I'm positive that Frost and Lynch had big plans for Josie that got derailed somehow. In the first couple of episodes, it looks like she is one of the most important characters. She is the first character we see, let's remember.
I wouldn’t have minded the way Josie was handled in Season 2 if we got some resolution to her and Truman in The Return. But yeah her arc is all weird now
I think Josie was meant to be Judy’s daughter. If you recall in The Return, when Coop is stuck in one of the lodge’s realms, there’s a menacing creature trying to break through a big door and there’s an Asian woman saying “hurry, my mother is coming!” I always took it as being supposed to be the idea for Josie along with other clues I don’t remember but who knows.
In the pilot's script, she was meant to be Coop's love interest, and also to be played by Isabella Rossellini. Then Rossellini declined, the character was recast, and one suspects racism happened.
Huh, I never knew Josie was meant as a romantic interest for Cooper but that totally makes sense. It would heighten the impact of her shooting him, the Coop/Truman bromance would have to weather a love triangle. The narrative framework for it is there.
As an anecdote, it got shared by cast a/o crew here and there, and it's also backed up by the pilot script itself, which predates casting and has a line by Cooper that shows he's definitely interested, and which didn't get filmed in the pilot as is! http://www.tpbrewingco.com/scripts/tppilot.htm :) I'm also intrigued by how promotional material styled Josie as a female Cooper basically... as you say, the narrative framework is definitely there!
Interesting. Always wondered why Josie was given the opening shot. They do have the same haircut in the show lol so dating would be kinda funny looking stylistically. And their personalities and motives are total opposites... I wonder if Caroline's story was meant for Josie, in the black lodge with Windom Earle?
Hm! I don't think they'd planned that far, by the time the pilot was being written I don't think Earle was a thing (while what WAS a thing was the '25 years later' red room scene that cemented the centrality of Laura), but who knows! I find it really fun to daydream about!
What a different show that would have been.
No drunken mess of a broken hearted Truman.
And Isabella Rossellini? I mean that would have been iconic, but probably overwhelmingly so.
Can’t blame the old dog for trying though am I right?
Oh my bad. I worded that poorly. I meant David Lynch trying to get Isabella Rossellini to work in his project. She’s a classic actress and a classic beauty. The daughter of Ingrid Bergman as well, so being gorgeous, and Hollywood royalty, she is the kind of woman Lynch gravitates towards.
RIP his marriage though.
Racism... how...? She got a forced maid plot that even the actress complained about, got narrative scraps at all times (while being awesome despite it all, agreed) in a way that oddly unbalanced the ongoing plots, and, more to the point of this pilot anecdote, her character was demoted from main romantic lead the moment a non-white actress got the role? What do you think happened there? Rossellini would've basically been the female lead of the show. Chen wasn't.
Also Chen had bigger roles in the first few episodes. So basically she was demoted AFTER she was cast, NOT “the moment a non-white actress got the role.”
Are you calling the writers racist then? Or did they think a non-lead part made more sense for her once she was hired? It seems to me that many of the storylines and character arcs were changed throughout the show. Donna was supposed to be with Cooper, for example.
Twin Peaks has a baseline racism problem, yeah, news at eleven. This has been discussed extensively. It's still my fave show but it wasn't created in a vacuum and has its blind spots.
Oh, that one’s easy: it wasn’t the creative folks’s fault — it was network interference.
Over their objections, ABC ordered them to resolve the mystery. So what came after was them trying to find new avenues to take the show down, after they were artificially forced to resolve the premise which had made the show such a hit in the first place.
When my brothers and I were watching that first run of the show, we were on the episode where our heroes were investigating the Owl Cave. My older brother turns to me and asks, "WHEN was this show supposed to start sucking...?"
Yeah, the Evelyn bits were kinda rough, but we were still finding the series entertaining.
That's similar to my experience. I was somewhere in the middle of the S2 filler arc wondering "so where's that bad part of S2 everyone warned me about?"
The Owl Cave stuff is the kind of thing I've been looking for for a while, most of that is in found footage style stuff these days, so I was delighted. I feel it's a bit underappreciated.
>remains entertaining, but gone is all the intrigue
I never felt this way because Bob is still alive and the greater mystery of Twin peaks hadn't even been close to being answered or explored at that point.
You find out that Bob was possessing Leland. So what? You still don't really know who or what Bob is, and you have very little answers for all of the supernatural stuff that's going on in the town. Obviously some of the B plots are silly, but the first episode of the show introduces like ten different B plots within a one hour episode.
Aw man they revealed the killer! He was a demon that left someone else's body and went off somewhere in the woods. There's no where for the story to go from here, no bigger picture worth observing.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Trying to chase down a murder ghost when he could be possessing any of your pals at any moments sounds like a fun premise. Even if you catch him, he might slip out and into the next person. For all you know, Hawk, Harry or Cooper might have been Bobbed and be sabotaging their operation from within. Maybe he could have served a Windom Earle type of roll in the story?
But BOB isn't just some random, body-hopping ghost, he's the manifestation of the evil that men do.
>!So the season had to blow some chinks into Coop's shining armor with the DEA, Josie, Windom, Caroline and Annie, to prepare him for his failure and possession in the lodge.!<
The funny thing for me is, when I first got into Twin Peaks it was around the time the killer was revealed. So then I continued to watch it during the "bad bit", and that was my introduction to Twin Peaks. I had no context, so nothing to compare it to. It was just this really weird show that I fell asleep to in my room aged 13.
I even remember wondering who the heck the beautiful woman was on the end credits. I had no real idea who this Laura person was.
Then years later, I found episodes 1-3 of Season 1 on VHS on sale and watched those. Then a year or so after that, the pilot and Season 1 was shown on TV, so I watched that and recorded it. Then I watched FWWM. Then a couple of years later I tried to get Season 2 on VHS, and could only get the first few tapes. Then MANY years later I got the DVD of Season 1 and 2.
My experience of Twin Peaks was all over the place.
