'Twin Peaks' 25 years on: The American TV show that changed it all

Fans of Twin Peaks, rejoice: today is the day of the Black Lodge. On April 8, 1990, the pilot for Twin Peaks was aired, directed by David Lynch, one of the most interesting and original directors of the last few decades. In the 25 years that have passed since, American television has built a formidable portfolio for itself, so much so that the so-called "golden era" seems to be never-ending, with the best writers, directors and actors all looking to work for television. Twin Peaks was one of its early triumphs, a pioneer of storytelling and production techniques, but more importantly, a show that took great pains to remain unpredictable; all great television's "hook" premise. As impressive as the first couple of episodes were, the show truly came alive only in the third episode, when viewers got their first glance at the Black Lodge. The first couple of episodes saw FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) investigating just about everyone who lived in Twin Peaks, a 50,000-strong crumbling remnant of old industrial America, in the wake of a young girl named Laura Palmer being raped and murdered. So far, the show was well-intentioned, impeccably stylish and with untapped reserves of a singular darkness, one that worked through implication rather than intimidation. (In short, it mirrored the personality of Cooper, its protagonist.) And yet, there was this curious distance between the story and the viewer; this distance is strictly an acquired taste. It was smashed to bits by a five-minute sequence at the end of the third episode.

Here, for the first time, we see Agent Cooper coming face-to-face - even if only in a dream - with BOB (Daniel Silva), the malevolent demon who has chosen Twin Peaks as its feeding ground. The dream is a classic David Lynch sequence: Agent Cooper sees himself 25 years older, sitting in a red room filled with sinister shadows and an otherworldly light. Here, he meets "The Man from Another Place", played by Michael J Anderson.

The Man is a dwarf wearing a red suit and an awfully formal-looking shirt. He speaks in an off-kilter accent, which one realises is a phonetically reversed tongue. The dwarf, his macabre tongue, his jazz dance and the air of nonchalance with which Lynch pulled it off make this, quite simply, one of the most memorable scenes in television history. It's only now that we know the little coincidences that made it possible; for instance, Anderson picked up reverse phonetics easily since he and his friends had used it as a secret code while in high school. Silva was a set dresser, part of the Twin Peaks crew, when he accidentally trapped himself in a room where the second episode was being shot; Lynch liked the look of Silva so much that he was made the primary antagonist of the series.

Today, when you see something of the calibre of True Detective, it's difficult not to notice the influence of Lynch's masterpiece. Both Twin Peaks and True Detective are affectionate parodies of the "hard-boiled" detective genre, with brief religious segues. Both begin with the ritualistic murder of a young female prostitute. Crucially, both use a distinct approach towards the supernatural to capture the ghostly decay of America's former manufacturing centres. In Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper's fixation with Twin Peaks' natural beauty and its home-cooked food is contrasted with the fact that a fair cross-section of the town was leading double lives, generally with tragic consequences. True Detective's Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) is more upfront with his analysis: "This place is like someone's memory of a town, and the memory's fading".

A more idiosyncratic way of assessing Lynch's influence is seeing where high-impact characters like "The Man from Another Place" and the Giant have appeared since.

Michael J Anderson famously played Samson, the redoubtable carnival manager from Carnivale, a short-lived but exquisite HBO show from 2005-2006. The seven-foot tall Carel Struycken, who played the Giant, was most recently seen in an episode of The Blacklist, one of the best shows being aired currently. He played a mentally-challenged giant who likes to hunt - and stuff the bodies of - poachers. Carnivale and The Blacklist represent very different kinds of television, representative of different schools of writing and performance. What is common is the quality of writing, the relatively generous budgets and the freedom given to creators who are nothing if not distinctive. With regards to that last part, it is ironic indeed that on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Twin Peaks, David Lynch pulled out from Showtime's planned resurrection of the show; Lynch says he was offered too little cash to do the script "the way it should be done". Showtime still expresses hope that both Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost will be on board. Kyle MacLachlan has confirmed his reprisal of Agent Dale Cooper's role.

Will Twin Peaks resume next year, preferably with Lynch at the helm of affairs? God I hope so.