of viewership, but I just want to emphasize that. We talked about this with Shogun as well. It was just a different culture when we were all watching the same things. And Twin Peaks, among those things, especially in its first season, had a chokehold on the culture. We always talk about how audience was much bigger in the past

and that there was more of a monoculture and so on and so forth. But in 1990 there were 250 million people in America And in 2025 there are almost 350 million people in America So you've got to add on top of that the fact that landman Which of course is equal in quality to Twin Peaks as we all know If it has roughly Somewhere between one half and one third of the audience as the biggest show on television Twin Peaks was reaching just an extraordinary amount of people

And so what you're citing here I think is the thing that makes him such a Fascinating cultural figure for me personally as someone who's obsessed with the insider and the outsider. Like he is a true outside artist, someone who is, you know, certainly informed by Americana, but the work that he's making is deeply abstract, informed by Bunwell, et cetera, et cetera. But also, what he made was Academy Award nominated and was mainstream and was popular and was accepted in a way and was known, you know, like my dad knows who David Lynch is. So he may not know what Lynchian is, but he knows who that person was.

So it's a very important context that an artist like him arrived at this time in which he could become such a well-known figure, purely by dint of his art and his, you know, kind of graceful, weird celebrity. And I think it's important to note that he had two Oscar nominations before he made Twin Peaks. That's for certain. But I do think there's a difference, even though the Oscars were, you know, much more popular, heavily watched back in 1980s. But I think that there's such a difference between Art House Oscar-nominated director and I'm in your living room every week, which is something that TV can afford. So that instinct that David Lynch had to take his art house weirdness,

which I love, and wrap it in the plastic of a TV soap opera and bring it into your living room or I mean I don't know do you do you consider him making Dune a sort of a similar pitch to the mainstream or yes and no I mean obviously that was a sort of a for hire job or Dino D'Lerrenta sought him out and in order to make that movie he then got D'Lerentis to agree to make finance other things that he would do it was a higher job but also there's a such a as we as we know now having covered Dune so closely over the last four years. like there's such an idiosyncrasy and esoterica and oddity to that world that Herbert created, that it's an obvious fit.

You know, he also, he directed commercials and he was like a part of Hollywood in some ways. But I think that the show is the collision, ultimately, of the two polarities for him. And it's done in such a funny and off-kilter. And a way that makes you ask, is this? What is this? Is this trying to be like this? You know, like that feeling when you first time you see Lynch. And I think Twin Peaks for a lot of people, you know, the Elephant Man and Blue Velvet were very well-known and celebrated movies in Eraserhead as kind of the er cult film for that generation. But this reaching so many people that his, the questions that you would ask yourself about intention and vibe that he created, I feel like really starts here.

And I would, yes, and that and say the reason to your point, The reason that not necessarily specifically your dad, but most people know David Lynch or can respond in some way when you say Lynchian, even if they can't particularly define it, comes from the mass popularity of Twin Peaks, an improbable hit. And you mentioned Eraserhead is this sort of Erotex for cult films. And Twin Peaks is in its way in uratex for prestige television, the very reason where he, The pilot gets nominated for eight Emmy Awards, wins a few sort of minor awards, but is a television academy hit, a ratings hit, a critical darling.

Reading through a bunch of the reviews of, you know, when it originally premiered, however, everyone's all the critics were like, this is great, it's not going to last. No way is this going to be popular? No way are people going to like, I like it. But the people won't like it. And then the people liked it for a time.

For a while, the people liked it. But the way that this show is referenced by so many of our favorite TV creators, David Chase talks about it all the time when he talks about The Sopranos. Matthew Weiner talks about it all the time when he talks about Mad Men. David Lindelof talks about all the time when he talks about all of his work. Brian Fuller, and then the list goes on and on and on. And Andy and I talked a bit about that on the episode that we did, Noah Hawley, all this sort of stuff, that this generation, I mean, David Ches is a bit older,

but this generation that grew up watching Twin Peaks when they were younger, it unlocked for them this possibility of what TV could be, which is not just cinematic, which it certainly is, but also weird and surreal and challenging in a way that TV had not been previously. And I just want to correct one thing on the record. I've seen some claims in recent, in the last week of people saying, Twin Peaks was the origination of the origin of serialized storytelling on TV. That's not quite true.

