‘Twin Peaks’ Turns 35! Which Cast Member Called It “‘Happy Days’ on Acid” in a TV Guide Interview?

On April 8, 1990, filmmaker David Lynch — then best known for arthouse films like Blue Velvet — debuted the two-hour pilot of Twin Peaks, and network TV would never be the same again. Twin Peaks took the classic small town murder-mystery formula, and turned it on its head — using it as a jumping off point to take viewers into a quirky parallel universe full of mysticism, bizarre characters, and damn fine coffee.

In advance of the show’s premiere, TV Guide Magazine profiled the show’s cast in its April 7, 1990 issue. Read on to check out Timothy Carlson’s interviews with the cast and creators — including David Lynch himself, who passed away on January 16, 2025 — right before the premiere of one of the greatest cult TV shows of all time. Though as you can see from the issue cover below, no one had any idea of the cult phenomenon it would become … since the show is mentioned nowhere on the cover.

courtesy Everett Collection

Reprinted from TV Guide Magazine, April 7, 1990. Written by Timothy Carlson.

Welcome to the weird new world of Twin Peaks … Where nothing is quite what it seems – and a killer is on the loose.

Can moviemaker David Lynch successfully bring the strange and erotically tinged vision of his Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to prime-time television? Will Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a kind of Gothic soap opera, hook viewers on his surrealist taste for the warped fantasies that lurk beneath the surface in small-town America?

Listening to those involved in the project you sense the whole twisted enterprise may just be TV’s latest display of doing what it does best: making everything old seem new again.

Michael Ontkean (who plays the sheriff of the Pacific Northwest logging enclave for which the series is named) calls it “a Kabuki-style Peyton Place.”

Dana Ashbrook (who plays a local Lothario) laughs at the Lynch sensibility: “It’s Happy Days on very heavy acid or an introspective Happy Days in which Richie Cunningham contemplates suicide and the Fonz is a drug dealer.”’

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In short, Twin Peaks takes the dying prime-time soap, revives it with a dose of ’90s surrealism and plops it all down in Middle America. In this mythical town (pop. 51,201, located 5 miles from the Canadian border), there’s enough sex, family feuding and power grabbing to outdo Dallas – but done up In Lynch’s inimitable style.

“We’re just trying to reimagine the genre of the nighttime soap, the way Hill Street Blues did the cop show a decade ago,” says Mark Frost, the series co-executive producer. “Dynasty had a campy quality – outrageously larger than life and glitzy and glamorous. David brings a certain surreal quality.”

A quick look at the initial storyline suggests he’s right. Kyle MacLachlan, who played the young man obsessed with solving a macabre mystery in Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, here plays FBI agent Dale Cooper, called to Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of the local high school’s homecoming queen. As he unravels the mystery of her death, we discover that the girl may have been leading a sordid double life. And it turns out she is hardly the only character in Twin Peaks who is not what she seems.

Lynch employs humorous banalities, non sequiturs, and other small-town personality quirks to mesmerize the audience – and to make them care about his characters. As in a Fellini film, strange moments abound in Twin Peaks: one tall lawman inexplicably cries like a baby at scenes of death; a woman shows up at a public meeting carrying a log, and when Agent Cooper asks who she is, he’s told, “We call her the Log Lady”

TWIN PEAKS, Catherine E. Coulson, 1990-91,

Spelling Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection

Sometimes humor emerges from the darkest moments. The camera lingers so long on the murder victim’s mother (Grace Zabriskie) sobbing over her daughter’s death that many who have watched the pilot first get nervous, then laugh from tension – when will this woman quit? “I knew there was no way in hell I would not come out looking a little weird,” Zabriskie says. “When [friends] heard me screaming and moaning so long they were worried I had been made to look silly. But when I saw it, I was thrilled.”