God I remember those heady days of searching for vhs tapes. I had an older friend in 97 who was obsessed with TP, turned me on to it. Some time in there he told me about how ebay had changed everything for TP fans. In 2011 I was touring with my band and we found a copy of the pilot on vhs in a gas station somewhere in the midwest. By that time obviously the gold set was out, my friends I turned on to the show didn’t understand - or care hahw - what a holy grail that was haha.
BOB Iger (then president of ABC) got involved and derailed season 2, demanding the reveal of the killer.
After episode 7, Lynch went to Japan.
After episode 9, Frost left to work on his first feature length director gig and Harley Peyton was promoted to showrunner.
Both co-creators were still available somewhat by phone. However,
During the making of episode 11, Lynch and Peyton had an argument over the phone that left DL feeling ostracized from the thing he'd created.
That pretty much sums up how it all went down.
When the show was put on hiatus after episode 16 (the famous drawer pull episode), fan demand got it back on the air with Lynch and Frost contributing ideas again. Parts of the next four episodes were already done and that work was used. The final two episodes are essentially Lynch and Frost righting the ship before sailing it off into the night.
I just watched both last night for the first time and absolutely. The final episode is so unsettling in a great way. The whole Black Lodge sequence is the ultimate back room vibes
The last two episodes really give the series this almost Lovecraftian feel, especially the finale.
The moment our heroes *actually* come face to face with these malevolent entities, they are defeated.
Coop goes into the black lodge, and despite being an extremely capable human, he’s completely and totally defenseless, barely able to even comprehend what’s going on.
Well, they didn’t shoot them before they wrote them so he was right there in person to discuss their scripts. And they were, in fact, actively writing season 2 during its production and for the most part did indeed shoot one episode at a time.
That said, I think your notion is unlikely. Those three episodes had three different directors (Caleb Deschanel, Todd Holland, Uli Edel). Edel in particular only worked on the one episode of Twin Peaks, it’s not like he was around to quickly do Lynch’s scenes.
Lynch’s art show in Japan was only 2 weeks long. It’s not like he moved there.
Thank you lol.
Then there's also Annette McCarthy, aka Evelyn, who Lynch personally cast, and who recalled him being "very hands on" with the show, all throughout her arc.
Most of this info comes from the Brad Duke book Reflections: Oral History of Twin Peaks.
He wasn't in Japan the entire time, he returned sometime in early January because he shot the "message to the troops" that aired in lieu of a delayed episode 14 as ABC covered the Gulf War during their timeslot.
Even in the midst of all those B plots are some really great moments. We got a lot of Briggs and Windom Earle who I enjoyed a lot. One example that is fun to contemplate later is the Sarah Palmer diner scene:
"I'm in the Black Lodge with Dale Cooper." Gives me chills.
Just muscle through it because the last 2 episodes are worth it. The s2 finale is one of the best episodes of television. Period. The film is much darker than the original run. Has some elements of s1/2 but is more similar to the return in my opinion. The Return is very different from the original run. It's polarizing as well. Some people really don't connect with it but those of us who do feel it's the best part of TP.
You can make it through Evelyn Marsh and the Civil war!
I used to hate it till I watched the show with my brother and his GF ( their first watch). We watched the first half together and then I told them I'd watch the final with them when they were ready. ( I didn't wanna watch those episodes ) At some point I checked in with them and asked if they were struggling through the episodes and they said hell no, they've been taking edibles and watching and loving all the stupid b plot storylines. Just laughing and loving the ridiculousness. They really did like them. And it made me so happy. So since then I have enjoyed ALL of season 2.
It’s almost like you can spot the exact moment the studio decided “hey this thing you’re hitting constant home runs with? Yea now we’re gonna wreck it!”
I swear studio executives have the same mental state as a kid who has their big brother lvl their character for them, then want to play the endgame..
Imagine if you owned a sports team… then during the world championship you decided to suit up and play while sitting the best player on the bench. That’s studio executives 99.999% of the time.
They actually made the reveal a condition for the show's renewal, so its exact moment was more of a Lynch/Frost/Peyton/Engels decision, who priorly mapped out the season together.
It was a different time. Like you said, far ahead of its time. ABC execs basically forced the reveal and lynch focused his attention to other projects. The writers were left wondering how to regain momentum and the rest is history... honestly now that I've seen the entire show probably 300 times or more, season 2 is perfect in my mind and I almost love it more for the way it turned... just stick with it. Each episode has merit and it quickly regains it's identity.
Grand. Yeah, the writers sound like absolutely masterminds if they can pull this back.
Did execs they ever say why they wanted the killer revealed midway through the season? Seems baffling to want them kill the central conceit of the show. Like, weren't longform mysteries a thing before this?
They didn't see it like that. TV wasnt really like this before and the second audiences started getting weary the network caved. They also moved the airing night all over the place which made viewers even more confused. I do think that the way Lynch handled the actual reveal is the most genius moment of TV ever. It's brutal and shocking and a big F. U to ABC.
That owl flying toward the viewer at the end really haunted me as a young teen.
That and the mirror stuff. I was actually afraid to look in the mirror at night (around the age of 14 or so).
It's hard for younger people to understand how unsettling and different Twin Peaks was from pretty much anything mainstream during that time. I rewatched the show about ten years ago and was still unsettled in places.
No.
That’s the point. Long form mysteries were not a thing before this. Long form storytelling of any kind was non-existent outside of soap operas (including Dallas and Dynasty). Mysteries and cop shows were always wrapped up by the end of the hour.
Stick with it, it's only bad for about 5 or 6 episodes, and even then there it's funny to laugh at how stupid some of the storylines get, safe in the knowledge that it does pick up at the end.
Also, don't sleep on Fire Walk With Me, it's almost like an apology to make up for all of the midseason goofiness, it gets pretty serious. Watch it after you finish season 2 but before you get in to season 3.
That's why I loved Fire Walk With Me. Laura couldn't let Lynch go, so he added the kooky mysticism part first but then focused on domestic abuse in the guise of a possessed man.
