What would’ve made it the hardest to pitch was the actual explanation for what happened to Laura Palmer. The reveal that her father Leland was her killer in season 2 was not a fun “aha!” moment, but the beginning of one of the darkest scenes ever played on ABC, one that served as a dark rebuke of the stranger danger panic that really picked up steam in the ’80s. As much as people were expected to fear their kids could potentially be attacked by any stranger on the street, ultimately the biggest threat to a kids’ safety was their own family.
At its core, “Twin Peaks” is a story about a teenage girl who was repeatedly raped and then murdered by her own father, a man who was seen as an upstanding member of his community. It’s an incredibly dark premise for a show airing on ABC in the early ’90s, which is perhaps why season 2 of “Twin Peaks” pulled back a little in Leland’s final episode, making it seem like Leland was an innocent person who was possessed by an evil spirit. It was with the prequel movie “Fire Walk With Me” that David Lynch, now free from the constraints of network TV, centered the story around Laura’s last days alive. The prequel makes it far more ambiguous just how in control Leland really is, as well as makes it clear just how badly Laura was abused throughout her whole childhood.
But as for the process of getting season 1 produced in the first place? These aspects of the story were underplayed. “We didn’t tell [ABC] what it was originally,” Mark Frost said, “because they probably would have killed it right away if they’d known what was actually going on.”