Dana Ashbrook, who plays Bobby Briggs, the murdered girl’s boyfriend, says the Lynch “twist to things” is pervasive and extends to all characters. including his own. “I try to play Bobby as sad, but David says, ‘No. it’s not that. [In the scene where Bobby learns about Laura’s death,] he’s thinking about himself here. He’s surprised, but he’s immediately thinking how it’s going to help himself. You’re going to get out of school that day. … You’re going to be able to get sympathy from people, and that’s what he thrives on.’”

TV Guide Magazine

All of this weirdness is contained in the two-hour pilot. which was shot for $3.8 million last winter near Seattle. ABC has ordered seven additional one-hour episodes, one of which just might reveal the murderer. But don’t absolutely count on it. “For every mystery that is solved, another emerges,” says actor Russ Tamblyn who plays an eccentric (what else?) psychiatrist. David Lynch bristles when he hears that some people think he is “sending up” the soap opera genre. “Soap operas, to me, should not be camp. These are very real characters,” he says. The 30-odd townsfolk whose lives will take part in the plot developments all “feel and do what they do with all their heart. Camp is not only not creative, it is putting yourself above something else that has already been done and poking fun at it. To me, that is a lower kind of humor.”

Many who have seen Lynch’s films, which are known for their often shocking scenes of violence and perversion, may wonder how a filmmaker with his distinct vision could work within the restrictions of television. Surprisingly he welcomed the challenge.

“You can’t get into certain heavier violence and sexual things that are a part of life but not a part of TV life,” he says. “But the added time allows you to pay more attention to more characters, and you can concoct an elaborate tapestry of those lives. That is completely thrilling to me.”

So Lynch, who had MacLachlan’s character discover an attraction for sadomasochistic sex and voyeurism in Blue Velvet, has to tiptoe around some more squeamish subjects. And he seems perfectly happy doing a verbal tap dance for ABC’s standards-and-practices department.

TWIN PEAKS, Michael Ontkean, Kyle MacLachlan, 1990-1991

Everett Collection

“We had one line they wouldn’t allow – Bobby Briggs says he wasn’t going to take any ‘crap off that bitch,’ says Lynch. “So we rewrote it to have him say he wasn’t going to take any ‘oink oink off that pretty pig.’”

A strange expression, to be sure, but one Lynch insists is plausible amidst a lot of other picturesque speech in small-town America. Lynch himself was born in Missoula, Montana and lived in Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane. before moving east at age 15. As a result, he has an instinctive grasp of some of the absurd turns of phrase that people use.

Even that time-honored soap staple – the cliffhanger ending — has been Lynched. For the European video release of Twin Peaks‘ two-hour premiere, he couldn’t use the pilot’s cliffhanger — he had to have a resolution. So he added 15 minutes of footage.

TWIN PEAKS, creator David Lynch, on set, 1990-91.

Spelling Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection

“We needed a killer in an alternate ending for the pilot,” recalls Joan Chen, who plays the owner of Twin Peaks’ Packard Sawmill. “And David saw this propman hiding, not wanting to get in the way of the shot. David thought he was an interesting-looking man and made him the killer. David really appreciates accidents on the set.”

“I’ve always been interested in secrets,” says Lynch. “Every human being is a detective, and they are looking for the secret to be revealed.” So will a mass audience get Twin Peaks, much less get hooked on its technique?

Ashbrook thinks so. “The reason Middle America will like this show is because it’s about a small town. They can relate to us. And unlike the big city, things like drugs and pornography and death have a much higher importance in small towns.”

TWIN PEAKS, town welcome sign billboard, with population total, 1990-1991.

Worldvision Ent./Everett Collection

“The series definitely doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence,” says Frost. “We have embedded clues for the careful viewer throughout – but it is also rewarding for the casual viewer.”

“You just sort of picture this kind of darkness and this wind going through the needles of these Douglas firs, and you start getting a bit of a mood coming along,” says Lynch. “And if you hear footsteps. and you see a light in the window, and you start moving toward it, little by little you are sucked in. And this fantastic mood and sense of place comes along, and hopefully, you want to go back and feel it each week.”