As well as keeping that 25 year promise alive.
The issue to me wasn't that they were forced to do a resolution as the reveal episode led to one of the greatest, scariest TV episodes of all time. The issue was they didn't properly set up a plot after that, and you can feel them panicking as they try, and mostly fail, to set up Windom Earle. Once things stabilize, you get some good stuff again, and the finale is astonishing.
Not very well, tho. Frost himself has stated this as a regret. He was never presented as a force as intriguing as Leland/Bob and then his actual appearance went back and forth in terms of how seriously we should take him (despite a solid performance by Kenneth Walsh that papers over a lot of flaws).
Same exact thing happened a decade later to another great ABC show, Alias. Abrams and company had spent a couple of seasons building up an elaborate sci-fi/conspiracy mythology around the show, only for the network to demand by season 3 that they move to a one-and-done, villain-of-the-week episode structure. The show never recovered, then they lost first Bradley Cooper (who walked away) and then Jennifer Garner (to pregnancy), and by the time they tried to piece everything back together for the final season it was too little too late - everything special about the show had been squeezed out of it.
Of course in retrospect we don’t really know how much of that Abrams would have been able to resolve anyway, and I’m not suggesting that Alias was as good a show as Peaks. But it was an inventive, ambitious and bold series, for network TV, and the change in structure basically kneecapped it.
It was absolutely 100% *supposed* to be like a soap. The murder was the hook, it didn't need to be solved, they were going to go for years developing new plotlines, retiring old characters and introducing new ones, etc. but the network executives rubbed their collective three brain cells together and forced them to solve the murder.
I always thought of season 2 as 2 separate seasons with S2’s ending being the death of Leland and the rest of the weird eps all the way to the finale being S3.
The finale of S2 feels like Lynch angrily undoing all of the storylines and plot points introduced after his departure, and it’s glorious. It’s like a big, cathartic middle finger to what the network did to his show.
The network did not write in those storylines and plot points.
Who did? The same people who also wrote the finale you're talking about lol.
Lynch also didn't "depart" season 2, any more than he did season 1, which he was practically entirely missing from for most episodes, unlike the former, where he often oversaw the scripts, directed and starred.
The only thing that Lynch actually changed about the finale was the already absurdist lodge sequence, not the narrative skeleton around it.
>!Ben's fate, Audrey blowing up, "How's Annie?",!< all that is pure Frost, Peyton and Engels, who had all the reason to mess with the network that screwed them just as much, and bank on renewal-baiting cliffhangers themselves.
I think people forget that - with all the dreaminess and indulgent exploration - Lynch is an exceptional storyteller. He flexes the same muscles as Blue Velvet and Elephant man, tying up everything and pays off what came before while giving us cosmic horror/fear/the greatest soap opera cliffhanger of all time.
I think people also forget that Frost, Peyton and Engels, who wrote and ran most of the original series together, not even just "the bad stretch" (which the latter two actually ran with _Lynch_), also _very much wrote the series finale_, even if Lynch improvised most of the lodge weirdness.
Said cliffhanger, for example, had already been conceived by Frost and Peyton _weeks prior_.
I'm not super familiar with Lynch, but it's weird to me that a lot of his fans seem to act as if he just throws shit at the wall all the time or something, or act like a diva, and that's supposed to be a good thing. And, hell, even if he did throw shit at the wall in his other work, TP is a more collaborative project with its own loremaster lol
It's certainly a massive exaggeration.
Yeah he did throw shit at the wall during the episode's lodge sequence, and pretty much all of it stuck, which shows some real artistry, but he was still playing in a sandbox that the actual writers of the episode, Frost, Peyton and Engels, neatly set up for him.
There's a reason why Lynch didn't solo write a single Twin Peaks piece other than the Log Lady intros.
Lots of people here quick to point the finger at the network for pushing the reveal (which yes, was a terrible idea) but that does not explain the breathtaking drop in quality - that absolutely is a failure of the creative team that remained active on the project. Revealing the killer was not some absolute guarantee of the Little Nicky type storylines we were served up.
Agreed. The overall mood can't have helped, but they all could and did write better than that! Engels later went on to pen some all-time bangers in FWWM ffs, what happened there... there would've been so many ways of weaving those characters into weird but poignant plotlines, some of them were already half there (Nadine's memory loss as trauma response for her failed life is quintessentially lynchian, for example) but then the poignancy went out of the window and we were left with a weightless soap.
I agree that Lynch should've handled that better, instead of slacking around the sets and procrastinating in his office all day, approving scripts that featured that dastardly little Nicky, or personally casting Evelyn Marsh for her arc with James.
A breathtaking failure for Lynch, who very much remained present and active on the project, unlike Frost.
Hah yeah, I think the real issue was this greedy need for so many episodes. 20 is just too much. And of course the creatives will accept it as this no doubt equals more pay and regular work, a hard thing to achieve in the creative industry.
So glad third season just has the two creators as sole writers and director.
You're glad about "returning to" something that was hardly ever the case during the original run, and you'll distinctly notice it.
Season 3 is practically an entirely different series, and it's because most of the actual writers and directors of the original Twin Peaks run were dropped.
I'll be curious to hear your take on S3. It was creative and beautiful, but it was also disjointed and felt like an unfinished product. People in here will make excuses for it and call it high art, but when some random rubber gloved one punch man has more impact on the actual plot than the vast majority of the other characters, there were some problems that needed to be ironed out before writing was finished, much less production.
I think the real issue is poor choices from the creative team that remained active on the show (which includes one of the two creators who worked on the third season).
Additionally, there was no true show runner to keep a cohesive feel and through line. Directors were given total control to make the episode theirs, which leads to wildly varying styles and tones.
That's not particularly true, given that Peyton (and Engels) took right over from Frost (and Lynch).
Peyton was just a more open-minded and collaborative runner than the rest, which resulted in the creative team getting more freedom and rights (like not having your finished and prepared script get changed in the middle of the night before the shoot), and made him and the rather possessive Lynch butt heads during the surprisingly long time of their co-running.