That's really Hill Street Blues. And Mark Frost came from Hill Street Blues to Twin Peaks. But it wasn't common. And so the idea of who killed Laura Palmer, the central mystery question, arcing over not just one season but into two, was a rarity at this time of television when you didn't have a DVR or you didn't have streaming and you couldn't catch up with episodes you missed. And so they couldn't rely that people would be home

every single week to watch every single episode. And so you were presented with Case of the Week or episode of the week. And this is a rare sort of arcing journey that we discover here with Twin Peaks. I think that that is obviously essential to understanding how it fits into prime time. Yeah. But the thing that it's speaking to more, I think, in terms of its inspiration structurally,

is Days of Our Lives and Dynasty. You know, like during the day, there obviously were soap operas and people were kind of watching their stories every day while doing the laundry. And then in the evening time, this was a period where the landman of its time was a show like Dynasty, which was about big families and quests for power and Dallas, you know, and very focused on these kind of locales and the inner workings of the power structures. And that's a big part of Twin Peaks.

You can see all of that in the first episode with Joyce and the mill and how the city is organized and here's where the cops are and here's where the high school is and sort of the lay of the land that this episode of television is giving us, which is so fundamental.

It's a lot of popular television at the time. Some shows are like that now, but most are really character-driven. You know, most shows now in the aftermath of the... kind of prestige rise is very much oriented around kind of the anti-hero, the complicated leading figure, and the way that they cut through the world. Twin Peaks is sort of like that, but that's not what Dale Cooper is. Dale Cooper, he's the opposite kind of tonally. And so he's really more of a

vessel for us as we explore this world. So it's a show that like really is very much a product of the 80s and not as reflective, I think, of 2025 as we sometimes think because of everything that it's set off. I really agree with that. I would just say that I think I think it's as character-driven as Lynch's. The interesting blend and collision of Frost and Lynch inside of this, and Frost's instinct as a storyteller, and Lynch's instincts as a storyteller, and where they blend and where they chafe, and where Lynch was directly involved and where Lynch wandered away from the project, all of that is interesting to track over the course of the episodes. And you can

sort of if you want to reverse engineer what you think is primary Lynch's influence if you watch the return, which is so heavily Lynch. Lynch. And that and the return is further a field, I would say, from character-driven than this is. I think you have moments of character-driven storytelling inside of the original seasons of Twin Peaks. I just think Lynch's insistence of not telling you how to feel. and creating that sort of unease and mystery and discomfort, he doesn't want to bring you inside of a human brain that you recognize, right?

He doesn't want to have a recognizable human for you to latch onto because that would make you comfortable, and he doesn't want you comfortable while you're watching this. Would you agree with that? I would, although one of the most interesting things to me revisiting the pilot was how the vibe is that traditional surreality, but not the events. The events of this episode

are fairly standard serialized narrative storytelling. 100%. There's no Black Lodge in this episode. You know what I mean? What we see occasionally, you know, the closing moments and the vision that Laura's mom has, for example, that feels very lynch.

That feels very inland empire. It feels very, the kind of chaos and the anxiety and the mania of that moment. But even what's happening there is just a woman sitting on a couch picturing something. You know, it is not the otherworldliness,

literally, of the rest of this series. And so I wonder about that. And like, is that a way, were they nervous about, you know, freaking out the general audience? Was it a trap or a lore to get more people invested in this mystery story that they were telling

to then bring us down the rabbit hole of, you know, the psychological burying that is going on in the story or the sense of good and evil and the origins of evil and all the things that the series eventually goes on to explore, it's still a fairly pro forma

who done it, but just the energy just feels wrong. Something just feels off. Yeah. And it's unmistakable when you're watching it. And having, you know, if you've seen the return, you're like, this episode is like, you know, watching an episode of Landman.

Yeah. But still his ability to communicate as a filmmaker that something is wrong in the world without moving to the tools that he would use, like moving to the alleyway image in Mulholland Drive, for example, or some of the decrepit and more disgusting aspects of blue velvet. Like, there's not a lot of that in this 95 minutes. And so that's so interesting that he's still, he can capture that. feeling of despair and anxiety and oddity, I guess, without going to any of those places. And I wonder if he, because there was a big drop-off from episode one, episode two, which I think is really notable. And what do you think it counts for that, I guess is my question.

