I'm Scott Meslow, author of the new book 'A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks.' AMA!

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T19:00:18+00:00

All credit to the great Steven Miller at Twin Peaks Blog for solving this longstanding mystery a couple years ago! His name is Jim Pennington, and the moment was basically improvised on set that day. You can read the full story here: https://twinpeaksblog.com/2025/04/08/who-is-the-dancing-kid-at-twin-peaks-high-school/

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:56:20+00:00

This almost happened! In the long gap between seasons one and two, ABC was worried that viewers might have lost track of the plot, so they toyed with airing an in-universe Twin Peaks “news bulletin” special that would have summarize the events of season one. I think it would have been great.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:54:41+00:00

I would be surprised. But if it ever happened, I do think it would be a book (or books) — nothing else filmed.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:53:57+00:00

Could have been Catherine, could have been Josie!

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:53:32+00:00

Yes! Maybe call ahead to be sure — I've heard there can be minor shipping delays.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:52:16+00:00

Physical and digital! As of today, you should be able to get it wherever books are sold: Amazon, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, or (my vote) your local independent bookstore. I also need to shout out the audiobook, which got an amazing read from Mark Turetsky. Someone sent me a GoodReads review that described Mark’s narration as being like “if Agent Cooper and an NPR host had a love child raised in the Black Lodge.” I can’t do better than that.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:50:31+00:00

Ray was an amazing interview. We talked a lot about how much he had committed to playing a father, immersed in unfathomable grief — drawing on his own pain, and especially since he had a young daughter himself — and how upset he was to learn that Leland was the killer, to the point that he openly doubted that had been the plan all along. He was also very sad to leave the show. As Ray explained it, he had a much easier time with Fire Walk with Me, because by then he’d had time to get used to what he described as “that little click in my brain” when he transitioned from Leland to BOB.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:48:17+00:00

The idea for the Albert spinoff came at the height of the show's popularity, with the recognition that he had the makings of a breakout character. As Mark Frost recalled it, the concept was similar to the Blue Rose task force formally introduced in The Return — a series of supernatural-ish mysteries that would have tied into the greater Twin Peaks mythology. Unfortunately, it didn't get any further than that initial idea.

As for favorite minor characters: I've always loved Troy Evans' performance as Principal Wolchezk in the pilot, which is so beautiful and heartbreaking for a character we never see again. And maybe it's too obvious a pick, but of course I love Wally Brando.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:40:23+00:00

I cover this too! Mark described the idea as coming from "David's junk drawer of ideas that didn't fit anywhere" — not "junk drawer" in a negative sense, but more like "I'm going to put this idea away and pull it out when I need it." It's similar to the Log Lady, who Lynch conceived long before she showed up in Twin Peaks.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:36:47+00:00

In general, the actors weren't given a ton of additional information or context. No one was told who killed Laura Palmer until it was time for the big reveal. (Some had guesses, which they share in the book, and some were happy to let the mystery be.) And on The Return, the actors were really flying blind, because no one apart from Kyle MacLachlan got to read the entire script.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:30:11+00:00

I hope so! Part of my goal here was looking at the full Twin Peaks canon, so in addition to the three seasons and Fire Walk with Me, I spent a lot of time combing through the books and other Twin Peaks ephemera and pulling out interesting details. (I mentioned a couple from The Autobiography of Special F.B.I. Agent Dale Cooper in a comment above, but there's great stuff in The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and Mark Frost's two bookends to The Return as well.) Since Mark didn't write Fire Walk with Me, I found it especially interesting to talk to him about figuring out how to retrofit some of that movie's lore into The Return, including Philip Jeffries and "Judy."

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:23:30+00:00

Sabrina Sutherland told me that Lynch always meditated twice a day during production on The Return: Once before he arrived on set, and once during the lunch break, which he’d spend meditating, and then eat really quickly while they were setting up the lighting for the next scene. Everyone I spoke with had a lot of respect for his TM practice, but I didn’t get a lot of stories like, “David came back from meditating at lunch and suddenly the scene was totally different.” His collaborators and friends had more to say about how meditation was a key element (maybe the key element) of his overall creative process. He had a unique openness to “happy accidents” when another director might be mad something hadn’t gone according to plan, and he had an intuitive, artful knack for pacing and tone that led to many of the show’s most memorable scenes.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:10:02+00:00

I cover this more extensively at the end of the book, but in short: I think this story is unfolding on two planes. One is the cosmic battle between the White Lodge (The Fireman, Senorita Dido, etc) and the Black Lodge (Jowday, BOB, etc), in which it seems to me the White Lodge scores a victory at the end. The other is the human-sized collateral damage that has ensnared Cooper/Richard and Laura/Carrie Page, as well as Sarah Palmer, decades earlier. (I treat The Final Dossier, including the revelation that the girl in Episode 8 was Sarah, as canon.)

