Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition (Moviemail April 2010)

Cause for cherry pie and another cup of coffee: the emergence of the complete Twin Peaks, one of the most singular and daring projects in American network television, in one handy box set. The second season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal murder-mystery has long been unavailable on UK DVD due to rights issues almost as tangled as the show’s plotting - but hats off to Universal Playback for persevering: here, at last, is a golden opportunity to explore - or revisit - every nook and cranny of the small screen’s strangest-ever town.

For the uninitiated, these are the investigations of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), summoned to the leafy Northwestern logging hotspot after the body of prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washes up, “wrapped in plastic”, on a nearby shore. Almost everyone - from bigshot hotelier Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) to leather-clad wild one Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) - is acting funny enough to count among the suspects, and Lynch’s hand keeps manifesting itself unexpectedly: in Cooper’s never-more-vivid dreams, the fixation with owls and sweetmeats, and a dragged-up David Duchovny.

The production-troubled Season Two - introducing rogue agent Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh, terrifying) - has long been underrated; seen again, it offers several of the show’s most lyrical stretches, involving Cooper’s courtship of waitress Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham). Yet it’s the creative risks taken by Lynch and Frost throughout that continue to amaze, their gorgeous leads, astounding tonal shifts and unprecedented atmospherics reclaiming and rejuvenating so many primetime drama clichés. No Twin Peaks, in other words, no Sopranos, no Lost, no Glee.

The extras are, as Coop might say, damn fine, preserving Log Lady Catherine Coulson’s cryptic episode introductions alongside deleted scenes, production documentaries, retrospectives, and the video for one-hit wonder Julee Cruise’s theme song “Falling”: evidence of how the show - and Angelo Badalamenti’s lulling orchestrations - permeated the global consciousness circa 1990. Most cherishable is the inclusion of Lynch’s self-enclosed feature-length pilot, formerly available only on VHS: for newcomers and obsessives alike, it’s a whole other way into (and out of) the woods.