And then there’s Bobby and Shelly. Boy oh boy, is there ever Bobby and Shelly. Director Tim Hunter films the two of them making out in her unfinished house, Shelly straddling Bobby’s lap in her waitress uniform as they kiss and clutch at each other. When Bobby gets the idea to use Leo’s shirt to get rid of him, Shelly rewards him by opening her uniform to reveal a black lace teddy, against which she clutches a gun suggestively. And just like that, Bobby decides he has a few minutes to spare before he leaves after all.

I don’t blame him. Mädchen Amick is the most beautiful woman in a cast that includes Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan Chen, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Peggy Lipton, which to paraphrase The Big Lebowski puts her in the running for the most beautiful woman worldwide. Dana Ashbrook is a megababe too, whose mercurial nature — beneath the tough-guy act he’s clearly an emotional and easily hurt kid — makes his obvious hunger for Shelly feel wild and insatiable.

But that’s just it: He’s complicated, and so is their whole situation. Bobby is a red-hot lover, but he really did care about Laura, and Shelly says she wished she could have comforted him at her funeral. Shelly, meanwhile, is perfectly capable of playing the seductive desperate housewife, all bullets and black lace, but she also spends her shift commiserating with Norma about their similarly shit taste in husbands. 

So yes, they’re gorgeous, but it’s the stickiness of their situation, the sharp angles and rough edges, that makes Bobby and Shelly’s romance work so well. Passion is the means by which they process their pain. Isn’t that the purpose of soaps — like Invitation to Love, the show within the show that the characters keep on watching even as their real lives exceed it — in the first place?

I reviewed the fifth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Consider Leland Palmer. He, too, has an uncomfortable outburst at Laura’s funeral. Perhaps triggered by the fight between Bobby and James, he quite simply melts down, throwing himself atop his daughter’s coffin. The hydraulic apparatus designed to lower it into the ground then malfunctions, yanking the sobbing man up and down. “Don’t ruin this too!” shrieks his wife, Sarah, who’s been decompensating in her own way as well.

Some mourners, like Shelly Johnson, find the whole thing comedic enough to reenact for the amusement of the diner patrons at the Double R. (She’s also hiding a gun in her home to protect her from her psychotic husband Leo, the prime suspect in Laura’s killing at the moment, so cut her some slack.) And it’s true, there’s something funny about it, and not just the slapstick-comedy nature of the incident. 

Leland’s grief is so over the top that it provokes nervous laughter, the kind you let out when what you’re watching is too intense to take seriously, for a moment at least. It’s hard to watch him weep and wail on the coffin, or again on the dance floor at the Great Northern, as he begs for someone, anyone, to dance with him in Laura’s place. I bet Sarah could do with some attention, too, but what happened to their daughter is pulling them apart, not bringing them together. That’s a second tragedy.

What’s worrisome is that Leland has another family member to worry about while this is going on. Laura’s cousin Madeleine — a brunette with big glasses but a lookalike in every other way, played by Laura actor Sheryl Lee — arrives in town for the funeral, and is there to witness the catastrophe at the cemetery. We’ve already seen Sarah superimpose her daughter’s face on the girl’s best friend, Donna Hayward. It isn’t difficult to imagine Madeleine being cast in that same role, whether she wants to play it or not.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Okay. Now we’ve seen Twin Peaks.

The show’s third episode is, in effect, the final chapter of a big three-part premiere. This is literally true, to an extent: Coop’s dream recycles footage originally created for an extended cut of the pilot for European markets. More to the point, it introduces multiple load-bearing elements of Twin Peaks’ cultural iconography, things you’ve probably seen or heard of whether or not you have any idea whodunit or where all this is headed (no spoilers, in other words): Audrey’s dreamy dance, Leland’s hysterical grief, Coop’s unconventional police work, One-Eyed Jack’s, the Red Room, the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), the backwards speech, Laura Palmer whispering in Agent Cooper’s ear, the “Fire Walk With Me” poem, one-armed Mike, Killer Bob. 

