David Lynch, ‘Twin Peaks’ and the American Art of Television

Is “Twin Peaks” the most American TV series ever made? It is, maybe, not the first series that a nation would happily choose as its calling card: a murder mystery, surreal and haunted, that involves the sacrifice of the innocent against a backdrop of mountain majesties and small-town diners. In it, David Lynch, who died at age 78, jimmied up the floorboards of the American dream and loosed a swarm of evil spirits from beneath.

But “Twin Peaks,” which Lynch made with Mark Frost, is chock-full of America, as wonder-struck by its physicality as any sweeping western epic or Georgia O’Keeffe painting. From its opening credits, which intercut misty forests and the sparks of logging machinery, it sees a place of beauty and violence, crowded with animistic spirits that predate political borders and even human settlement.

It is also a show that was made out of Americana, coffee and cherry pie, yearbook photos and doo-wop ballads. Lynch, who spent some of his childhood in the northwest, is often described as a filmmaker who showed the rot behind picture-perfect American facades, and this is not wrong. (In the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” he even represented his concept “garmonbozia,” or worldly pain and sorrow, in the form of that most midcentury-American of side dishes, creamed corn.)

But there is nothing cynical or snide about his portraiture in “Twin Peaks.” It is full of darkness but absent of contempt. Like the dictated observations of the F.B.I. special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), it is the work of an earnest odd bird driven to dig deeper — underneath the grass, into the woods, even beyond the bounds of the earthly plane — to get at the horror and transcendence of being human.

This, to put it mildly, made “Twin Peaks” a stunning thing to see on weeknight prime-time TV when it premiered on ABC in 1990. It was even more stunning to see it become not just a hit but also a monster pop-culture sensation — this from the art-house director who had released the phantasmagoric “Blue Velvet” a few years before.

But “Twin Peaks” was not a lofty work of film lowering itself to a lesser medium. It was unashamedly commercial TV, combining elements of high-school drama, police procedural and soap opera. (Not to mention the soap-within-a-show, “Invitation to Love.”) Yes, there were inexplicable interludes in the Black Lodge, a cryptically speaking giant and the wild-eyed murderous spirit Bob — but first, there was a popcorn-entertainment whodunit with a tagline: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

“Twin Peaks” burned hot and brief. It became a shorthand both for the kind of risk-taking series that networks would shy away from for fear they were unsustainable, then for the kind of ambitious mystery-box entertainment aspired to by the likes of “Lost” and “Yellowjackets.” One of its greatest successors would be itself, in the form of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the 18-episode sequel Lynch and Frost made for Showtime in 2017.

Lynch could have simply made this new “Twin Peaks” a monument to its past, collected grateful praise and called it a day. He did not. In form (visually experimental and muscular) and story (somehow even more elusive than the original) it is the work of an artist continuing to grow and push. (His feature film career had stalled since “Inland Empire” in 2006, leaving him to pour his energy and hallucinatory vision into the new episodes.)

“The Return” rejects nostalgia. It refuses to simply serve up more fan-pleasing delights, most pointedly by having MacLachlan spend much of the series playing not the Cooper we know but a double, the enigmatic Dougie Jones.

It also expands its setting geographically, to Manhattan, Las Vegas and beyond. In its eighth and finest episode — maybe the most stunning hour I have ever seen on TV, period — it departs in place and time to depict a crucial moment of American history, the detonation of an atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945.

The explosion is rendered first in stark black and white, growing multicolored as we push into the mushroom cloud, amid whose bursts of excited radiation we see images of otherworldly forces, including the face of the menacing spirit Bob.

The episode unfolds like a visual poem, spanning years and dimensions, with elements of silent film, B-movie horror and Stan Brakhage-style screen art. An Abe Lincoln-like ghoul invades the D.J. booth of a radio station; the beatific face of Laura Palmer appears in a floating golden orb. Mesmerizing, confounding, the images speak of a land that births unspeakable terrors and heartbreaking beauty.

In “Twin Peaks” and “The Return,” horror and wonder are two different expressions of the same force, and Lynch was our great poet of both. We hear that spirit echoed in the very first monologue of Agent Cooper as he dictates his thoughts, driving on a highway through the woods to investigate what will prove to be a ghastly mystery. “I’ve got to find out what kind of trees these are,” he says. “They’re really something.”