Twin Peaks

David Lynch's iconic TV series Twin Peaks is ostensibly about the brutal murder of a small-town teen, a brilliantly conceived MacGuffin that allows him to explore the bucolic Pacific Northwest hamlet and brood over its troubled inhabitants. With writer Mark Frost, Lynch creates a fascinating scenario that juxtaposes the area's wooded natural beauty with increasingly bizarre plotlines and out-there characters (a ghostly giant, the famous backwards-speaking dwarf) that had never before graced primetime television. Kyle MacLachlan's unorthodox FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper displays a moral certitude and coffee-and-cherry-pie-fueled wit that anchors the sprawling cast, while Sheryl Lee's dual roles as the murdered Laura Palmer and her identical cousin, Maddy Ferguson, casts a Hitchcockian shadow over the show's tense balance of psychological horror and dark humor. Composer Angelo Badalamenti perfectly captures Twin Peaks's heartbreaking sadness and jazzy swagger with dissonant tones, finger snaps, and the melancholic "Laura's Theme," whose gentle sway mirrors the motif of windblown trees and swinging traffic lights. By the time the enigmatic Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) declares that "the owls are not what they seem," it's taken as fact, not fiction, and it's a shame the series never recovers its gloriously weird momentum after revealing Palmer's killer. Though some storylines verge on soap-opera parody, Lynch's indelible eye for the wild and the wondrous makes Twin Peaks a strangely magical place, and one that's worth revisiting.