Foreword
- Foreword
For Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), 2015 was a damn fine year. The last annum has seen the completion of a new collection of critical essays (Jeffrey Weinstock and Catherine Spooner’s Return to “Twin Peaks”: New Approaches to Theory & Genre in Television), an international conference in the United Kingdom (“‘I’ll See You Again in 25 Years’: The Return of Twin Peaks and Generations of Cult TV” at the University of Salford), and the current In Focus.1 Not coincidently, this has transpired alongside the commissioning of the return of the series on the American premium cable channel Showtime for a 2017 debut. Long before this Twin Peaks renaissance, the place of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “quirky quality” series in TV history was, however, already secure.2 As the creator of the iconic series Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, now fifty years old, put it definitively: “I was already out of college when Twin Peaks came on, and that was where I became aware of what was possible on television.”3
Twin Peaks has played a central role as well in our understanding of what is possible in television studies. As I have written and spoken about elsewhere, the collection Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin [End Page 117] Peaks” was not only my own first foray into serious television criticism but also a seminal early book in the systematic investigation of important series.4 My involvement in each of this year’s three new exercises in Peaks scholarship has been that of an elder statesman; I am old enough (and quite proud) to be the father of many of the brilliant contributors to Twin Peaks: The Next Generation. Think of me as the world’s oldest bellhop of Twin Peaks criticism.
When I was assembling Full of Secrets even before the end of the show’s original run, it was one of my goals to make the book an exercise in critical pluralism—to offer a multifaceted take on the show. So I am pleased to see the present In Focus still essentially faithful to that goal. “The past,” Joost Merloo once observed, “is as open to development as the future.”5 He was thinking, of course, of history, but the observation is true as well for television’s past. The essays in this collection bring us a new, reconsidered Twin Peaks, essential preliminary reading before the series itself is reborn or reimagined for the twenty-first century next year.
David Lavery is professor and director of graduate studies in English at Middle Tennessee State University (1993–). He is author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of more than twenty books, including Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks” (Wayne State University Press, 1995), TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map of “Supernatural” (ECW Press, 2011), The Essential Cult Television Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2015), The Essential “Sopranos” Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), and Joss Whedon, a Creative Portrait: From “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “The Avengers” (I. B. Tauris, 2014). He has lectured around the world on the subject of television and has been a guest and/or source for various international news agencies. From 2006 to 2008, he taught at Brunel University in London.
Footnotes
1. See Jeffrey Weinstock and Catherine Spooner, eds., Return to “Twin Peaks”: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For a review of the conference, see Ross Garner, “Conference Review: “‘I’ll See You Again in 25 Years’: The Return of Twin Peaks and Generations of Cult TV”: University of Salford, 21–22 May 2015,” Critical Studies in Television Online, June 5, 2015, http://cstonline.tv/twin-peaks.
2. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill Street Blues” to “ER” (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 150.
3. Michael O’Connell, “Showrunners 2012: ‘Mad Men’s’ Matthew Weiner,” Hollywood Reporter, October 3, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/showrunners-2012-mad-men-matthew-weiner-376006.
4. David Lavery, ed., Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks” (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).
5. See Loren C. Eisley, All the Strange...
