The "artistic" status of Twin Peaks stemmed from the unique pedigrees of the series' co-creators, writer­ producer Mark Frost and writer-director David Lynch. Frost was most known for his work as a writer and story editor for the highly acclaimed Hill Street Blues, where he had mastered the techniques of orchestrating a large ensemble drama in a serial format. Lynch, meanwhile, had fashioned one of Hollywood's more eccentric cinematic careers as the director of the cult favorite Eraserhead (1978), the Academy Award­ winning The Elephant Man ( 1980), the epic box-office flop Dune (1984). and the perverse art-house hit Blue Velvet (1986). A prominent American auteur, Lynch was already well known for his oblique narrative strategies, macabre mise-en-scenes, and obsessive the­ matic concerns.

     Twin Peaks combined the strengths of both Frost and Lynch, featuring an extended cast of characters oc­ cupying a world not far removed from the sinister small town Lynch had explored in Blue Velvet. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the series centers on FBI agent Dale Cooper and his investigation of a murder in the northwestern town of Twin Peaks. a few miles from the Canadian border. The victim, high-school prom queen Laura Palmer, is found wrapped in plastic and floating in a lake. Cooper gradually uncovers an ever­ more baroque network of secrets and mysteries surrounding Laura's death, all of which seem to suggest an unspeakable evil presence in the town. Quickly integrating himself into the melodramatic intrigues of the community, Cooper's search for Laura's murderer eventually leads him to track "Killer Bob," a malleable and apparently supernatural entity inhabiting the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest.

     Although the enigma of Laura's killer was pivotal to the series' popularity-so much so that TV Guide featured a forum of popular novelists offering their own solutions to the murder mystery-Twin Peaks as an avowedly "artistic" text was in many ways more about style, tone, and detail than narrative. Many viewers were attracted to the series' calculated sense of strangeness, a quality that led Time to dub Lynch as "the czar of bizarre." As in Lynch's other work, Twin Peaks deftly balanced parody, pathos, and disturbing expressionism, often mocking the conventions of tele­ vision melodrama while defamiliarizing and intensify­ ing them. The entire first hour of the premiere episode, for example, covered only a single plot point, showing the protracted emotional responses of Laura's family and friends as they learned of her death. This slow yet highly overwrought storyline was apparently considered so disruptive by ABC that the network briefly discussed airing the first hour without commercial interruption (although this could have been a strategy designed to promote the program as "art"). Throughout the run of the series, the storyline accommodated many such directorial set-pieces, stylistic tours-de­ force that allowed the "Lynchian" sensibility to make its artistic presence felt most acutely. The brooding synthesizer score and dreamy jazz interludes provided by composer Angelo Badalamenti, who had worked previously with Lynch, also greatly enhanced the eerie, bizarre, and melancholy atmosphere.

     As the series progressed, its proliferation of sinister enigmas led the viewer deeper into ambiguity and continually frustrated any hope of definitive closure. Ap­propriately, the first season ended with a cliff-hanger that left many of the major characters imperiled, and still provided no clear solution to Laura Palmer's mur­ der. Perhaps because of the series' obstinate refusal to move toward a traditional resolution, coupled with its escalating sense of the bizarre, the initially high ratings dropped over the course of the series' run. Despite such difficulties, and in the face of a perhaps inevitable critical backlash against the series, ABC renewed the show for a second season, moving it to the Saturday schedule in an effort to attract the program's quality demographics to a night usually abandoned by such audiences. After providing a relatively "definitive" solution to the mystery of Laura's killer early in the second season, the series attempted to introduce new characters and enigmas to reinvigorate the storyline, but the transition from what had essentially been an eight-episode miniseries in the first season to an open­ ended serial in the second had a significant, and many would say negative, impact on the show. The series at­tempted to maintain its sense of mystery and pervasive dread, but having already escalated its narrative stakes into supernatural and extraterrestrial plotlines, individual episodes increasingly had to resort to either absurdist comedy or self-reflexive commentary to sustain an increasingly convoluted world. After juggling the troubled series across its schedule for several months, ABC finally canceled the series after just 30 episodes in total, packaging the second season's concluding two episodes together as a grand finale.

     Exported in slightly different versions, Twin Peaks proved to be a major hit internationally, especially in Japan. In the United States, the brief but dramatic suc­cess of Twin Peaks inspired  a cycle of shows that tempted to capitalize on the American public's previously untested affinity for the strange and bizarre. Series as diverse as Northern Exposure (CBS), Picket Fences (CBS), The X-Files (FOX), and American Gothic (CBS) have all been described in journalistic criticism as bearing the influence of Twin Peaks. The series also spawned a devoted and appropriately obsessed fan culture. In keeping with the program's artistic status, fan activity around the show concentrated on providing ever-closer textual readings of the individual episodes, looking for hidden clues that would help clarify the series' rather obtuse narrative logic. This core audience was the primary target of a cinematic prequel to the series released in 1993, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Again directed by Lynch, Fire Walk with Me chronicled Laura Palmer's activities in the days just be­ fore her death. Freed from some of the constraints of network standards and practices, Lynch's cinematic treatment of Twin Peaks was an even more violent, dis­ turbing, and obsessive reading of the mythical commu­nity, and it provided an interesting commentary and counterpoint to the series as a whole.

     Lynch once again attempted to bring his neo-noir surrealism to network television with Mulholland Drive, a pilot that was ultimately rejected by a cautious ABC. Lynch had the last laugh, however, at least artis­tically. Taking the core footage of the pilot, Lynch re­ scripted and reshaped the project into a feature-length film. Mulholland Drive went on to be one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2001.