Is it that move toward a slightly more surreal style of storytelling? There is a significant drop-off, but it's, the drop-off isn't too low viewership numbers. It was still a phenomenon for the rest of season one. The bigger drop-off comes in season two. But I think, yeah, I think some people tuned in, probably thinking they were getting a sort of Dallas dynasty-esque soap opera, and there is an unsettling weirdness. I'll skip ahead and say I chuck a lot of that up to the score.

Really helps establish that. We can loop back to that a little bit later. but I think, you know, or the emotionality that's on display here that's unsettling, uncomfortable, the cadence of the dialogue. So I think people tuning in thinking they're getting something extremely standard will say, that was a little weird and I don't want to watch it anymore. But people who are like, it's just standard enough that I feel comfortable and just unsettling enough that it's maybe expanding my idea of what starts.

storytelling can be inside of my living room are the people who sort of went on watching it. And I love that about the series. I want to ask you before we can sort of get into the specifics of this episode even more, what's your personal relationship with Twin Peaks? When did you start watching it? Well, it's interesting that you bring up the score. I think I might have told this story briefly on the big picture, but I have a very strong sense memory of hearing Angela Bauda Lamenti's.

Is it Laura's theme? Is that the theme song to this series? and it's like being a clarion call and kind of drawing me into the living room of my home where I grew up where a baby, I know, I remember very vividly my babysitter Karen being into the show. Really? And watching the show. And Karen, of course, like all great babysitters, allowed me to stay up later, allowed me to watch TV I shouldn't watch. This is a critical experience for all young developing sickos like myself.

Yes. And so I'm sure I saw aspects of the show. And then over time, I think Karen, realize this was not ultimately appropriate for me. So I wasn't like one of those kids who was watching at seven the series all the way through. But that song, that tune, sticks out in my mind.

And then I went back, I don't know, whenever it was circulated on VHS, I assume. I don't remember. Did it run in syndication anywhere? Was it air on any other networks? It was on Bravo. Bravo, okay. For a while in the 90s, I'm not sure for how long. And I know that David Lynch sort of,

that's when you get the there was like the Log Lady prolog that started accompanying it when it showed up occasionally in syndication so yeah I'm not sure it was super accessible but it was it was running all the time

like the Brady Bunch or something like that but it was in reruns around for sure yeah and I think you know in the 90s obviously Lynch goes from Firewalk with me to Lost Highway and when Lost Highway hits you know Trent Resner

and Marilyn Manson and all of those figures kind of meaningfully being a part of that soundtrack and being obsessed in music and music magazines. That really is kind of what drew me into the Lynch orbit, like, and more sort of understanding what it was that he was doing. And then eventually, when Mulholland Drive comes around,

I think I kind of went into a, let's watch all of this person's stuff mode. I probably hadn't seen Dune till then. I probably had not seen The Elephant Man until then. And so in the late 90s and early 2000s, really kind of investing. And I remember when the missing piece's DVD of Twin Peaks came out and that being a really big deal as a home video dork that I am

and watching everything and devouring it and getting obsessed with it. But yeah, I was seven when it came out and I watched, I'm sure I saw multiple episodes on TV not really knowing what to make of it. What about you? When did you first get exposed to it? I was really late to the game in that it was only, it was like about 10 or so years ago. And someone I was dating was really into it and wanted to show it to me.

And like, which was a really wonderful way to watch anything, I think, is someone who loves something wants to share it with you. They could go poorly, but it went really well. Did you love it right away? I did, and I was extremely aware of it. I was aware of sort of the bones of it as someone who was as tapped into pop culture

or its legacy as I was. You can't avoid its legacy if you watch as much film and television as we do. And so, And it's one of those relief moments of I finally watched this and now I understand everything a bit more completely.

I love that feeling. I just watched the outsiders for the first time earlier this week and it's just sort of like oh, now everything has sort of locked a little bit more into place for me. I love checking things off. That sounds like a very cold way to talk about art. But anyway,

I loved it. I loved it. And then the return happened and I loved it even more. Like the return, I love Twin Peaks, but I loved the return. And so going back to rewatch Twin Peaks in light of the return

makes me love it even more, if that makes sense. It definitely deepened my appreciation for the original series. The original series, you know, the truth is the second season is real wonky and a lot of it doesn't work.