Episode three is where it becomes clear that something not just strange but supernatural is occurring in this quiet logging town. It’s where the show goes from weird to Weird. And in all its non sequitur, nonlinear surrealist menace, it’s where David Lynch as we’d know him for the rest of his career — the David Lynch of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and this show’s own unlikely comeback season — is born.

I reviewed the third episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Director Duwayne Dunham, who collaborated with Lynch as an editor both before and after working on Twin Peaks’ original run, clearly knows Lynch’s stuff well. His shot compositions for the one-on-one heart-to-hearts echo the quietude of Lynch’s own approach, against which surreal flourishes, like the blue glow on Hawk in the hospital, or scary ones, like the sudden appearance of that man behind the bed, pop more brightly. 

He also respects that this is a show about people experiencing pain over Laura Palmer’s murder, not just trying to solve it: The sympathetic way he shoots characters like Sarah and Donna as they each grieve in their own way are among the show’s most memorable so far. Granted, “so far” means two episodes. But what episodes! From the mesmerizing opening credits on down, Twin Peaks asks you to quietly sit with whatever it’s doing — gags and bits, soapy melodrama, serial-killer horror, coping with loss, ranting about cotton-ball-powered drape runners — and listen to the screams, or the sighs, or the silence.

I reviewed episode two of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” is a question that drips with a pain that Lynch and Frost admirably refuse to clean up and wipe away. Whatever their original intent regarding the resolution of her murder, Laura Palmer is no MacGuffin, no glowing briefcase or unobtainium or Maltese Falcon. She is, or rather was, a real person. She was complicated, obviously, and led multiple secret lives, lives even Donna and James, her best friend, knew nothing about. She was likely an addict. She may have been trafficked. She was a child — Leland and Sarah Palmer’s child. She was Laura Palmer.

Now she’s gone. Through all the surreality and silliness, as suspect after suspect is introduced and dismissed, Lynch and Frost never lose sight of Laura. They never silence the cries of those who loved her, to the point where I found it impossible not to cry along with them all. They never take their eyes off that empty desk. They never let you forget what it means.

I’m reviewing all of Twin Peaks — Season 1, Season 2, Fire Walk With Me, The Missing Pieces, The Return — for Pop Heist, starting with this essay on the series premiere. Twin Peaks is my favorite show, the best ever made, and I’m going to give my heart and soul to this.

Please note that while this is a gift link, Pop Heist is a worker-owned site that makes algorithm-free pop-culture coverage with no big-money backer. No other place would let me do this (or I, Claudius, or The Prisoner). It’s $7/month or $70/a year to subscribe, and it’s worth it.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

I wrote about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the work of David Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, for Decider.

Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

But the problem with Secret Invasion’s AI credits isn’t just one of ethics, or of ugliness. It’s a waste of some of the most valuable creative real estate any television show has. Throughout television history, thoughtfully crafted opening title sequences have set the tone for the shows to follow, conveying valuable information about everything from the mood you can expect to the plot of the show itself. Some are woven so deep into the fabric of the series they kick off that the two become synonymous. The best function like short films, artistic statements on their own. Speaking plainly, AI just doesn’t have the juice.

When Cheers wanted to show you a place where everybody knows your name, they relied on a carefully curated and edited selection of illustrations and photographs depicting nostalgic good-old-days revelry created by James Castle, Bruce Bryant, and Carol Johnsen. Monty Python member Terry Gilliam established his troupe’s style of surrealistic inanity with animation that would become a staple of the show. David Lynch and Mark Frost used second-unit footage and the evocative music of close Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to transport you to Twin Peaks.

I wrote about the ethical and, above all, artistic failure of Disney’s decision to use AI to “create” the opening credits for its new show Secret Invasion for Decider.

Stefan and I enter the town of Twin Peaks in this episode on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark series. It’s geared to newcomers, so hopefully everyone can listen and enjoy!