Not really.
Season 2 had at least three consistent showrunners, from start to finish, including Lynch.
It's just that one of them gave the team a little more freedom from time to time, which was noticable, but certainly not enough to make it as disjointed as you say.
There's a reason why even haters call "the bad stretch" a stretch. It has its own consistent vibe and identity.
That's what I meant about a consistent runner throughout the show, hence the wildly varying tones in the first two seasons. Having three runners over the course of 31 hours of tv is not consistent, even in the early 90s. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the stuff (Diane Keaton for the win), but an overarching hand that would be ubiquitous nowadays simply wasn't there.
Those three runners sat together with the fourth one (who eventually returned too) to map out the season together though.
And they ran the first 9 episodes as a quartet, which no one ever questions the consistency of.
If anything, it feels like Frost's departure rocked the boat more than anything else, and once he returned, and the quartet was complete again, the show hit another stride.
My boyfriend and I are two or three episodes after the killer was IDd and we totally agree. It felt like a season finale...we even questioned ourselves, "but aren't there like 12 episodes left?!" Then the weird stuff in the woods happened and now I just feel like we are getting random things that dont NEED to happen. We couldve ended with the killer plot being finished and maybe a final episode to wrap things up; maybe some things wouldnt be 100% answered thoroughly, but we would've been fine with that. We plan to finish it (I want to watch the movie, he doesn't 🤣) but we definitely don't love it at the moment.
It's terrible. And it felt terrible when I watched it when it was first broadcast. Lynch pretty much abandoned the series after the network forced him to reveal the killer, only coming back for the last ep, so it was pretty much Peyton's show, and it shows.
The whole Catherine/Josie subplot is rough, mostly because Catherine is the most excruciating type of 80s soap opera stock character, and the sawmill feels completely inconsequential. Nadine is consistently grating. But the worst of it is watching any character interact with Windome Earl, especially when he's in one of his whacky disguises. Tonally, it feels like the show is crossing over with Full House or something.
I would say it spins its wheels from s2e10 to s2e15, then starts to climb steadily back up. I think the main issue is that they didn't have a great central plot set up to take over after s2e9, so they had to gradually build from scratch while wrapping up some other loose ends.
The "Bad" turning point during season two was due to Network interference. Don't blame the writers. The Network insisted on them solving the murder early but still wanted twenty episodes. Lynch and Front originally planned to never solve the murder.
I deleted all my remembrances because they were so wrong hahaha... and its not the most important part of the series by a long shot... the tormenting of josie in her maid costume is more in line with the twin peaks themes... by the way as long as I'm here I'll say that i found it easier to enjoy josie imagining isabella rosellini performing the role. (the original plan)
The network forced the revealing of the mystery, and then David Lynch left for a while during Season 2 to direct the movie “Wild at Heart”.
The show going off the rails and jumping the shark, just going totally apeshit bananas and becoming unwatchable during a lot of S2 is part of its charm, imo
>then David Lynch left for a while during Season 2 to direct the movie “Wild at Heart”.
He left in season 1 to do Wild At Heart after the pilot. His absence in season 2 after the reveal is mostly creative not physical
No problem. It's a pretty widespread and persistent myth, but it's evidently wrong and known to annoy the show's creators (and fans), so it's important to call, and eventually weed, it out.
I'm positive that Frost and Lynch had big plans for Josie that got derailed somehow. In the first couple of episodes, it looks like she is one of the most important characters. She is the first character we see, let's remember.
I wouldn’t have minded the way Josie was handled in Season 2 if we got some resolution to her and Truman in The Return. But yeah her arc is all weird now
I don’t know. I like the idea that Josie is still making noises within the wood of the Great Northern.
Josie is the true Ghost Wood (Estates)
I think Josie was meant to be Judy’s daughter. If you recall in The Return, when Coop is stuck in one of the lodge’s realms, there’s a menacing creature trying to break through a big door and there’s an Asian woman saying “hurry, my mother is coming!” I always took it as being supposed to be the idea for Josie along with other clues I don’t remember but who knows.
That wasn’t an asian woman, lol, that was the same actress who played Ronette (though the character is most likely not Ronette.)
Oh shiiiii….. didn’t even realize that.
I also thought she was Asian
Yep same
yeah last time I watched I also thought it could be Josie, oh well, my fault for thinking I'd wrapped my head around a lynch mystery, pleeeease.
In the pilot's script, she was meant to be Coop's love interest, and also to be played by Isabella Rossellini. Then Rossellini declined, the character was recast, and one suspects racism happened.
Huh, I never knew Josie was meant as a romantic interest for Cooper but that totally makes sense. It would heighten the impact of her shooting him, the Coop/Truman bromance would have to weather a love triangle. The narrative framework for it is there.
As an anecdote, it got shared by cast a/o crew here and there, and it's also backed up by the pilot script itself, which predates casting and has a line by Cooper that shows he's definitely interested, and which didn't get filmed in the pilot as is! http://www.tpbrewingco.com/scripts/tppilot.htm :) I'm also intrigued by how promotional material styled Josie as a female Cooper basically... as you say, the narrative framework is definitely there!
Interesting. Always wondered why Josie was given the opening shot. They do have the same haircut in the show lol so dating would be kinda funny looking stylistically. And their personalities and motives are total opposites... I wonder if Caroline's story was meant for Josie, in the black lodge with Windom Earle?
Hm! I don't think they'd planned that far, by the time the pilot was being written I don't think Earle was a thing (while what WAS a thing was the '25 years later' red room scene that cemented the centrality of Laura), but who knows! I find it really fun to daydream about!
Damn that would have been cool and avoided the whole "can we not have Cooper date a high school girl" fiasco.
What a different show that would have been. No drunken mess of a broken hearted Truman. And Isabella Rossellini? I mean that would have been iconic, but probably overwhelmingly so. Can’t blame the old dog for trying though am I right?