And that was understood at the time in the viewership fell off a clip. but just creatively, it really kind of lost its way. And I think in some ways, struggled to do the same thing that a lot of current prestige television, I think, struggles to do, which is sort of justify its length and existence in a lot of ways, especially when there is kind of a core, whether it be conflict or mystery involved. The thing that sticks out to me as I rewatch the first episode,

then watch the final 20 minutes of the European cut, which I'm sure we'll get into quickly. Right. And then even just sort of like teasing myself by watching, bits and pieces of other episodes was this idea that like it was a mystery show but what so many mystery shows

since it happened have failed to capture the vibe you know I thought of like the killing the AMC series or mayor of East Town or you know there are a lot of shows that are like this and we live in a ton this movie this TV series presaged our obsession with the dead girl and none of those shows

Shows are funny or... Kicked it off. It kicked it off. Yeah. It did, but it also seemed to sort of be like, not mocking it, but undermining our fascination by these ideas. And then Firewalk with me kind of closes the book on that where it's like, is this really what you're

interested in? Let me rub your nose in it and show you how dark this actually is. And so it felt like at its inception, he and Frost really understood just kind of how gross and unsettling a lot of these ideas can be and what's really at the bottom of them. And in the last 15 years,

years in our culture, like, we have this kind of like methadone drip of like, give me more, give me more mystery box, give me more, I need to know what happened, I need to know what happened. And the show definitely preyed on that, but it also subverted it simultaneously. And that's such an amazing accomplishment that

I'm still odd by what they pulled off, even when the show isn't at its best. What's fundamentally at the core of the pure uncut Twin Peaks versus the methadone of everything that follows it is that when when you talk about a mystery box show and the concept of the mystery box,

which comes from a JJ Abrams like TED Talk, oftentimes you're talking about something that is meant to, meant to get people talking, meant to get people guessing, meant to keep people engaged, get the clicks going, get the Reddit boards going, all that sort of stuff like that. I don't know what Frost isn't interested in, but that is not what David Lynch is interested in. He's not interested in it as bait at all.

He is, like, you know, famously with Twin Peaks, the fight between the network and Lynch was over whether or not we solved the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, the central question of the show. And he didn't want to, and they did. And, you know, I was looking at an ad they put out when in season two the killer is revealed, there was an ad that was in the paper that was just sort of like this, you know, this Sunday at, you know, this time, finally you find out who killed Laura Palmer, right? That's what ABC feels like it needs to feed people. And it's the difference between giving the people what they're asking for and giving the people what is good best for them. And David Lynch is trying to give people what's best for them. And I feel like with love and respect to so many mystery box shows, which I love and I love to theorize about and I have a great time with. There is a cynicism to them that is, I think, absent for them.

from what David Lynch intends. When he talks about asking people to live in the mystery, to dwell in the mystery, to follow their inner feeling, he's like, you know how you're supposed to feel. Don't ask me to tell you how to feel. You know, if you listen to yourself,

there's this quote, I pulled from an interview he gave, he says, feel think, feel hyphen think, your way through. Trust your inner knowing. That's how he wants you to engage

with a mystery, not zoom in on this one book title on a shelf and this Easter egg will tell you exactly what's going on here. Do you know what I mean?

I think that's a fundamental difference. It is, and yet the final image of this episode is in a blurred reflection in a mirror of Bob, which is in itself one of the critical

Easter eggs in popular culture history. Correct. And that was an accident, of course. An accident. Which then kicks off that one of the creative windfalls, I guess, of the series. But it's there.

You know, like, and when Sales asked us to do this, he was like, it's all there. Like, in the first episode, it's all there. The whole show is there. The energy, the, yeah, Firewalk with me, where this is going. Most of the characters, most of the significant characters, you know, who's that lady with the log, we call her the log lady.

