David Lynch’s masterly, albeit short-lived, Twin Peaks took the prime-time airwaves by storm during a captivating run of two seasons in 1990 and 1991. The show’s guiding mystery is the murder of the town’s adored homecoming queen, Laura Palmer — an emotive conceit AMC’s The Killing has co-opted in the advertising buildup ahead of its own debut. But Twin Peaks is at once darker and more whimsical than your routine crime drama — like much of Lynch’s oeuvre, there’s a lurking, unfathomable terror lying behind the surface of everyday quiet American life, and in Twin Peaks this assumes an eerily supernatural character, brooding in the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. The show’s terrifically written and excellently acted, beginning with its lead protagonist, the eccentric, affable FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), and working its way through a cast of wonderfully real and quirky characters, from a bumbling sheriff’s deputy to the unforgettable Log Lady. Indeed, in Twin Peaks, the “owls are not what they seem,” and trust us, that’s a good thing.
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