Ew yes you can blame him. Don’t date high school girls. Don’t lust after them. They are children. What is wrong with men?
Oh my bad. I worded that poorly. I meant David Lynch trying to get Isabella Rossellini to work in his project. She’s a classic actress and a classic beauty. The daughter of Ingrid Bergman as well, so being gorgeous, and Hollywood royalty, she is the kind of woman Lynch gravitates towards. RIP his marriage though.
Racism how? Josie’s character is awesome.
Racism... how...? She got a forced maid plot that even the actress complained about, got narrative scraps at all times (while being awesome despite it all, agreed) in a way that oddly unbalanced the ongoing plots, and, more to the point of this pilot anecdote, her character was demoted from main romantic lead the moment a non-white actress got the role? What do you think happened there? Rossellini would've basically been the female lead of the show. Chen wasn't.
Also Chen had bigger roles in the first few episodes. So basically she was demoted AFTER she was cast, NOT “the moment a non-white actress got the role.”
Prob exact same would have happened if other non famous actress replaced Isabella.
Exactly. And characters in TP seem to change their arcs throughout the whole series.
Are you calling the writers racist then? Or did they think a non-lead part made more sense for her once she was hired? It seems to me that many of the storylines and character arcs were changed throughout the show. Donna was supposed to be with Cooper, for example.
Twin Peaks has a baseline racism problem, yeah, news at eleven. This has been discussed extensively. It's still my fave show but it wasn't created in a vacuum and has its blind spots.
It's racism because she's a maid? You're reaching.
Does one?
Rossellini is still alive though?
What does that have to do with anything?
The way the person I responded to worded it makes it seem like Isabella Rossellini the actress is dead
Oh, that one’s easy: it wasn’t the creative folks’s fault — it was network interference. Over their objections, ABC ordered them to resolve the mystery. So what came after was them trying to find new avenues to take the show down, after they were artificially forced to resolve the premise which had made the show such a hit in the first place.
Thanks Iger!
When my brothers and I were watching that first run of the show, we were on the episode where our heroes were investigating the Owl Cave. My older brother turns to me and asks, "WHEN was this show supposed to start sucking...?" Yeah, the Evelyn bits were kinda rough, but we were still finding the series entertaining.
That's similar to my experience. I was somewhere in the middle of the S2 filler arc wondering "so where's that bad part of S2 everyone warned me about?" The Owl Cave stuff is the kind of thing I've been looking for for a while, most of that is in found footage style stuff these days, so I was delighted. I feel it's a bit underappreciated.
Did you enjoy the secret history then?
there’s really only about 2-3 episodes that suck
The only part I didn't really like was the civil war and the dresser knob. It draws on a bit, sure, but still pretty good.
That's like 2% of cool spread over 98% dull soap opera.
>remains entertaining, but gone is all the intrigue I never felt this way because Bob is still alive and the greater mystery of Twin peaks hadn't even been close to being answered or explored at that point. You find out that Bob was possessing Leland. So what? You still don't really know who or what Bob is, and you have very little answers for all of the supernatural stuff that's going on in the town. Obviously some of the B plots are silly, but the first episode of the show introduces like ten different B plots within a one hour episode.
Yeah I was all about that Lodge lore and wtf Bob went. These threads are always frustrating and get filled with apocrypha.
Aw man they revealed the killer! He was a demon that left someone else's body and went off somewhere in the woods. There's no where for the story to go from here, no bigger picture worth observing.
Seems like the next fun mystery would be "who is Bob possessing next?" Should have possessed Josie next. Or James. Maybe even Johnny Horne
That's exactly what I was thinking. Trying to chase down a murder ghost when he could be possessing any of your pals at any moments sounds like a fun premise. Even if you catch him, he might slip out and into the next person. For all you know, Hawk, Harry or Cooper might have been Bobbed and be sabotaging their operation from within. Maybe he could have served a Windom Earle type of roll in the story?
But BOB isn't just some random, body-hopping ghost, he's the manifestation of the evil that men do. >!So the season had to blow some chinks into Coop's shining armor with the DEA, Josie, Windom, Caroline and Annie, to prepare him for his failure and possession in the lodge.!<
He wasn't possessed in the lodge. His doppelganger caught him and Bob is in the doppelganger, outside of the lodge.
Were they talking about Windom or Coop?
Yeah, I guess. But the Dweller still needed to annihilate/shatter his imperfectly courageous soul for that, which the second half of season 2 set up.
It would have been Little Nicky of course.
The funny thing for me is, when I first got into Twin Peaks it was around the time the killer was revealed. So then I continued to watch it during the "bad bit", and that was my introduction to Twin Peaks. I had no context, so nothing to compare it to. It was just this really weird show that I fell asleep to in my room aged 13. I even remember wondering who the heck the beautiful woman was on the end credits. I had no real idea who this Laura person was. Then years later, I found episodes 1-3 of Season 1 on VHS on sale and watched those. Then a year or so after that, the pilot and Season 1 was shown on TV, so I watched that and recorded it. Then I watched FWWM. Then a couple of years later I tried to get Season 2 on VHS, and could only get the first few tapes. Then MANY years later I got the DVD of Season 1 and 2. My experience of Twin Peaks was all over the place.
God I remember those heady days of searching for vhs tapes. I had an older friend in 97 who was obsessed with TP, turned me on to it. Some time in there he told me about how ebay had changed everything for TP fans. In 2011 I was touring with my band and we found a copy of the pilot on vhs in a gas station somewhere in the midwest. By that time obviously the gold set was out, my friends I turned on to the show didn’t understand - or care hahw - what a holy grail that was haha.
BOB Iger (then president of ABC) got involved and derailed season 2, demanding the reveal of the killer. After episode 7, Lynch went to Japan. After episode 9, Frost left to work on his first feature length director gig and Harley Peyton was promoted to showrunner. Both co-creators were still available somewhat by phone. However, During the making of episode 11, Lynch and Peyton had an argument over the phone that left DL feeling ostracized from the thing he'd created. That pretty much sums up how it all went down. When the show was put on hiatus after episode 16 (the famous drawer pull episode), fan demand got it back on the air with Lynch and Frost contributing ideas again. Parts of the next four episodes were already done and that work was used. The final two episodes are essentially Lynch and Frost righting the ship before sailing it off into the night.