When that one-eyed man popped up at Amelia’s book reading in “Hunters in the Dark,” disruptive and distraught, perhaps complicit in the central crime in some tangential way but seemingly remorseful and also very obviously disturbed by his own experiences, I didn’t think of the Black Lodge or the Red Room, Norma Jennings and Dougie Jones. I thought of Russ Tamblyn’s Dr. Jacoby, the eccentric psychiatrist who had an unethical relationship with his teenage patient, snapped when she was murdered, and wound up a conspiracy crank in the woods.

There are so many people like that in Twin Peaks, people driven to the margins of the idyllic small-town society by abuse, poverty, mental illness, drugs, or their own bad actions, never to return. Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl Rodd, wise and sad in his trailer park. Alicia Witt’s Gersten Hawyard, a onetime child prodigy clinging to her suicidal and abusive junkie lover. Lenny Von Dohlen’s Harold Smith, the shut-in with the lonely soul. Catherine E. Coulson’s Log Lady, whose prophetic gifts couldn’t save her from dying of cancer like anyone else. Addicts, adulterers, crooked cops, scheming hoteliers, lonely gas station operators.

Some are closely connected, in one way or another, to murdered high-school student Laura Palmer — herself pulled in a million different soul-damaging directions long before her murder and quite apart from the demonic forces feeding off her misery. Others have no connection at all except geography. All of them float around in the dark and icy waters of the American underclass. In Twin Peaks, Laura’s tragic murder is the crack in the ice that allows us to observe the sea of suffering underneath.

That’s what I think of when I think of True Detective season three, not Matthew McConaughey’s twitchy nihilism, nor Colin Farrell’s thousand-yard, eight-beer stare. Wayne Hays, Amelia Hays, and Roland West may well be the truest detectives we’ve met yet. But from Agent Dale Cooper on down, not even the best investigators have ever truly seen an open-and-shut case, one they could comfortably solve and file away forever. The forces that made life so hard for the Purcells and the people around them, that empowered their community’s worst elements and discarded otherwise decent people like corpses at a crime scene, will be there even if Will and Julie’s attackers are taken down once and for all. Who killed Laura Palmer?was the start of a discussion about what we do in the face of endemic pain and injustice, not the end of it. If True Detective season three wraps up with the same strengths it has displayed so far, it will ask a similar question, and offer just as challenging an answer.

I favorably compared this season of Nic Pizzolatto’sTrue Detective to David Lynch & Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks saga for Vulture.

True Detective season three is about the fate of the Purcell children, yes. But it’s also about the prejudice and PTSD that drove Native American Vietnam vet Brett Woodard to spark a lethal firefight after his neighbors tried to lynch him for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s about the mysterious one-eyed man who gave the Purcell kids a doll he purchased from a racist parishioner at the local Catholic church, then resurfaced a decade later to harangue Amelia for profiting off other people’s suffering. It’s about the black neighborhood that understandably reacts to a visit from the police like an invasion by outside occupiers. It’s about the three random metalhead teenage assholes who nearly get jammed up for murder because they’re surly and wear Black Sabbath shirts in a God-fearing southern community. It’s about Tom Purcell, driven to alcoholism to dull the pain of life in the closet. It’s about his wife, Lucy, who employs drugs, drink, and promiscuity in much the same self-medicating way after a childhood of abuse and incest. It’s about the contemporary true-crime boom, and how well-meaning filmmakers and podcasters and writers can get us closer to the truth but do a lot of damage on their way there. It’s about the way wealthy men and their allies in government and law enforcement can collude to treat the communities they rule with the kind of impunity that would make a feudal lord envious. It’s about an old man with Alzheimer’s, whose own life is fast becoming as big a mystery to him as the case he could never quite solve, and whose loved ones are slowly slipping into anonymity the same way the real killers and kidnappers did.

In this respect, True Detective season threehas learned lessons not only from its own direct predecessors, but from the ne plus ultra of small-town murder mystery television: Twin Peaks. And it’s learned the right lessons, too.

I wrote about True Detective Season 3 in the context of Twin Peaks–style small-town sadness and horror for Vulture.

