Twin Peaks reinvented TV when it premiered in 1990, and again when the third season aired in 2017. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks started out ostensibly as a murder mystery about the death of a local schoolgirl, Laura Palmer. However, the show’s real appeal was its unique blend of crime-drama, soap opera, slapstick humour, and supernatural horror. In 1986, Lynch disturbed and perplexed paying cinemagoers with Blue Velvet; in 1990, millions stumbled upon Twin Peaks, a show that explored the trauma of incestuous sexual abuse, in their living room.
In hindsight, it’s astonishing how aggressively weird the first two seasons were, and that they scored such high ratings. 34 million Americans tuned into ABC for “The Pilot”; by the third episode, Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was visiting The Red Room to encounter a dead Laura Palmer reciting her dialogue in reverse. In other words, whether they’re said forwards or backwards, Twin Peaks allowed strangeness to enter the mainstream.
“Once we had created the infrastructure for the town and populated it with characters, we wrote the pilot in three weeks,” Frost tells me in May over Zoom from California. “We hardly changed a word after that. It poured out of us, almost exactly as what you see when you watch it.” The 71-year-old writer and director explains to me the rigidity of TV networks in the 80s. “Until we came along, television was very traditional.”
In 2025, it’s apparent that Twin Peaks is back in fashion, not that it ever left. The BFI is screening a 35mm print of the US pilot for Film on Film Festival. Prince Charles Cinema has programmed Season Three Episode Eight for “Bleak Week”. Moreover, MUBI has acquired all three seasons of Twin Peaks to stream on its platform. With Lynch dying at the age of 78 in January, expect new dimensions when you dive into a show that’s fixated on grief, memory, and the afterlife.
“Working with David was like playing tennis with somebody who you were perfectly matched with,” says Frost, who occasionally describes Lynch in the present tense and then corrects it to past tense. “David was temperamentally more a director than a writer. He loved being on set. He was like a maestro with an orchestra. I think he found that with my years of storytelling acumen, our creativities matched. I was able to give us a framework structurally – a beautiful frame to hang the show on.”
Frost, an experienced TV writer, met Lynch in 1985 to co-write a proposed Marilyn Monroe biopic, which they followed with One Saliva Bubble, an unproduced comedy that Steve Martin and Martin Short agreed to star in. “Writing can be a lonely way to make a living,” says Frost. “But writing with David was a hoot.”
We wrote the pilot for Twin Peaks in three weeks. We hardly changed a word after that. It poured out of us, almost exactly as what you see when you watch it
While it’s easy to attribute the more surreal aspects of Twin Peaks to the director responsible for Inland Empire, Lynch maintained that Frost is “at least 50 per cent of it”. Season one had Frost as its showrunner; Lynch directed two of season one’s episodes but was mostly absent due to Wild at Heart. Season one’s finale was written and directed by Frost. “I was there every day [at the start] on set as the hands-on producer, knowing we were making something built to last. I would tell the department heads, the cast, and the crew, ‘This means something. Let’s give this our best effort.’”
After the reveal of Laura Palmer’s killer in season two, declining ratings led to the show’s cancellation in 1991. Frost and Lynch’s 1992 sitcom On the Air was off the air within weeks. That same year saw the release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which Lynch directed without Frost’s involvement. However, the pair didn’t entirely lose contact.
“In the heyday of Twin Peaks, we were talking about a spinoff for Audrey where she’d have adventures in Hollywood,” says Frost. “I gave it the title Mulholland Drive because I was living there at the time. He loved the title and asked permission to use it when he turned it into a film.”
When Twin Peaks relaunched in 2017 as Twin Peaks: The Return, it was so cinematic that the first two episodes screened at Cannes, and it was named the second-best film of the year by Sight & Sound magazine. The 18 episodes were all directed by Lynch, all written by Frost and Lynch, and all filled with a level of dread unmatched by anything since.
It came about when Frost contacted Lynch in 2012 about a possible third season. They spent a year discussing storylines before agreeing they “had something”. Instead of coming up with hour-long episodes, though, they wrote a 500-page document on spec that Frost compares to War and Peace. “I was always the typist,” he says. “David couldn’t type at all.”
Frost knew the third season would be too adventurous for a traditional network, but he “didn’t like the feel of Netflix, that they’d want to dump it all out at once”. So Frost convinced Lynch to pitch the show to Showtime. “We took a 500-page script out of a briefcase, sat it on the executive’s desk, and said, ‘Let us know by Monday,’” says Frost, laughing. “This was a Friday. You have to have a little showmanship, right? It was the only meeting we ever took.” However, he and Lynch didn’t want to call it The Return. “That was a Showtime decision.”
I tell Frost how dumbfounded I was by the eighth episode of season three, which I watched on my laptop in 2017 at 2am to avoid spoilers and enter the Twin Peaks headspace. “I had this idea to do an origin story for Bob. My instinct was to stick it in the middle of season three, and hit everybody with a sucker punch. There’d be a quarter of a page of description that David would turn into five minutes of screen time.” Would he ever share the script? “Maybe, someday. They’re opening a museum for David in Poland. The original copy of it may be there.”
What I remember most is how much [David and I] laughed. We cracked each other up. That kind of joy is rare in life
Season three arrived with two novels by Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. If the MUBI re-release proves successful, would he revisit Twin Peaks in book form? “Long ago, with the show, we adopted a policy of never saying never,” says Frost. “That’s still in play, even though David’s not here anymore. I’m open to anything. I just finished my last book, which is coming out next year, so we’ll see.”
Frost admits he hasn’t watched the show since 2017, and is unsure how it’ll feel to revisit now that Lynch is gone. “David was a dear friend and collaborator for 40 years,” he says. “I knew him as a person, not as a famous person, when we met. We grew up together.” He recalls the lengthy Skype calls during the writing of season three. “What I remember most is how much we laughed. We cracked each other up. That kind of joy is rare in life.”
Even though the show is dark and disturbing, viewers can sense the elation in the creation? “Yeah, but we leavened it with humour,” says Frost. “David’s basic view of life is probably a few shades darker than mine, or mine is a few shades lighter than his. Aside from that, we shared a lot of beliefs about life. That’s what makes the collaboration unique: it’s not a Mark Frost creation, and it’s not a David Lynch creation. It’s Lynch/Frost. That third entity was created when we were working.”
All three seasons of Twin Peaks will stream on MUBI from June 13. The US pilot of Twin Peaks screens on 35mm as part of Film on Film Festival at BFI Southbank on 15 June
