Referring
to The Curse (2023), movie director Christopher Nolan said: “It’s
an incredible show, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen on
television before. There are so few shows that come along that have
genuinely no precedence. You’re going back to things like Twin
Peaks, or The Prisoner, or Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective and
things like that, so you’re in an amazing space...”
These
are also the three shows I see brought up most often when discussing
when so-called peak TV began.
The
beginning of appointment television, the golden age, where you had to
pay attention, is also where weird TV first really took off.
The
Prisoner was what might be called a limited series today. It's a self
contained single season story that aired in 1967. It wasn't insanely
mainstream, nor was it unpopular. The gap between The Prisoner and
the next peak TV show is almost twenty years. To me that rules it out
as launching this era. It's only in retrospect that it fits the
criteria. It didn't spark immediate and noticeable change.
The
Singing Detective is a miniseries from '86 and depending on the
setting, can be considered somewhat obscure. Co-creator of Twin
Peaks, Mark Frost is a fan of Dennis Potter's work (namely Pennies
From Heaven and The Singing Detective) and considers Potter perhaps
the most major influence on his own writing. Parallels can be seen in
the complex blending of reality with fantasy through layered
storytelling, peppered with occasional musical numbers.
Twin
Peaks, which began airing in '90, is a full fledged show with a known
name in film at the helm. It was big enough to get its own movie, and
also be brought back 25 years later as prophesized for what
functioned as both a spinoff and finale to the story.
Because
the third season was decades later, directed entirely by Lynch
himself, and on a premium network, it feels much darker and tonally
different than the first two seasons. Some people separate the shows
into Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. For the purposes of this,
I'll be treating Twin Peaks as an umbrella term for the entirety of
the series.
It's also worth noting that the two earlier shows,
The Prisoner and The Singing Detective, are both British. Examples
furthering the theory that it was Europe who originally sparked
interest in a deeper, more peculiar television experience include:
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and The Decalogue (1989), bookending the
eighties as part of a wave of theatrical arthouse miniseries that
lended crediblity to the medium and expanded people's ideas of what
could be done within it.
Bizarreness
being traded from the UK to the US and back again is a common
occurrence throughout this list. In fact, Twin Peaks began with a
failsafe in place in case the series wasn't picked up. There was a
contractually imposed alternate ending Lynch had to film to wrap up
the story of the pilot. (These alternate scenes were later reworked
into a dream sequence.) This version, now called the International
Pilot, played in cinemas throughout multiple countries and first
released on VHS in Europe, years before it came to the US.
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