TWIN PEAKS TUESDAY!

Okay, okay... I know today is Wednesday but somehow I overlooked the fact Twin Peaks: The Second Season was officially released on DVD yesterday!

Twin Peaks aired from 1990 to 1991 and was created by the highly distinctive director David Lynch and Mark Frost (writer of Hill Street Blues and other hit TV shows fame). Twin Peaks proved to be both a critical and popular success before unceremoniously being cancelled at the close of this its second season.

The other work commitments David Lynch took on during this period meant he had less and less time to supervise the show. A uniquely personal vision to David Lynch and enhanced by his collaboration with Mark Frost, Twin Peaks was destined to stutter and shake under the weight of its growing reputation and the broad and unwieldy nature of the television series format. Hiring different directors to deliver scripts increasingly produced by larger and more disparate sets of writers/producers inevitably saw the creative vision diluted and obscured. Ultimately, David Lynch conceded the series had reached its zenith in terms of its TV incarnation and there have been no more seasons of the show. The director, himself, returned to the setting and characters of Twin Peaks, for many fans his greatest achievement, in his controversial and often derided 1992 feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Whilst perhaps not tying up the multitude of plot strands begun by the television series and unmistakably bleaker in its outlook, the film does succeed in providing an illuminating counter point to Twin Peaks the TV series. Recently voted the ninth best television drama ever by critics and TV industry professionals in the UK - for Channel 4's 50 Greatest TV Drama list show - no small feat for an American drama, Twin Peaks remains a landmark in television history and a richly textured work of art.

This 6-disc set is region 1 encoded and NTSC from the US. The distributor label is Paramount rather than Artisan, who released Twin Peaks: The First Season in the US, and is available from online retailers such as DVD Pacific, Amazon.com and Deep Discount DVD.

This release has been an awful long time in coming with many fans of the groundbreaking television series making do with well worn LP recorded VHS tapes. For myself, I must confess to only having recently sat down and watched the first season in its entirety. Being an admirer of David Lynch, I was expecting to enjoy the show but even so Twin Peaks is a polished gem of a TV series. The episodes encompass a plethora of well written characters and the main plot, to find the killer of Laura Palmer, is in many ways the back story to all the sub-plots brought to the surface in the series. Considering the different directors involved and the fact that this was the first run of the programme the mood and atmosphere is superbly maintained throughout. Of course there is no shortage of the bizarre with numerous 'moody' sequences infused with the intangible sense of the oneiric. However, there are also moments of genuine emotion and comedy; in fact I would say it was Twin Peak's ability to switch fluidly between different genre conventions without losing spectator engagement that is the greatest strength of this highly original concept.

By the way the 4-disc set of the first season is available in UK and PAL, region 2 encoded from the Universal Playback label.Anyway, I certainly intend to pick up Twin Peaks: The Second Season come pay day and would urge any Twin Peaks virgins to seriously consider taking the time to delve into this hugely entertaining and enchanted Lynchian world!

To read some early reviews of the Twin Peaks: The Second Season DVD release head over to DVD Talk, DVD Verdict and DVD Town