You know, like, it's all there. But he is still laying traps for us, you know, to think, to feel think about what happened. He's not, it's not solvable, though. That's really the thing to me is it's not solvable. Like, the truth of what happened is more ethereal and complex and psychological than you ever could say, well, it was this guy who did it or it was this lady who did it. You know, it's not operating in the same way. It is more akin to, you know, your beloved Lost,

which had these kind of phantasmagoric, psychotronic qualities at its best. And it's something that I really like about Twin Beaks and that I always liked about Lost. When Lost was going good, I was like, man, this is really pushing the limits of what 25 million people are interested in. And I fucking love that. So I think that that is really ultimately the differentiation for me is that image of Bob in the mirror. which was an accident for a set dresser, you know, who accidentally found himself in the frame and then that, or maybe he was about when he was behind a piece of furniture

that inspired the Bob's role in this series. There's conflicting reports, whether or not it's like him behind the bed or him being captured in the mirror. I read interviews that go both ways. That choice does still indicate that he does want us to be always paying attention, you know, and that there's no second screening Twin Peaks. That's not, I would not recommend that. Absolutely true. The details matter. I think the fact that it's a happy accident and not a calculated move, but just sort of a, I like how this feels, this feels right to me. I think that differentiates it for me, but you're right. It is important to talk about the fact that this is a show in the VCR era, which kind of goes both ways. On the one hand, there is this sense in this era of it's 1990. There is this sense that like if you don't watch this, the

that it premieres, you will be behind. And in fact, that is very much the message that ABC put out in the world. This is the tagline, quote, if you miss it tonight, you won't know what everyone's talking about tomorrow. We lived in a different world, Sean. If you miss it tonight,

you won't know what everyone's talking about tomorrow. I'm still trying to catch up on the penguin. You'll get there. I believe in you. Alternatively, alternatively, 1990, VCRs have been around for a while, but they are now affordable enough that they're in almost everybody's home.

And so you can tape Twin Peaks off the TV. And if you have reasonably good tracking dials on your VCR, you can rewind and pour over in a much fuzzier way, frames of Twin Peaks, which certainly people did. And that is a newish phenomenon. We talk all the time about in the context of Lost, the fact that TiVo comes out right in the first season of Lost, and this sort of like boop-boop, like TiVo moment in the first season of Lost really changed how people watch television.

And Twin Peaks as a VHS tape that you can sort of fast forward, rewind, and pause also change the way that people watch television. Did you do that? Not with anything on VHS now. Okay. Yeah. I would love to know what percentage of fans of the show were actually doing that. And if that actually is the launch point of the thing that we're talking about here. I think it's something that might have happened more in the second.

season because without the proliferation, the proliferation of online message board fandom really happens more with X-Files, which of course draws heavily from Twin Peaks. But X-Files is really the kickoff of that, which is a like a smidgen later. But so it's not, it's not like you're logging onto the Twin Peaks message board necessarily and someone's like, did you pause it at 22. you know, whatever and see. But it was something that was happening in its earliest stages. But to your point, not in a widespread way, I would say. It's an interesting point, too, about how, like, the way that the show looks, which is that there are things that you would want to analyze in the frame, but the way that it's filmed

is also very banal at times, you know, that it's sort of like, it has that feeling of television where the camera is very still, it's not moving around, it's capturing, you know, a lot of establishing shots of the mountains or the lake, a lot of images of just character, you know, two shot, one over the shoulder, one over the shoulder. It's very simple and very economical towards television and very different from, say, like, the elephant man, you know, which is very designed, or Dune, which is very designed. And it looks good. It's not a criticism, but it is using the contemporary tools, maybe just tilting them a little bit. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound tersephotide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity,

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Let's follow John Carter in his first day in the ER. Let's follow Dale Cooper into investigating this mystery. And so everyone has to explain, oh, yeah, that's the log lady or whatever, to someone. Someone is there to ask the questions of who owns the mill and what's going on here and who's that. Verses, and I think it's such an interesting, I was really struck by the discovery of Laura Palmer's body right at the beginning of the episode, wrapped in plastic, this iconic image. She's been tinged blue, but still absolutely beautiful. Deputy Andy breaks into tears and everybody knows who she is. That's an important thing.

It's not who is this. Everybody knows that's Laura Palmer, you know, a blonde, popular teenager that everybody in town already knows. And that's an important part of this. But Dale Cooper is the one who has to come in and say, you don't actually know her, right? You don't understand what your teenagers are up to. you don't understand the wider world. And also, I don't understand what's going on in your town. Why do these trees smell so good?

You know, like all of that is part of the push and pull of Twin Peaks. But Dale Cooper, as this, and David Lynch has said, as a sort of avatar for a Lynchian celebration of the simple pleasures, a genuine sincere celebration of a hot cup of coffee and a slice of pie. all through this character who, in the mode of many pilots, kind of changes significantly by episode two. He's different in episode one than he is for the rest of the series. He's much stiffer and more awkward.