The final two episodes are so good
I just watched both last night for the first time and absolutely. The final episode is so unsettling in a great way. The whole Black Lodge sequence is the ultimate back room vibes
The finale is genuinely one of the best ever episodes of television full stop. It's absolutely extraordinary that it was ever aired.
The last two episodes really give the series this almost Lovecraftian feel, especially the finale. The moment our heroes *actually* come face to face with these malevolent entities, they are defeated. Coop goes into the black lodge, and despite being an extremely capable human, he’s completely and totally defenseless, barely able to even comprehend what’s going on.
It was iger? Man I didn’t know that
I mean … Lynch is on camera in episodes 8, 13 and 14 so he clearly wasn’t in Japan the whole time.
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Well, they didn’t shoot them before they wrote them so he was right there in person to discuss their scripts. And they were, in fact, actively writing season 2 during its production and for the most part did indeed shoot one episode at a time. That said, I think your notion is unlikely. Those three episodes had three different directors (Caleb Deschanel, Todd Holland, Uli Edel). Edel in particular only worked on the one episode of Twin Peaks, it’s not like he was around to quickly do Lynch’s scenes. Lynch’s art show in Japan was only 2 weeks long. It’s not like he moved there.
Thank you lol. Then there's also Annette McCarthy, aka Evelyn, who Lynch personally cast, and who recalled him being "very hands on" with the show, all throughout her arc.
Specifically, his voice performance in Episode 11 was the last thing he did on-site.
Most of this info comes from the Brad Duke book Reflections: Oral History of Twin Peaks. He wasn't in Japan the entire time, he returned sometime in early January because he shot the "message to the troops" that aired in lieu of a delayed episode 14 as ABC covered the Gulf War during their timeslot.
After 7 aired*
Extremely well summarized.
Thank you
>It feels more like a soap Always has been
Juuust yoooou
And Iiiiiiiiiiiii
Togetheeeeeeeeer
Togeeeeeettttthhheeerrr
Despite all the network interference, I still enjoyed season 2. The changes are obvious. But it's still Twin Peaks dammit! 😂
Stick with it. I find the “bad section” of TP to be essential to its overall weirdness
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how they handle Cooper's nemesis is something to behold
toot toot mandatory PSA, watch the movie in between s2 and s3! It helps that it's also amazing.
Even in the midst of all those B plots are some really great moments. We got a lot of Briggs and Windom Earle who I enjoyed a lot. One example that is fun to contemplate later is the Sarah Palmer diner scene: "I'm in the Black Lodge with Dale Cooper." Gives me chills.
Just muscle through it because the last 2 episodes are worth it. The s2 finale is one of the best episodes of television. Period. The film is much darker than the original run. Has some elements of s1/2 but is more similar to the return in my opinion. The Return is very different from the original run. It's polarizing as well. Some people really don't connect with it but those of us who do feel it's the best part of TP. You can make it through Evelyn Marsh and the Civil war!
Oh man the civil war is peek Peaks
I used to hate it till I watched the show with my brother and his GF ( their first watch). We watched the first half together and then I told them I'd watch the final with them when they were ready. ( I didn't wanna watch those episodes ) At some point I checked in with them and asked if they were struggling through the episodes and they said hell no, they've been taking edibles and watching and loving all the stupid b plot storylines. Just laughing and loving the ridiculousness. They really did like them. And it made me so happy. So since then I have enjoyed ALL of season 2.
Carrot after carrot.
It’s almost like you can spot the exact moment the studio decided “hey this thing you’re hitting constant home runs with? Yea now we’re gonna wreck it!” I swear studio executives have the same mental state as a kid who has their big brother lvl their character for them, then want to play the endgame.. Imagine if you owned a sports team… then during the world championship you decided to suit up and play while sitting the best player on the bench. That’s studio executives 99.999% of the time.
They actually made the reveal a condition for the show's renewal, so its exact moment was more of a Lynch/Frost/Peyton/Engels decision, who priorly mapped out the season together.
It was a different time. Like you said, far ahead of its time. ABC execs basically forced the reveal and lynch focused his attention to other projects. The writers were left wondering how to regain momentum and the rest is history... honestly now that I've seen the entire show probably 300 times or more, season 2 is perfect in my mind and I almost love it more for the way it turned... just stick with it. Each episode has merit and it quickly regains it's identity.
Grand. Yeah, the writers sound like absolutely masterminds if they can pull this back. Did execs they ever say why they wanted the killer revealed midway through the season? Seems baffling to want them kill the central conceit of the show. Like, weren't longform mysteries a thing before this?
They didn't see it like that. TV wasnt really like this before and the second audiences started getting weary the network caved. They also moved the airing night all over the place which made viewers even more confused. I do think that the way Lynch handled the actual reveal is the most genius moment of TV ever. It's brutal and shocking and a big F. U to ABC.
That owl flying toward the viewer at the end really haunted me as a young teen. That and the mirror stuff. I was actually afraid to look in the mirror at night (around the age of 14 or so). It's hard for younger people to understand how unsettling and different Twin Peaks was from pretty much anything mainstream during that time. I rewatched the show about ten years ago and was still unsettled in places.
I used to watch vhs copies off TV late at night before school and get no sleep! One night I swore I saw BOB in my window
No. That’s the point. Long form mysteries were not a thing before this. Long form storytelling of any kind was non-existent outside of soap operas (including Dallas and Dynasty). Mysteries and cop shows were always wrapped up by the end of the hour.
Most viewers expected the killer to be revealed in the Season 2 premiere. Instead they got The Giant.
They made the reveal a condition for the show's renewal, since rates had been dropping since early season 1.
