Twin Peaks' Mark Frost: 'David Lynch and I had a unique alchemy that's never been duplicated'

Launched 35 years ago in the spring of 1990, the eight-episode first season shook the world of television to its core. Mark Frost and David Lynch were keen to take TV further than it had ever gone before.

Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Frost explains: "After World War II, television set up a kind of cosy and warm conformity that was best exemplified in situation comedies. It was always the nuclear family, the dad was a sweet, loveable goofball, the kids were all adorable, and it was utterly predictable. It was all designed to sell products to those people in the audience — television was an advertising medium.

"It wasn’t until the ‘60s that I perceived television can do a lot more than that, if you gave it a chance. There were little sparks that would escape every once in a while like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which blew the top of my head off. I didn’t think that sort of storytelling was possible. Believe me, I filed those sorts of things away."

Frost spent the early days of his career writing for a variety of shows, including The Six Million Dollar Man, and eventually had a three-year stint on Hill Street Blues, after which he decided to turn his attention to writing films. Enter David Lynch.

Frost recalls: "Hill Street Blues was tremendous, but three years of 22 episodes a season is exhausting, and I thought movies sounded kind of relaxing by comparison. That was what drew us together; we were paired up on a script that I wrote that David was going to direct, and we got along — as he used to say — ‘like Ike and Mike’."

Whilst working on the (ultimately unproduced) film together, Frost and Lynch were approached by ABC over the possibility of creating a series for television. The pair jumped at the opportunity, Frost still feeling dissatisfied by the state of television at the time: "I felt it was underachieving, in terms of what it could possibly do. So, when we got the chance, we took it. We said, ‘What have we got to lose?’

"This was back in the Jurassic period [of TV] where there were three networks," explains Frost, "and ABC were thinking of us as a spring replacement show. In those days, spring meant you came on for a try-out period to see if you stuck to the wall. I’d say we not only stuck to the wall — we blew a hole through it!"

The first season of Twin Peaks leapt onto screens in 1990, eerily balancing warm, familiar small-town drama with far darker dream sequences. Frost elaborates: "It all became an organic process. [David and I] had both spent time in small towns, and we knew that when you’ve got less people and more open territory, the ‘weird’ gets in a little easier.

"It’s not lost in the tumult of an urban centre where everything’s rushing by so quickly you can hardly notice the strange or macabre when it sneaks up on you. With the woods right there, it insinuates itself a little more subtly, and we thought people would be interested in seeing something like this instead of the usual, antiseptic kind of rigid conformity of most television at the time."

Frost goes on to explain that he and Lynch had a lot in common, especially regarding their view of the world: "We’re both people who don’t necessarily have both of our feet planted in mundane reality. There’s a ‘shadow side’ to life that Americans have become adept at papering over — particularly during the Reagan years — and we wanted to let some of that shadow back in. I think that reflects our own experience of reality more faithfully."

While Lynch had developed himself within the world of fine art, Frost maintains that his talents are mostly in the written word: "I was a drama major and a playwright, and I’d studied literature and read the classics. Our disciplines were quite different but completely complementary. We were speaking the same language, just using different letters. It isn’t neatly dichotomous — it was really an amalgam. The two of us had a particular kind of alchemy that I’ve never duplicated with anyone else. I’ve never even tried!"

While the televised version of Twin Peaks didn’t introduce the surreal dream-world of the Red Room until its third episode, fans have long been aware that the location was created for the internationally-broadcast pilot episode.

Frost explains: "The initial dream sequence was born out of the strange necessity that we had with the pilot. The foreign distributor wanted a closed ending of the initial two hours. It opens the door to the dream-world that then became part of the show. All that stuff snuck in through that cracked door for the closed end and we just decided, ‘well, that’s got to be part of the show’.

"The dream life of these people, and the mysterious world that’s pressing in around them — you can see what those trees look like — that’s a feel that we wanted to have present in the town at all times."

More than 25 years after the first season, the series returned in the aptly named Twin Peaks: The Return, an 18-part epic that continued the series, penned entirely by Frost and Lynch.

While the classic characters all returned, Frost explains that the intention was to create something just as groundbreaking as the series had been in 1990: "Nostalgia was the last thing on our mind. The world had changed, and the medium had changed, and so had we.

"We wanted the show to be — in its own way — as startling this time around as it was the last time. Everybody in the show had grown older and we had a lot of thoughts about some of the major themes of the third series — mortality, and how much is there to this idea of a spiritual world? Are mortal souls in peril because of moral decisions that we make? These were all things that we were able to put into place more directly and more forcefully now that we had some years under our belts."

Finally, Frost reflects on what he thinks it is about Twin Peaks that has given the series such a lasting legacy, 35 years on: "We both were huge fans of classic movies and moviemaking. We wanted every second to count.

"Television has a lot of filler — if you watch it a lot, you know [when] they’re just building a bridge between this scene and that scene. We wanted every scene and every moment to count.

"Once David started working with that cast, they were able to get invested and give it the same care and attention that we had on the page, so it feels alive. That’s the thing, I think, that people still see in it. It was just a perfect amalgamation of all these different talents coalescing at the right time."

All episodes of Twin Peaks launch on MUBI on 13th June in the US, UK, Latin America, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Netherlands and India.

Twin Peaks' original US pilot episode screens as part of the BFI's Film on Film Festival on 15th June + Q&A with Kyle MacLachlan.

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