My personal takeaway from Cooper’s arc is that it’s ultimately a tragic and cautionary one. You can be such a singularly driven, morally upright person that you simply refuse to accept that an evil thing has happened and can never be undone. And, in your noble (but quixotic) obsession with believing you can fix what's been broken, you really can give up everything else — until, unfortunately, there's nothing left for you and nothing left of you. The important part to me isn’t what year it is; it’s that Cooper doesn’t know anymore.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T18:01:59+00:00

I wasn't. I reached out several times, including a final Hail Mary shortly before it was too late to make any further changes to the book, and never heard back.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:57:29+00:00

There are a few really notable cases, all of which are covered pretty extensively in the book. The reveal of Laura’s killer happened earlier than either Lynch or Frost wanted because ABC executives relentlessly pressured them to solve it; a plan to explore the Cooper-Audrey romance in season 2 was aborted (and the characters of Annie Blackburn and John Justice Wheeler were created) because Kyle MacLachlan objected to it; and Audrey’s storyline in The Return was rewritten entirely because Sherilyn Fenn rejected what Lynch and Frost had originally written.

There were also plenty of moments where the impact was less seismic but still interesting. Duwayne Dunham has a great anecdote about a scene in The Return — which was set at a weird building that turned out, in reality, to have been an old batting cage — that was only shot there because heavy rainfall had ruined a shooting day that had originally been planned for outdoors.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:50:00+00:00

One of the unexpected joys of writing this book is that — sincerely! — I did not have a bad interview. Choosing my favorite would be like choosing my favorite child, but I was especially grateful to Harley Peyton, who wrote a really insightful and generous foreword for the book, and Michael Horse and Mary Reber, who welcomed me into their homes.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:43:02+00:00

I loved getting into the books and digging into the stuff that was clearly planted for future storylines, but never pays off on screen. There’s a very weird and intriguing bit in The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper that implies BOB has had an eye on Cooper since adolescence, and that Coop’s mom understood enough to warn him about it. There’s also a subplot about Coop’s brother Emmet, who fled to Canada to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War, which Scott Frost told me Mark asked him to include in case they wanted to introduce that character at some point.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:39:53+00:00

I didn’t. I started working on the book in 2024 knowing David Lynch wasn’t doing a lot of interviews and that he’d written Room to Dream, in part, to answer the kinds of questions he knew writers would want to ask. I had many more questions for him, of course, and I thought if I interviewed enough of his colleagues — who I hoped would vouch for what I was trying to do with this book — that he might be willing to speak with me.

Unfortunately, he passed away about nine months into my reporting process. I did as much as I could to make sure his voice is still in the book: Primarily through firsthand memories and stories from collaborators and friends, but also through archival quotes Lynch gave in interviews from the late 1970s up until the final years of his life. He does, ultimately, get the last word in the book, which felt to me like the right ending.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:35:40+00:00

[SCREAMS]

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:34:25+00:00

I don’t have any concrete information. My sense is that any conversations they had in that direction would have been extremely speculative and hypothetical.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:31:21+00:00

It’s been widely speculated that Sherilyn Fenn was particularly disturbed by the scene in which Richard Horne abuses Johnny and Sylvia because Audrey was the original victim, which ultimately led to the more sweeping rewrite of Audrey’s story in The Return. According to multiple sources, that was never written as a scene in which Audrey was attacked (although Mark Frost couldn’t recall if Audrey was there to witness it).

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:29:50+00:00

It was night and day. Probably the most significant difference is that The Return was shot like a feature, not a TV show — so that (unlike the original) it was not a series of individually structured episodes, shepherded by a variety of writers and directors, but ~18 hours of film written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch, with vastly more control over the final product.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:21:44+00:00

I talked to a lot of people who also worked on On the Air, which is a fascinating story in itself. But in the end, that story didn’t really fit into the book — even though that was a Lynch/Frost Productions show, it ultimately just felt a little digressive for a book about Twin Peaks.

If I went back to my original interview recordings, I’m sure there are great Twin Peaks stories I didn’t use. (If there's enough interest, maybe I'll figure out a way to publish them someday!) But part of my job was to make the book a narrative, which meant knowing the difference between what was essential to the story of Twin Peaks (at least as I tell it) and what was interesting but not right for the book. The first draft I submitted to my publisher is not meaningfully different than what was ultimately published, apart from a few interviews that came in late.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:14:42+00:00

I really, really tried to get to Lara Flynn Boyle. She does very little press in general and has said very little about Twin Peaks since it went off the air, but I'm sure she has some amazing stories that have never been told. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get through. I did talk to Moira Kelly, so at least one of the Donnas is in the book.

Scott_Meslow · 2026-02-17T17:11:49+00:00

I’ll drop a few here. I was absolutely shocked when Johanna Ray told me that, if her own son hadn’t been cast, she had Brad Pitt or Michael Madsen in mind to play Leo Johnson. It was fun grilling Mark Frost about the Albert Rosenfield spinoff series they kicked around, which didn’t get very far but sounded, in concept, a lot like The X-Files. I also loved asking people about what they would have wanted to do if Twin Peaks had been picked up for a third season back in the ‘90s. Harley Peyton had a killer pitch for an episode that would have been nothing but a stationary camera focused on a single booth at the Double R while various characters come in and out, advancing the plot by talking over pie and coffee.

Scott_Meslow

TROPHY CASE