He's, I think, a bit more charming as the series goes on. But as an iconic, as Kyle McLaughlin who has played Paul Atreides, as Kyle McLaughlin's favorite character he ever played, What does Dale Cooper mean to you? Why do you think he works as well as he does? To me, it's the closest we get to watching Lynch on screen. Yeah. You know, that we have obviously seen Lynch perform.

He performs on Twin Peaks. But the Lynch perspective and communication style feels deeply embedded into Dale. And I'm sure Frost had a lot to say about Dale and what it means to have an FBI agent come to this town. But, you know, you cited this quote from Frost through Guillermo del Toro that was going around after Lynch passed about the utter lack of irony in Lynch. That sincerity. And the way that that was kind of in opposition to the go-go-clintonian 90s, you know, and the like more, more, more culture that we kind of wandered into as kids.

And the fact that Lynch was ultimately a very simple, routinized person, you know, and that what he liked, whether it be smoking or transcendental meditation or a slice of cherry pie, he had no concern about coming off in any way other than just a simple person who liked what he liked. And Dale is the same way. Now, Dale is very smart. This episode, I think, there's a really good job of showing how he is clocking the town so well.

I love that moment when he's interrogating Billy, and he's just like he didn't do it. He writes on the calculator, he didn't do it and shares it with the sheriff. It shows us that this is a smart man. In our culture now, like FBI agents are not considered like nice guys or guys you necessarily want to believe or trust. This show is kind of working in opposition to that.

It doesn't mean that he's right all the time. Obviously, Dale goes through quite a bit over the course of the entire Twin Peak story. But McLaughlin is so naturally tapped into and clearly like absorbing and re-communicating what Lynch is that it's a very, just like a very heartful character. It's like if you go back and watch this show, you can feel closer to David Lynch, especially in this first episode. So yeah, he's deeply meaningful. This is that Giermo del Toro quote, it sounds better when Giermo says it because his accent so beautiful, but I will do my best. He says, people think David is ironic, but he's not. He actually loves that little bluebirds singing at the end of blue velvet, and he really

believes in the goodness of pie and coffee. He's not being meta. He really has the two things, the weirdest mind and the most wholesome mind. And I was reading, I read this essay on the sincerity or the empathy of David Lynch, which I think is a quality. of his that doesn't get as celebrated as the weirdness, the unsettling, the creepy. This idea, this sort of mistaken idea that

his point was to expose the rot at the center of Americana. That idea of evil, which we can talk about in a second, is certainly on his mind. But I think all the time about this scene

in the return where his character talks is talking to David Dukovni's character, and he says he was talking to his coworkers, and he says, he wanted them to fix their hearts or die. I misquote it all the time in my head, and I think of it is fix your hearts or die, but it's fix their hearts or die. Fix your hearts or die. You know, like, where is your heart? Where is your empathy? And that idea that empathy exists inside of Lynch's most grotesque creations, like it's on the page and so evident, in things like Elephant Man and the Straight Story,

but even in the margins of, or at the center of his more nightmare fuel creations, that it's always there. And it's here inside of Twin Peaks. Before we talk about the evil, I want to talk about the emotionality. This is something that puts off a lot of people who try to get into Twin Peaks for the first time

with a 2020's sort of mindset, the beyond soap opera display of emotionality that we get from Andy or Laura Palmer's mom, Sarah, or from Larifan Boyle's character, Donna, these crying jags that we get inside of this first episode. How does that work for you? What is it doing for you and when you watch it in 2025?

I think if you connected to what we were talking about with TV soap opera, but also high-toned melodrama, Hollywood melodrama from the 1950s and 60s, if you watch a Douglas Cirque movie, you can see that what's happening between Donna and James is just torn from that playbook. And it's a style of storytelling and a style of film and television acting

that I think just creates a high level of investment in the tragedy. You know, that's really what the story is trying to convey. It does ultimately get much more chaotic and feels much more like the Grace Zabriski moment at the end of the episode as you go through the series. but I think it's really important for establishing this is a really small town. Like you said, everybody really knew Laura

and loved her, or at least loved the idea of her as the prom queen. And so, you know, if you trip on it, that's fine. I think you're probably going to trip on every David Lynch vehicle to some extent because it's going to feel slightly more outsized than what we expect. This is not, you know, there's a lot of contemporary art that is attempting to replicate realism

And that's not, even though this is said in a grounded world, it's not a realistic story. So I love the performance style that he gets out of most of the people on this show. Not everybody, but most of the people seem to understand what it is that he wants. Yeah. That is exciting. Which performance works best for you and which do you bump the most on? Hmm. That's a good question.

