‘Twin Peaks’ Hall of Fame: “Pilot” With Joanna Robinson and Sean Fennessey

Look, it's not that confusing.

I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s.
I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009.
The Strokes, Rihanna, J-Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, colon the 2000s.
Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now.
Just trust me. That's 60 songs that explain the 90s colon the 2000s, preferably on Spotify.
Nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands, Skims, Mango, Free People, and Princess poly all under $100 from trending sneakers to beauty must-haves we've curated the styles you'll wear on repeat this spring free shipping free returns and in-store pickup make it easier than ever shop now in stores and at nordstrom.com nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands

Skims, Mango, Free People and Princess Polly

All under $100

From trending sneakers to beauty must-haves

We've curated the styles you'll wear on repeat this spring

Free shipping, free returns and in-store pickup

Make it easier than ever

Shop now in stores and at Nordstrom.com.

Diane, 11.30 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. Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed.
I'm Jonah Robinson. Joining me today is a very special guest from, not the Black Lodge, but a black spooky room.
It's Sean Fennessey. 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 to 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 you have any questions about the Hall of Fame process? No. 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 worked 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 a 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 a 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 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 Michael Fassbender 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 but 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 bookending it with a sense of a beginning of Twin Peaks. That's a fabulous episode of 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 we did on the screen.
Thank you. 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 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 like 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 weeks to revisit Elephant Man and Racerhead, 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 8th, 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 Fennessy 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 a ratings phenomenon, 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 were 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 Bunuel, etc., etc.
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 that's just, 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 arthouse 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 arthouse 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 consider him making Dune a sort of a similar pitch to the mainstream? Yes and no. I mean, obviously, that was sort of a for hire job where Dino De Laurentiis sought him out and in order to make that movie he then got De Laurentiis to agree to finance other things that he would do it was a hire job but also there's such a 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 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 Ur 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 as this sort of urtex for cult films and Twin Peaks is in its way an urtex for prestige television

the very reason we're here. 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 the reviews of, you know, when it originally premiered. However, everyone's like, 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 it 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 Chase 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 the last week of people saying Twin Peaks was 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 in 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. 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.
Or Dallas, yeah. 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 antihero, 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 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 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, yeah. And The Return is further afield, 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 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. 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 is that a way, were they nervous about 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 the psychological burying that is going on in the story or the sense of, you know, 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 whodunit, but just the energy just feels wrong.
Something just feels off. 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. There's not a lot of that in this 95 minutes.
And so that's so interesting that 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 accounts 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 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 chalk, you know, I'll skip ahead and say I chalk a lot of that up to the score.
Really helps establish that. We can, we can loop back to that a little bit later, but I think, you know, or, 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 storytelling can be inside of my living room are the people who sort of went on watching it.
And I, 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 Bottle Amenti'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 remember very 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 realized this was not ultimately appropriate for me. So I wasn't like one of those kids who was watching at seven, these 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 prologue that started accompanying it when it showed up occasionally in syndication.
So, yeah. I'm not sure it was super accessible, but it was, you know, it's not like 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 nineties, obviously Lynch goes from Fire Walk With Me to Lost Highway.
And when Lost Highway hits, you know, Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson and all of those figures kind of meaningfully being a part of that soundtrack and being obsessed with music and music magazines. That really is kind of what drew me into the Lynch orbit 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 until 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 Pieces 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 and 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 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 like love Twin Peaks but I loved the return and so going back to re-watch Twin Peaks in light of the return um 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 and the viewership fell off a cliff 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 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 is I rewatch the first episode, then watch the final 20 minutes of the European cut, which I'm sure we'll get into quickly.
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 Easttown, or, you know, there are a lot of shows that are like this, and we in a time, this movie, this TV series presaged our obsession with the dead girl.
Yeah. And none of those shows are funny or...
It kicked it off. It like 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 Fire Walk 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 in our culture, 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 awed 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 you talk about a mystery box show and the concept of the mystery box, which comes from a J.J. Abrams TED Talk, oftentimes you're talking about something that is 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 is interested in, but that is not what David Lynch is interested in. He's not interested in it as bait at all.
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 um you know i i was looking at a um an ad they put out when in season two, the killer was 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 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 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. An accident, which then kicks off 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, Fire Walk 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 I, it's something that I really like about Twin Peaks 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 the image that 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 it was about when he's behind a piece of furniture that inspired the bob's role um in this 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, um, 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 night that it premieres, you will be behind. And in fact, that is like 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, you know, 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 changed the way that people watch television.
Did you do that? Not with anything on VHS, no. 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 smidgen later.
But so it's not like you're logging onto the Twin Peaks message board necessarily and someone's like, did you pause it at 22 point, 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 this 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, two shot, one over the shoulder, one over the shoulder. It's very simple and very economical towards television

