Encapsulating three seasons, a theatrical feature, at least six official books and almost endless speculation from its fiercely dedicated viewership, Mark Frost and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” has maintained a stranglehold on popular culture for almost 35 years. The series launched with a question that would become one of the greatest mysteries in television history: Who killed Laura Palmer? Unfortunately, solving that murder 10 episodes into Season 2 only hastened the demise of the show, especially after executives for Capital Cities, the then-parent company of its network partner, ABC, developed an intense dislike for the idiosyncratic series.
“David always said, ‘We should never solve the mystery — this should go on forever,’” says co-creator Frost. “And there’s a part of me that thinks he may have well have been right.”
Running on ABC from April 1990 to June 1991, “Twin Peaks” was a bellwether for the artistic possibilities of a medium that was still a few decades away from it “peak TV” era, merging the soapy, smalltown drama of shows like “Peyton Place” with Lynch’s appetite for surrealism, not to mention his ongoing curiosity about the underbelly of suburbia, first explored in his 1986 film “Blue Velvet.” The series percolated with the idiosyncratic sensibilities of its creators like few before it, unafraid to digress from the obligations of conventional plotting in order to indulge in pure storytelling, character development, imagery and atmosphere.
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Frost recently spoke to Variety about his work on the show, offering insights about the show’s unlikely champions, complicated legacy, false starts and would-be spinoffs. He also contemplated its ultimate destination: As the show’s lead character, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), once said, “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
When did you first get a sense that you’d captured lightning in a bottle with “Twin Peaks”?
It was the first public screening that we did at the DGA. The feeling in the room that night was that people were almost giddy with how different and funny and frightening and truly bizarre some of the show seemed to them. I think we all felt after that night that we had something here that really does have a chance to break down a wall or bust a couple of windows. And sure enough, when it made its debut, that’s exactly what happened — we got Super Bowl numbers practically that first night.
In retrospect, do you think you solved the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder too soon, or not soon enough?
Definitely too soon. I mean, we literally had a gun to our head from the network. As I recall, they were just going to stop sending us money if we didn’t deliver this. They wanted it right off the bat at the start of the second season. But David always said, “We should never solve the mystery — this should go on forever.” And there’s a part of me that thinks he may have well have been right. At least through Season 2 would’ve been, I think, acceptable. We could’ve easily gotten through at least the rest of that season engaging with those story dynamics. But it was still 1992, and it was still network television, and they just put their foot down.
This was before ABC was sold to Disney, correct?
They were owned by Capital Cities, a very conservative family-owned business, and it deeply disturbed them. I remember talking to [Thomas Murphy], the CEO of the company, who I think felt we were unleashing some kind of digital Ebola into the world with the storytelling. He was really upset. But the one fortunate part was that they had a young executive there in [future Disney CEO] Bob Iger who, to his credit, was a real champion of the show. I always felt he was in our corner.
Looking back, how do you feel about Season 2 of the show?
I’m very proud of the whole run-up to the solving of the mystery — those first nine episodes I think are every bit as good as the first season had been. And we had planned a storyline that didn’t pan out because of an issue with a couple of the actors and relationships that were sensitive. [According to a 2014 interview with Sherilyn Fenn, Lara Flynn Boyle, who was dating MacLachlan at the time, complained about plans to explore the relationship between Cooper and Fenn’s character, Audrey Horne.]
So Harley Peyton and I had to come up with the Windom Earle story, and it was slightly undercooked by the time we got it on screen. And it took maybe an hour or two longer than I, looking back, would’ve wanted in getting it fully up to speed.
How much of Season 3 had you conceived at that time?
We made a concerted pitch to Bob about what we would do with Season 3, and certain elements of it became part of “The Return” many years later. But they wanted to move on. The other element here was that in the early winter and spring of that second season, the Iraq war had started, and by my recollection, we were preempted something like six weeks out of eight. That was a real detriment to holding onto our audience as that [Windom Earle] story was starting to build.
I understand that the original version of David’s “Mulholland Drive” was conceived as a “Twin Peaks” spinoff focused on Audrey.
“Mulholland Drive” wasn’t called that just yet, but we thought of that as ‘Audrey goes to Hollywood and hilarity ensues.’ I was living on Mulholland Drive at circa 1997, so I offered that as a title and David thought that was great. But he wrote the pilot and sold it initially to ABC as a TV show, and the network didn’t like it, apparently. And that’s when he went to [StudioCanal], the company he’d worked with in France and got the funding to shoot 45 to 60 minutes of additional material. And out of that, he created that incredible movie — obviously, no longer having anything to do with “Twin Peaks” or Audrey, but that was its origin story.
