Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Season 2 and the Twin Peaks Gold Edition will be released on March 22, 2010 in the UK

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Twin Peaks is a wildly imaginative, darkly comic mystery-thriller series that became one of the most acclaimed events in TV history.

When the TV series Twin Peaks was first broadcast at the beginning of the Nineties, it was a totally new, fresh look at the genre of a TV serial drama. Twin Peaks broke all the traditional rules of story line, plot and character development and was an immediate smash with both the criics and the public. 

Twin Peaks was the brain child of David Lynch the successful cult Film Director and Mark Frost an equally successful TV writer, director and producer. Before Twin Peaks, David Lynch had enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success as a Film Director, with  fils like Eraserhead, the muti-oscar nominated The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. Mark Frost had also enjoyed great success, having written for the hit TV shows The Six Million Dollar Man and The Equalizer and directed and written for the award winning cop Hill Street Blues.

Frost and Lynch were brought together by their mutual friend and agent Tony Krantz. He believed that the two would work together successfully and that they had complementary experience and skills. After a number of false starts, Krantz was able to convince them to work on a TV project which would show their shared vision of real life America, a similar dark vision to the one Lynch had shown in Blue Velvet. The decision was made to base their story in a small town  and they immediatly screened old episodes of the hit TV soap Peyton Place. Unusually they worked on creating the town of Twin Peaks before setting about writing the story or even the idea of the plot.  They went as far as creating a fictional map which showed the location of all the major buildings the river and the roads. "We knew where everything was located and that helped us determine the prevailing atmosphere and what might happen there". Mark Frost for his part wanted to create "a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go perpetually".

Perhaps it is for this reason thatthe town of Twin Peaks itself is another character in the show, one who's presence can be felt in every scene.

Many of the actors cast by Lynch in Twin Peaks were people he had worked with before, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Grace Zabriskie, and Everett McGill. He also decided to use veteran actors in key roles and gave a much needed boost to a number of flagging careers, most notably movie stars Richard Beymer, Piper Laurie, Russ Tamblyn, and Peggy Lipton. To save money it was decided to use a local girl ,Sheryl Lee ,to play the dead Laura. Whilst filming some home video footage of Sheryl he Lynch realized she had talent and expanded her roll in the show to include Laura's cousin, and of course Laura in flashbacks.

The ensemble nature of the piece allowed a number of young aspiring actors to gain their first credits in a succesful global TV show, Heather Graham, David Duchovney, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cheryl Lynn Fenn, Michael Ontkin, Joan Chen, Billy Zane, Miguel Ferrer and Keifer Sutherland all appear in Twin Peaks.

The music composed for Twin Peaks was a hit around the world and won a Grammy in 1990 for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, written by long time David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. There were three soundtrack albums released all of which achieved global success, and the opening theme tune must have appeared on millions of compilations

Synopsis

After the brutal killing of Twin Peaks homecoming queen Laura Palmer, Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), discoversthe small town is seething with deadly secrets and killer cherry pie. Then Cooper interprets an unusual dream about murder, has teas with the log lady, finds a macabre crime scene in the woods and is determined to solve the murder. 

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