You may not have heard of the monumental horror-image before, but like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it. The little girls in The Shining, the statue of the demon in The Exorcist, the titular entities in The Wicker Man and It Follows: Though they’re rarely discussed compared to jump scares, gore, monsters, slashers, torture, or other hallmarks of the genre, the monumental horror-image is everywhere. Chances are good that if a movie has ever really frightened you, you have strange, standalone sights like these to thank.

The things you see in images like these aren’t brandishing a chainsaw or baring a mouthful of fangs, but something about them feels completely terrifying anyway. It’s not just scary, it’s wrong, like you’re seeing something that should not be.

Why “monumental?” In part, because subjects of these images are horrifying more for what they represent than what they actually do. In most cases, they don’t do anything but stand there. Yet seeing them alone is enough to indicate that something dreadful going on. Just as monuments in real life commemorate events or embody ideals, these images function as horror’s forward-facing surface — “monuments” to the deeper evil they connote.

Inspired by a twitter thread I did on the topic that went viral recently, I wrote about the monumental horror-image for The Outline, and they made an incredible visual presentation out of it that you really should check out if this subject interests you at all. This piece was nearly 20 years in the making and i’m so proud of how it turned out.

2. The Young Pope: “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO

“Sexy and I Know It” is Paolo Sorrentino’s ambitious, emotional, confrontational series about an autocratic American-born pope in miniature. Granted, using LMFAO to represent your drama about faith, loneliness, power, corruption, and lies is a bit counterintuitive compared to, say, summing up Twin Peaks with a song from the Twin Peaks score. That’s the joke, in part: It’s very stupid, and therefore very funny, to watch the Holy Father dress up for his first address to the College of the Cardinals while Redfoo drawls about wearing a Speedo at the beach so he can work on his ass tan. Girl, look at that body … of Christ?!

But like so much of The Young Pope, there’s a much deeper and more serious meaning beneath the craziness and camp. To wit, the brand of tyrannical, uncompromising religion the pontiff formerly known as Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) embraces depends on craziness and camp. Look at the obscene decadence of his subsequent entrance to the Sistine Chapel, borne on a litter like an emperor of old. Listen to his megalomaniacal speech, demanding that the Church remake itself in his bizarre and imperious image. Watch how he demands his followers demonstrate their obedience by literally kissing his feet. It’s a contrast to the self-aware silliness of “Sexy and I Know It,” yes, but it’s a contrast achieved by taking that song’s boasts as deadly serious claims to superiority. He’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it. Spiritually speaking, anyway.

I wrote about the 10 best music cues on TV this year for Vulture. As is always the case with lists of this nature when I write them, it is objectively right and I shall brook no dissent.

this concerns the final episode. after the jump

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Did I not mention that Kyle MacLachlan read and enjoyed my weekly Twin Peaks reviews for Rolling Stone?

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

“I’ve already gone places. I just wanna stay where I am.” Stanton’s role as tired-looking trailer-park owner Carl Rodd in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel was as cryptic as everything else in the film, lasting just a few short minutes and some spare lines of dialogue. But he packs decades of world-weariness into his brief screen time; nobody could turn “It’s just more shit I gotta do now” into a punchline that doubled as a declaration of existential despair. Stanton reprised and expanded the role in Peaks’ astonishing third season this year, cracking jokes about defying death one minute, bearing witness to unspeakable tragedy like an earthbound angel the next – a moving, bonus grace note in a long, legendary career. STC

I consider it one of the great privileges of my career as a writer to have written about Alien and Twin Peaks for Rolling Stone’s list of 10 Essential Harry Dean Stanton Movies.

A side note here: It feels goofy to praise David Lynch for not participating in the usual back-and-forth between showrunner and viewer about the need for answers, closure and a finale that “sticks the landing,” which the conclusions of The Sopranos and Lost have rendered a seemingly permanent part of the TV discourse. (It’s like giving Stanley Kubrick a shoutout for resisting the temptation to create the Kubrick Cinematic Universe.) Still, even if this wasn’t on the filmmaker’s mind, as seems likely, it certainly was on ours. How refreshing to watch a show wholly alien to the debates that consumed the final seasons of even the most truly wonderful dramas, from Mad Men to The Leftovers. And how cool to see a series so gloriously unsuited to the era TV takes, too. After “This is the water and this is the well,” didn’t every article you came across with a title like “Lucy Brennan Proves David Lynch Has a Receptionist Problem” or “Dr. Jacoby’s Spray-Painted Shit Shovels Would Work Much Better Using the Netflix Release Model” feel … a little small? Like, even smaller than usual?