I'm, you know, Bobby has always been a little bit much for me. And I recognize that character. And, you know, there's certainly. I like Dennis Hopper and Blue Velvet, and I like Robert Blake in Lost Highway, and I know when he's pushing for something that is like really, really outsized on the arfing at the end of this episode,

you know, the kind of growling across the way in the prison, that's always been a little bit tricky for me. You know, setting aside Kyle McLaughlin and Michael Onkeen, who I think are both, like, pitch perfect on this show. I've always, you know, one probably just fell deeply in love with Laura Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fen when I was a kid. But watching them together, the sort of like angel and the devil on the shoulder of this show is very, very special.

And they seem to have like really understood what it's asking for. There's a ton of other performances that are really great. But those are the ones that jump out to me when I think about it. It's funny. When I first watched it, Bobby was, Bobby was tough for me. James was kind of tough for me. Leo was kind of tough for me. Like those characters sort of were tough for me.

Then watching the return and then coming back, Dana Ashberg is so good. in the return, that it made me like Bobby, the performance in Bobby, so much better. And I think he's really grown, like, he's so much better as a performer in the return, but then it just made me latch onto that character in a different way. And so I was able to sort of overlook some of the things that I bumped on when I watched it before, if that makes sense. It does. That's one of those things I remember.

Like, these were really young performers, too, playing high school kids. Yeah, you know, and obviously they improved as actors. And that's part of the amazing thing about the, um, you know, Cheryl Lee aspect of it is getting, you know, kind of that opportunity to perform in Firewalk with me and then in the return and kind of show who she was as an actor because she was kind of crystallized in this dead girl cocoon for so long. And you see like in by 2017, a lot of these actors have gotten even better at their craft. I want to sort of combine two points. We don't have like a ton of time. I want to like sort of make sure we get to two things. One, David Foster Wallace is obviously like a really controversial figure nowadays. I cannot help the fact, though, that I very much imprinted on this incredible article he wrote about David Lynch that appears in full in full in a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, a book that I've read several times through. Me as well. It was one of the critical books of my life. It was given to me by a teacher in high school with a long inscription about why it would probably resonate with me.

so it's not surprising to hear you say that, given all the things we share. And when he talks about evil, the full version is in the book, this long meditation on evil, and David Lynch has actually cut out of the version that appeared in, I think it was premiere. Premier, yeah.

But I want to read just part of what he writes about, this idea of evil. He says, evil-ridden, though his filmic world, is please notice that the responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily into greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless

serial cooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility and he's not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he's interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in darkness with capital D

and darkness in David Lynch's movies always wears more than one face. Lynch's movies are not about monsters, i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil, but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch's constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound carpets and grotesque figurants in his movie's world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter, hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch's villains seem not merely wicked or sick, but ecstatic, transported.

They are literally possessed. And I think that, end quote. And I think that that's sort of cobbled together from a longer section inside of this essay. But like, I think that that idea of a haunting of this town, of this almost visceral antimatter of evil that has left its residue on an American town

is really gets to the heart of why I find Twin Peaks so compelling and so unsettling versus this idea of exposing a single person who is malevolent or exposing capitalism or something like, oh, that's interesting, but it's not what Lynch is trying to do and no one else does it like he does it.

No one else has been able to match this. I completely agree. It's a great point and it's interesting how much that piece that Wallace wrote kind of predicts episode 8 of the return and the fact that this idea of evil is operating on this kind of historical intellectual continuum and that it is, there is something monstrous but they're not monsters, you know,

that it is something that is handed down and creates this domino effect across time that is very powerful and sad. and hard to wrap your mind around. And it is there in this episode of the show. It's sprinkled in very, very carefully because it wants you to have some of those traditional ideas of like, oh, the rot and the American idea

and the way that the capitalism behind what's happening at the mill and whether it should be shut down and all these, you know, the town hall meeting and thinking about the outrage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of these recurring events, like, who are the suspects? Let's bring in Bobby.

