Twin Peaks Magazine

Losing imagination

For the kids born in the 90’s, music videos carried a great weight. It depicted what the artist had to express, it might have not made sense at all for some, but they did leave a message behind them, something small or something big – the beauty of it was that they never made it obvious but there was a hidden meaning telling us things like save the planet, be who you are ( staying from botox berkshire ) and More

Twin Peaks Dream Come True

Everybody keeps telling me about their favourite current TV series and urging me to watch it. The thing is, if you haven’t seen Twin Peaks then you’ve got nothing to compare it to. No, forget that, it means you haven’t lived. Coming from a true Twin Peaks fan, if you haven’t involved it in your life yet then this may seem a little on the crazy side. But I promise you, once you start there’s no going back. Once you More

The Spirit of Twin Peaks lives on in Sweeps

I’ve been thinking about sweep quite a bit recently, and talking about it because it’s fun to say. Sweeps. See…?

For those of you who don’t know, Sweeps is the period when American TV series go crazy, story lines go of the wall, narrative arcs peak and celebrities pop up for bizarre cameos. The reason for this is that American companies get all thier viewing figures from a section of the population monitored closely for a small period of time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings).

The period over which they gather this data is known as sweeps and writers aim to get as many viewers during sweeps as possible, which is brilliantly ridiculous. The value of advertising space is based primarily on how the Nielsen families respond to a crazy period. So this billion dollar industry bases its actions on how enticed people are by the bizarre. No-one really expected Twin Peaks to have mainstream success when it aired but it scored ABC’s highest ratings in four years which goes to show how brave shows can break the mold. The irony is that the plot twists and cliffhangers which Twin Peaks was famous for are now, ubiquitous in the most popular modern dramas and series with massive followings like Lost have Twin Peaks to thank for making that unique presentation skill mainsteam. (They could take an acting course from it too!)

These days, sweeps is split into four month long monitoring periods of November, February, May and July and process about two million paper diaries from households to assess ratings. Think back to your favourite episode of an American series where they pulled out all the stops. The chances are it was aired during sweeps. I think it’s a real testament to the American enthusiasm to do things bigger and better- no matter how ill-advised and embrace the spectacle of a situation. The wonderful weirdness and suspense of Twin Peaks may be a distant memory but its spirit lives on through the surreal behaviour exhibited during sweeps.

Who Cares About Common Sense?

Twin Peaks: weird, wonky, wonderful, a proper TV show anomaly—and an endangered species nowadays. I almost feel sorry for the producers of the show when I read things like what this.

Do fans actually realize what goes into making such shows as Twin Peaks? All the ins and outs, all that planning? And really, isn’t the point with a show like Twin Peaks that common sense can be thrown out the window at will? Isn’t that the More

Twin Peaks and challenging your audience

With a body of work including Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive—not to mention, of course, both the television and film versions of Twin Peaks–David Lynch has long been one of my favorite directors. He’s been variously acclaimed and rewarded, receiving all sorts of accolades and awards, and is hailed by many as one of the most important and creative directors of our time.

However, one of the issues, of course, of working with such challenging material—after More

The Beauty of Planning

I have to say that besides Twin Peaks, my other all time favourite television show is Carnivale. When you look at them side by side you can actually see a lot of similarities, both definitely have cliff-hanger plot lines, both are a little bit messed up and you never really know what is going one, and both of them (despite the fact that they had massive cult followings) had been cancelled after season two. But I think that perhaps the most important similarity is that Carnival and Twin Peaks had a storyline that was developed all the way through six seasons unsted of writing one season after the last one had aired. Which gave the whole show a little bit more mystery and a lot more interesting long-follow storylines. Which could be in part why the show was cancelled, you couldn’t just catch up with an episode in the first 10 minutes of the program. But the eccentricities and hidden meanings offered the viewer so much more satisfaction when watching it. Perhaps if we has seasons on DVD or the ability to watch shows online back in the 90s it would have done better, I think it is just a crying shame that it didn’t!