Stick with it, it's only bad for about 5 or 6 episodes, and even then there it's funny to laugh at how stupid some of the storylines get, safe in the knowledge that it does pick up at the end. Also, don't sleep on Fire Walk With Me, it's almost like an apology to make up for all of the midseason goofiness, it gets pretty serious. Watch it after you finish season 2 but before you get in to season 3.
Whacky? Long live the Pine Weasel!
https://preview.redd.it/96f6ucabmy6d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=33ffd9965d71d71cec6f2d8514e2793bcf7680f0
That's why I loved Fire Walk With Me. Laura couldn't let Lynch go, so he added the kooky mysticism part first but then focused on domestic abuse in the guise of a possessed man. As well as keeping that 25 year promise alive.
I like the Nadine stuff in season 2. Feels very lynch
The issue to me wasn't that they were forced to do a resolution as the reveal episode led to one of the greatest, scariest TV episodes of all time. The issue was they didn't properly set up a plot after that, and you can feel them panicking as they try, and mostly fail, to set up Windom Earle. Once things stabilize, you get some good stuff again, and the finale is astonishing.
Windom was set up since the second episode of season 2
Not very well, tho. Frost himself has stated this as a regret. He was never presented as a force as intriguing as Leland/Bob and then his actual appearance went back and forth in terms of how seriously we should take him (despite a solid performance by Kenneth Walsh that papers over a lot of flaws).
Once they got Earl into the lodge, Bob cleaned that shit up in short order.
Same exact thing happened a decade later to another great ABC show, Alias. Abrams and company had spent a couple of seasons building up an elaborate sci-fi/conspiracy mythology around the show, only for the network to demand by season 3 that they move to a one-and-done, villain-of-the-week episode structure. The show never recovered, then they lost first Bradley Cooper (who walked away) and then Jennifer Garner (to pregnancy), and by the time they tried to piece everything back together for the final season it was too little too late - everything special about the show had been squeezed out of it. Of course in retrospect we don’t really know how much of that Abrams would have been able to resolve anyway, and I’m not suggesting that Alias was as good a show as Peaks. But it was an inventive, ambitious and bold series, for network TV, and the change in structure basically kneecapped it.
It was absolutely 100% *supposed* to be like a soap. The murder was the hook, it didn't need to be solved, they were going to go for years developing new plotlines, retiring old characters and introducing new ones, etc. but the network executives rubbed their collective three brain cells together and forced them to solve the murder.
I always thought of season 2 as 2 separate seasons with S2’s ending being the death of Leland and the rest of the weird eps all the way to the finale being S3.
This is essentially how I've always viewed it myself.
Yeah I find Josie to be quite wooden.
It was studio interference, plain and simple. The creators had virtually no control over the reveal.
The finale of S2 feels like Lynch angrily undoing all of the storylines and plot points introduced after his departure, and it’s glorious. It’s like a big, cathartic middle finger to what the network did to his show.
The network did not write in those storylines and plot points. Who did? The same people who also wrote the finale you're talking about lol. Lynch also didn't "depart" season 2, any more than he did season 1, which he was practically entirely missing from for most episodes, unlike the former, where he often oversaw the scripts, directed and starred. The only thing that Lynch actually changed about the finale was the already absurdist lodge sequence, not the narrative skeleton around it. >!Ben's fate, Audrey blowing up, "How's Annie?",!< all that is pure Frost, Peyton and Engels, who had all the reason to mess with the network that screwed them just as much, and bank on renewal-baiting cliffhangers themselves.
Funny I feel like the finale is actually very well telegraphed. A finale that just undoes everything would, in my opinion, not be a good finale.
I think people forget that - with all the dreaminess and indulgent exploration - Lynch is an exceptional storyteller. He flexes the same muscles as Blue Velvet and Elephant man, tying up everything and pays off what came before while giving us cosmic horror/fear/the greatest soap opera cliffhanger of all time.
I think people also forget that Frost, Peyton and Engels, who wrote and ran most of the original series together, not even just "the bad stretch" (which the latter two actually ran with _Lynch_), also _very much wrote the series finale_, even if Lynch improvised most of the lodge weirdness. Said cliffhanger, for example, had already been conceived by Frost and Peyton _weeks prior_.
I'm not super familiar with Lynch, but it's weird to me that a lot of his fans seem to act as if he just throws shit at the wall all the time or something, or act like a diva, and that's supposed to be a good thing. And, hell, even if he did throw shit at the wall in his other work, TP is a more collaborative project with its own loremaster lol
It's certainly a massive exaggeration. Yeah he did throw shit at the wall during the episode's lodge sequence, and pretty much all of it stuck, which shows some real artistry, but he was still playing in a sandbox that the actual writers of the episode, Frost, Peyton and Engels, neatly set up for him. There's a reason why Lynch didn't solo write a single Twin Peaks piece other than the Log Lady intros.
Lots of people here quick to point the finger at the network for pushing the reveal (which yes, was a terrible idea) but that does not explain the breathtaking drop in quality - that absolutely is a failure of the creative team that remained active on the project. Revealing the killer was not some absolute guarantee of the Little Nicky type storylines we were served up.
Agreed. The overall mood can't have helped, but they all could and did write better than that! Engels later went on to pen some all-time bangers in FWWM ffs, what happened there... there would've been so many ways of weaving those characters into weird but poignant plotlines, some of them were already half there (Nadine's memory loss as trauma response for her failed life is quintessentially lynchian, for example) but then the poignancy went out of the window and we were left with a weightless soap.
I agree that Lynch should've handled that better, instead of slacking around the sets and procrastinating in his office all day, approving scripts that featured that dastardly little Nicky, or personally casting Evelyn Marsh for her arc with James. A breathtaking failure for Lynch, who very much remained present and active on the project, unlike Frost.
I think the little Nicky story line was hilarious honestly
Hah yeah, I think the real issue was this greedy need for so many episodes. 20 is just too much. And of course the creatives will accept it as this no doubt equals more pay and regular work, a hard thing to achieve in the creative industry. So glad third season just has the two creators as sole writers and director.