and very different from, say, The Elephant Man, 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. back at Apple and 2% back on every purchase made with Apple Card using Apple Pay.
Apply for Apple Card, the wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.24% to 28.49% based on credit worthiness.
Rates as of January 1st, 2025. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch.
Terms and more at applecard.com. This episode is brought to you by Max.
The Emmy award-winning series Hacks returns this April. The new season follows Debra Vance making a move from her Vegas residency to Hollywood showbiz.
Tensions rise as Debra and Ava try to get their late night show off the ground and make history while doing it. Starring Gene Smart and Hannah Einbinder.
Hacks season four is streaming Thursday, April 10th, exclusively on Max. Don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify.
This episode is brought to you by Max. The Emmy award-winning series Hacks returns this April.
The new season follows Debra Vance making a move from her Vegas residency to Hollywood showbiz. Tensions rise as Debra and Ava try to get their late-night show off the ground and make history while doing it.
Starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. Hacks season four is streaming Thursday, April 10th, exclusively on Max.
And don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify. I want to talk to you about Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Dale Cooper.
Let's do it. You mentioned this character as sort of our way in.
An outsider's classic storytelling technique of let's bring an outsider. Let's follow John Carter on 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 versus, 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, 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? All of that is part of the push and pull of Twin Peaks.
But Dale Cooper, as 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 MacLachlan, who has played Paul Atreides, as Kyle MacLachlan's favorite character he ever played, what does Neil 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. 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,

does 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,

FBI agents are not considered nice guys

or guys you necessarily want to believe or trust.

This show is kind of working in opposition

I'm going to show you. And in our culture now, FBI agents are not considered 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 Peaks story. But McLaughlin is so naturally tapped into and clearly absorbing and re-communicating what Lynch is, that it's just 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 Guillermo del Toro quote. It sounds better when Guillermo says it because his accent's so beautiful, but I will do my best.
He says, people think David is ironic, but he's not. He actually loves that little bluebird 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 is talking to David Duchovny's character and he says he was talking to his co-workers 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 as fix your hearts or die, but it's fix their hearts or die. Fix your hearts or die.
Where is your heart? Where is your empathy? And that idea that empathy exists inside of Lynch's most grotesque creations, 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 2020s sort of mindset. The beyond soap opera display of emotionality that we get from Andy or Laura Palmer's mom, Sarah, or from Lara Finn 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 when you watch it in 2025? I think if you connect it 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 Sirk 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.
that's really what the story is trying to convey.

It does ultimately get much more chaotic

and feels much more like the Grace Zabriskie 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.

And 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 set 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 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.
Um, and I, I recognize that character and, you know, there's certainly, I like Dennis Hopper and Blue Velvet and I like Robert Blake and 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 Fenn when I was a kid.
But watching them together and 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 tough for me.
James was kind of tough for me. Leo was kind of tough for me.
Like those, those characters sort of were tough for me. Then watching the return and then coming back.
Dana Ashbrook is so good in the return. Yeah.
That it made me like Bobby, the performance in Bobby so much better. And I think he's really grown.
He 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 to remember.
These were really young performers too, playing high school kids. Yeah, exactly.
And obviously they improved as actors. And that's part of the amazing thing about the Cheryl Lee aspect know, kind of that opportunity to perform in Fire Walk 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

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 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 this, when he talks about evil,

there's the... 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 is actually cut out of the version that appeared in, I think it was Premiere. Premiere.
Yeah. But I want to read just like part of what he writes about this idea of evil.
Um, 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 kooks. 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 a 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 is a great question. 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 figurines.
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 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 really gets to the heart of why I find Twin Peaks so compelling and so unsettling versus, yeah, 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 eight 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 the hotel outrage. 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 the 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, was it written around the production of Lost Highway? Yeah, it was. Yeah.
He visited the set. 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 like 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 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 Sibriskie 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 onto the European version, which is a funny pre-echo of what happened to Mulholland Drive, which was also supposed to be a television show and then was 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 if 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 so happening so quickly.

And it doesn't really let us sit in

what the Black Lodge represents

and what the 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 Peaks season two, you don't really feel like you have it all mapped out for you.
It really, and even in the return, 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 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 such a cool execution of artistry at the earliest stages yeah so i 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 watch on youtube yeah on youtube okay what did you did you 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 uh i was like wow this is this would have been horrible i mean it's 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 uh as they used him throughout the rest of the series i do want to quickly shout out one point that I didn't 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 Boehmer and Russ Tamblyn to West Side Story alums that are in this that just like 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 American culture inside of this, along with like the generation of talent that he discovered and Kyle Buckland 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 Lynchy 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 Fennessey.

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 speed soon. Bye.