Season 2 ends on several cliffhangers, which you resolve in your book, “The Secret History of Twin Peaks.” How much of the material for the book was drawn from whatever roadmap you may have had back in 1992, and how much came from noodling on these characters for a few decades ahead of “The Return”?
It was mostly the second. The outline [for Season 3] was as simple as, “the bad Cooper’s loose in the world and the good Cooper’s trapped.” And when they said no, there was literally no reason to keep thinking about it. So it wasn’t until the Gold Box [DVD set] came out in 2007, and we hit with that DVD at exactly the right moment — kind of eerily like the luck that we had when we first brought the show on the air. And that made me think, “we might be getting close to a time when the show could make a return.” It took five more years, [but] I called David up and said, “I think I may have an idea. Let’s have a lunch and talk about it.” We took a year of talking almost every day, building out the world of where it could go from where we left it. One of the things we did was go back and look at the last episode. Neither of us exactly recalled that at one point Laura leans in to Cooper in the Red Room and says, “I’ll see you again in 25 years,” but that’s when the key turned — and from there, it was full speed ahead.
Given how fully David Lynch had embraced surrealism in his filmmaking by that point, can you talk about how you found a creative balance between your two styles in “The Return”?
We were in complete agreement from the very first moment that the last thing we wanted to do was an exercise in nostalgia. That’s why we didn’t go back to a broadcast network. We broke the stories, then we had a meeting at Showtime just to say, “Are you at all interested in something like this?” And they said yes, so we wrote the script on spec and came back for that second meeting. We printed it out as a single document, and it didn’t have episode breaks — it was an 18-hour movie. And we said, “Can you get back to us by Monday?” sort of half-joking. But they did, and they wanted to do it.
It was more expensive than they wanted to be, but David handled that in the best way possible by threatening to leave the project. And they wanted to buy nine episodes, but we didn’t know until he finished shooting and cutting that it was going to be 18. But we just wanted to go so far beyond the old “Twin Peaks” that it would be something entirely new. I mean, if we thought we had done a novel the first two seasons, this was like an 800-page novel.
Was there a concern in any capacity of attempting to, if not do justice, but to give some screen time to as many of the characters as possible?
One of the things that really interested me to explore given this unique set of circumstances was, what happens to a town over 25 years and to the people in it? How do they change? That’s thematically an idea you don’t get to wrestle with very often. So we started coming up with storylines for nearly everybody that we knew either wanted to or could participate. And we ended up dealing with everybody that we felt we could effectively represent in a meaningful way to update and further their journeys into what compelling areas could we take their story.
How did the supplemental books you and others wrote about the series feed some of those broader ideas?
Well, when the show had gone off the air, we had created three books that were sort of adjunct to the show. Jennifer Lynch wrote “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer” off an outline that we had come up, and then we did “The Cooper Tapes” that my brother wrote, and “Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town,” which was just a fun throw in. But in the back of my mind, I wanted to write a novel. I thought there is an almost geologically old history you could tell of this area as a setting for the jewel of the show. That became “The Secret History of Twin Peaks.” It was one of the more ambitious things I’d ever tried to do. I didn’t want to lean at all into the future of the town because it came out a year before the show did to kind of whet people’s appetites. And then in a second volume, I thought I’ll do “The Final Dossier” to wrap up any loose ends, and also take you a little bit into the future.
Obviously, “The Return” ends on a note of ambiguity. Without sneaking in a back door question about a “Twin Peaks” Season 4, how much did it let you end the story at a comfortable creative resting place for what you wanted to explore in this world?
I think we were happy with where it ended up. I thought we might end it slightly earlier, initially with the disappearance when Laura doesn’t die, and we discover that things have been set right. But David reminded me, and rightfully so, “You’re not supposed to go back and fool with history. It’s almost written in stone.” And when we thought about it, it in a way revealed Cooper’s tragic flaw, which is that he can’t leave well enough alone. He thinks there’s always a wrong to be righted and somebody to be saved.
And the truth is, life isn’t as simple as that. And meddling with those forces can have unforeseen consequences. So I felt that that was absolutely the appropriate note to draw the curtain on this thing. And you never say never, but we haven’t talked about anything going forward at this point.
Mark Frost originally spoke with Variety for a sponsored editorial series exploring real-life “Twin Peaks” location the Salish Lodge, which inspired the show’s Great Northern Hotel. This interview has been edited and condensed.