[…]

Twin Peaks: The Return was a dazzling work of filmmaking. But unlike its jittering cameras, flashing lights, billowing smoke and ambient whooshing and whirring, its emotional foundations were rock solid. We may marvel at the cosmos Lynch and Frost created – a universe of vast purple oceans, towering metal fortresses, billowing red curtains and infinite fields of stars. We may spend another 25 years attempting to puzzle out Audrey’s location, the glass box’s bankroller, the true identity of “Judy” and what, exactly, became of the girl with the bug in her mouth. But there’s nothing ethereal or mysterious about abuse, trauma and the irresistible death-march of time. That part of Twin Peaks, the part that counts most, is as clear as your reflection in the mirror.

Twin Peaks is the best television show ever made. I tried to explain why for Rolling Stone.

So ends the con job that Lynch and Frost telegraphed from the season’s subtitle, The Return, on down. After all, the original Twin Peaks ended in the worst possible way: goodness corrupted, evil triumphant. Fire Walk With Me hinted at a way forward, only to linger on cruelty and suffering. Certainly nothing in Lynch’s intervening filmography indicated that this story would have a happy ending. Why wouldn’t we wind up right back where we started: an unspeakable violation, carving a hole in the moral fabric of the universe that no one, not even the whitest of knights, is capable of making whole?

This is Twin Peaks: The Return, alright. A return to pain that can’t be healed, crimes that can’t be solved, wrongs that can’t be righted. We drank full. We descended. There’s no way up and out again.

I reviewed the final episode of Twin Peaks Season Three for Rolling Stone.

With only one week and two hours remaining, this season/series revival had spent nearly its entire running time chronicling the (mis)adventures of a Coop far from the one we knew and loved all those years ago – and that’s not even counting the evil doppelganger who escaped the Black Lodge into our world. Our beloved federal agent may have finally escaped that zig-zagged hellscape, but he wound up trapped in the life of a Las Vegas insurance agent named Dougie Jones. Episode after episode, “Dougie” was unable to remember not just his past but, like, how to speak in complete sentences. Somehow, this didn’t prevent our hapless hero from surviving multiple assassination attempts, winning both the local mob bosses’ favor and thousands of dollars at the slots (“Hell-oooooooo!”), making sweet love to Naomi Watts and consuming his fair share of damn good coffee and cherry pie. It was as if his innate Coop-ness was still shining through, guiding him through life’s dangers even if he was incapable of figuring out how a door works.

Then, last week, something changed. Hearing the name of his old mentor Gordon Cole in the movie Sunset Boulevard, “Dougie” was somehow triggered into jabbing a fork into an electrical outlet, sending him into a coma. What emerges on the other side in this episode is wonderful even beyond the imagining of people who’ve waited for this moment for two decades and counting.

“You are awake,” says the one-armed man Philip Gerard in a vision.

“One-hundred percent,” says Dale – the real Dale – in response.

Welcome back, Cooper — the do-gooder, go-getter and wrong-righter whose decency shone like a beacon through all of the darkness all those years ago. The music that accompanies his awakening is the Twin Peaks theme itself. He even still loves and cares for Janey-E and Sonny Jim, the family you might have expected him to simply abandon. By the time his insurance-agency boss Battlin’ Bud Bushnell warns him the FBI is looking for him and he turns to the camera and says, “I am the FBI,” it’s hard to believe there was a single Peaks freak on the planet who wasn’t either screaming for joy or a blubbering mess.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been as moved by an episode of television I was by last night’s Twin Peaks. Just openly sobbing with joy. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.