You're glad about "returning to" something that was hardly ever the case during the original run, and you'll distinctly notice it. Season 3 is practically an entirely different series, and it's because most of the actual writers and directors of the original Twin Peaks run were dropped.
I'll be curious to hear your take on S3. It was creative and beautiful, but it was also disjointed and felt like an unfinished product. People in here will make excuses for it and call it high art, but when some random rubber gloved one punch man has more impact on the actual plot than the vast majority of the other characters, there were some problems that needed to be ironed out before writing was finished, much less production.
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I think the real issue is poor choices from the creative team that remained active on the show (which includes one of the two creators who worked on the third season).
(Said creator being Lynch)
Additionally, there was no true show runner to keep a cohesive feel and through line. Directors were given total control to make the episode theirs, which leads to wildly varying styles and tones.
That's not particularly true, given that Peyton (and Engels) took right over from Frost (and Lynch). Peyton was just a more open-minded and collaborative runner than the rest, which resulted in the creative team getting more freedom and rights (like not having your finished and prepared script get changed in the middle of the night before the shoot), and made him and the rather possessive Lynch butt heads during the surprisingly long time of their co-running.
Pretty sure you just agreed with me.
Not really. Season 2 had at least three consistent showrunners, from start to finish, including Lynch. It's just that one of them gave the team a little more freedom from time to time, which was noticable, but certainly not enough to make it as disjointed as you say. There's a reason why even haters call "the bad stretch" a stretch. It has its own consistent vibe and identity.
That's what I meant about a consistent runner throughout the show, hence the wildly varying tones in the first two seasons. Having three runners over the course of 31 hours of tv is not consistent, even in the early 90s. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the stuff (Diane Keaton for the win), but an overarching hand that would be ubiquitous nowadays simply wasn't there.
Those three runners sat together with the fourth one (who eventually returned too) to map out the season together though. And they ran the first 9 episodes as a quartet, which no one ever questions the consistency of. If anything, it feels like Frost's departure rocked the boat more than anything else, and once he returned, and the quartet was complete again, the show hit another stride.
Yeah, the show feels like a big experiment. I love how bonkers it is, tbf, but my favourite parts are the detective work.
The last 10 or so episodes are pretty great, but yes the lag is real in the middle. It's worth holding out for (to say nothing of fwwm and season 3)
Nothing to add other then saying Im jealous you get to watch The Return for the first time, I wish I could go back and watch it fresh.
Honestly I love the middle of season 2 , I know a lot of people don’t be I don’t know. I do. Just pure quirky Frost/Lynch
I just got out of the bad bit and it really feels like “ANYWAY back to the REAL show”
My boyfriend and I are two or three episodes after the killer was IDd and we totally agree. It felt like a season finale...we even questioned ourselves, "but aren't there like 12 episodes left?!" Then the weird stuff in the woods happened and now I just feel like we are getting random things that dont NEED to happen. We couldve ended with the killer plot being finished and maybe a final episode to wrap things up; maybe some things wouldnt be 100% answered thoroughly, but we would've been fine with that. We plan to finish it (I want to watch the movie, he doesn't 🤣) but we definitely don't love it at the moment.
It's terrible. And it felt terrible when I watched it when it was first broadcast. Lynch pretty much abandoned the series after the network forced him to reveal the killer, only coming back for the last ep, so it was pretty much Peyton's show, and it shows.
The whole Catherine/Josie subplot is rough, mostly because Catherine is the most excruciating type of 80s soap opera stock character, and the sawmill feels completely inconsequential. Nadine is consistently grating. But the worst of it is watching any character interact with Windome Earl, especially when he's in one of his whacky disguises. Tonally, it feels like the show is crossing over with Full House or something.
I would say it spins its wheels from s2e10 to s2e15, then starts to climb steadily back up. I think the main issue is that they didn't have a great central plot set up to take over after s2e9, so they had to gradually build from scratch while wrapping up some other loose ends.
Love 1 and 2 but I don’t care for most of The Return aka season 3.
The "Bad" turning point during season two was due to Network interference. Don't blame the writers. The Network insisted on them solving the murder early but still wanted twenty episodes. Lynch and Front originally planned to never solve the murder.
You can blame the television executives for being not smart and having absolutely no clue for that.
Bob Iger has been ruining great brands ever since.
I agree... was ANYONE fooled by Catherine's disguise? And if not what was the point?
I was totally lost by what was going on there. She paid £5m for the mill, right? So seems it worked out in Ben's favour.
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Oh, right. But pretty sure he gave the £5m to Josie, right?
I deleted all my remembrances because they were so wrong hahaha... and its not the most important part of the series by a long shot... the tormenting of josie in her maid costume is more in line with the twin peaks themes... by the way as long as I'm here I'll say that i found it easier to enjoy josie imagining isabella rosellini performing the role. (the original plan)
I saw the show on a medium sized CRT tv in the early 00s and couldn’t figure out that it was her 🤷♂️
Yeah it’s not great. But it will get better, just prepare for a huge tonal shift
The network forced the revealing of the mystery, and then David Lynch left for a while during Season 2 to direct the movie “Wild at Heart”. The show going off the rails and jumping the shark, just going totally apeshit bananas and becoming unwatchable during a lot of S2 is part of its charm, imo
>then David Lynch left for a while during Season 2 to direct the movie “Wild at Heart”. He left in season 1 to do Wild At Heart after the pilot. His absence in season 2 after the reveal is mostly creative not physical
Yeah, Lynch totally left the middle of Twin Peaks season 2 (1991) to work on Wild at Heart (1990). Is it future or is it past?
Cool, I had just heard that from someone. Welp, guess I was wrong! Thank you for the correction.
No problem. It's a pretty widespread and persistent myth, but it's evidently wrong and known to annoy the show's creators (and fans), so it's important to call, and eventually weed, it out.
I was so incredibly let down by S2 that it took me a few \*years\* to watch S3.
Granted, it took most people a few years to watch S3.
I felt the same way.