Let's bring in James. Who is Jay? What's under the fingers? All those clues. and details are wrong footing us the entire time. They're trying to get us invested in a kind of traditional mystery storytelling that is essential to them making the show go. But it's much, much deeper than that and much more unsettling than that.

And it's a very good piece if people haven't read it. I think it was written around the production of Lost Highway? Yeah, it was. Yeah. He visited the said, it's a whole, it's great. It's a wonderful piece. Okay. Justin Sales and all his infinite wisdom mentioned to us that there was not just this

original episode that aired in America, but an international version, basically contractually, David Lynch was required to wrap up the story if they decided they just wanted one sort of package to wrap this all up with. There's 20 extra minutes that aired internationally that tell us who the killer is, wrap everything up, give us some nightmare fuel, give us the Black Lodge, give us all kinds of stuff. We watched this. We had nightmares about it, and we should say that a lot of the footage is incorporated later in episodes

inside of Twin Peaks proper. Some of the Black Lodge stuff, some of the Bob stuff, Frank Silva, shows up to, you know, inside of Dale Cooper's nightmares. I think it's like in episode two or three, something like that. So a lot of this stuff we do see later, but it all packaged together. I mean, it's terrible and horrible and rushed.

and it's not very effective. It would be a tragedy if this is all we got of Twin Peaks. It's not satisfying in any way whatsoever. But I did want to talk about it briefly. Sean, you told me you had nightmares or unsettling dreams after you watched it. Yeah, I think my nightmares are really more about the last two minutes of the original pilot about the Gray-Sabriski having a vision and then that POV shot of the hand reaching for the half of the heart necklace,

the pendant and that image just being something that you just wouldn't see on network television and that kind of sets up the rest of the series. I do think that the final 20 minutes that are tacked on to the European version, which is a funny pre-echo of what happened to Mulholland Drive, which was supposed to be a television show and then became a recut and became a movie. The fact that this keeps happening to him, that he keeps having these ideas and then everybody's like, I don't know, this is going to work out. So let's just do something just in case. I think the way that they resolve the Mike and Bob story here is not terribly satisfying.

It feels happening so quickly. Yeah. And it doesn't really let us sit in what the Black Lodge represents and what kind of the mythology of that evil is that feels so important to the show. And honestly, even by the time you get to the end of Twin Peak season two, you don't really feel like you have it all mapped out for you. It really, and even in the rich,

turn, which maps out a lot more. You still don't feel like you've had it all mapped out for you. Sean, you can feel think your way through it. Yes. So I think that trying to accomplish all that in 20 minutes is ridiculous, but it's cool that to the, it was all there in the beginning point, the fact that the arm is there and that Laura is there and that the, you know, aged McLaughlin is trapped in the Black Lodge and all the things that will happen over the course of the next 30 years happen right before us

in the making of the first episode is such a cool execution of artistry at the earliest stages. So I think if you haven't seen that version, it is available on the DVD. I don't think it's available on Paramount Plus where you can watch the series, right? I watched it on YouTube.

Yeah. On YouTube, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you like it? You'd seen it before? I had seen the parts that had been reintegrated, but I had never seen it, watched it through before.

And I was like, wow, this would have been horrible. I mean, it's unsettling. and it's actually almost like too much Frank Silva. I think they did a really good job of like sort of dropping him in and having him speak less and just be visually creepy as they used him throughout the rest of the series. I do want to quickly shout out. One point that I can get to that I think is important to celebrate

is this out of a story out of time aspect of this. And I want to shout out Richard Bamer and Russ Tamplin to West Side Story alums that are in this that just kind of thrills me the way that he uses them, the way that he uses Peggy Lipton, you know, just sort of like drawing from pop, pop, pop, pop American culture

inside of this, along with like the generation of talent that he discovered and Kyle Glockland as sort of like a lynchian muse and all of that is in the mix here in a way that I, that is unforgettable. And the fact that it never resolves,

not even with the return, and has us constantly feel-thinking and having to trust our inner knowing all the way through it is why David Lynch you will always be famous, why Twin Peaks is such an important part of television history

and why, if you listen to all of this and you still haven't watched Twin Peaks, I hope that you do. Thanks, Sean Fentery. Thanks so much, Joanna. Thanks to Kai Grady and also, of course, the Twin Peaks king, Justin Sales, for this episode,

and we will see you back on the story. See too. Bye.