‘Twin Peaks’ in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s TV Week for May 6-12, 1990

I love finding artifacts from the earliest days of when Twin Peaks was first broadcast in the United States. Recently, I acquired at auction a rather well-preserved copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “TV Week” from May 6-12, 1990. This television viewing guide featured a previously discussed publicity photo of Josie Packard (Joan Chen) and Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) on the cover. Inside, the late journalist Lee Winfrey discussed why Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking television show had everyone talking.

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, ‘TV WEEK’ FOR MAY 6-12, 1990 | COVER

The cover of the May 6-12, 1990 issue of “TV Week” from The Philadelphia Inquirer featured Joan Chen and Michael Ontkean sitting by a fireplace on the set of the Blue Pine Lodge. The bold caption for Lee Winfrey’s article reads, “TV’s hottest new series / Why ‘Twin Peaks’ has everyone talking.” This article was published the week that episode 1.005 first aired on Thursday, May 10, 1990 on the ABC Television Network.

The Mauve Zone has the original uncropped publicity photo of Chen and Ontkean by the fireplace.

Lee Winfrey was a former television critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer and onetime president of the Television Critics Association. He was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. Winfrey later served in the Army for a couple of years and then earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Tennessee. His first reporting job was at the Nashville Tennessean on April Fool’s Day in 1957. From there he went to the Miami Herald, then became a Washington bureau reporter for Knight Ridder.

Lee took a break from the newspaper business to earn a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of lowa, then came to the Detroit Free Press. He left with a Nieman Fellowship to study Shakespeare at Harvard University, then went to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1972. His first television column for the Pennsylvania paper was published in February 1974. He continued reviewing television programs for the newspaper until he retired in 2001.

Mr. Winfrey died in Philadelphia on March 31, 2003 of arteriosclerosis and diabetes. He was 70.

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, ‘TV WEEK’ FOR MAY 6-12, 1990 | PAGES 8-9

Lee Winfrey’s Twin Peaks cover story was published on pages 8-9. Below is a transcript of the article from the long out of print viewing guide. It even has a nod to the Real Twin Peaks of Snoqualmie Valley, Washington.

On ‘Twin Peaks,’ the offbeat is king
By Lee Winfrey

WHY ARE SO MANY television critics praising and so many viewers talking about the hot new one-hour weekly series called Twin Peaks? An easy and obvious two-word answer is: It’s different.

Co-creator and co-producer David Lynch calls it “Peyton Place meets Blue Velvet.” Actor Dana Ashbrook, who plays one of the Twin Peaks villains, calls it “Happy Days on very heavy acid.” Harry F. Waters wrote in Newsweek: “Imagine Our Town written by Kafka.”

If you think most TV series are sausage, think of Twin Peaks as veal Oscar. Lynch, 44, already renowned as a movie director for his distinctive work on Eraserhead (1978), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984) and Blue Velvet (1986), has brought his idiosyncratic vision brilliantly to bear on the little screen.

Lynch’s specialty, hitherto achieved most memorably in the bizarre Blue Velvet, is to dig beneath the placid surface of American small-town life and find derangement and horror. A cast of about two dozen, huge by TV-series standards, is acting out his unique fantasies in Twin Peaks, whose next episode will be at 9 p.m. Thursday on ABC (Channel 6).

The pivotal characters in Twin Peaks, which is set in a Pacific Northwest city of the same name, are FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean). Since the series premiered April 8 for an initial run of eight episodes, they have been investigating the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose body was found wrapped in plastic on a beach.

Everybody thought 17-year-old Laura was so sweet, since she was the high school homecoming queen. But Cooper and Truman had scarcely started digging before they discovered that she had used cocaine and had amassed a secret bankroll of more than $10,000.

Morally, Laura’s high school friends are a mixed lot. The Good are James Hurley (James Marshall) and Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), whom all parents would be proud to hug. The Bad are Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), who both hate their fathers and abuse the patience of almost everybody else.

Among the adults, white hats are worn by Donna’s father, Dr. William Hayward (Warren Frost), the good-hearted local physician, and Jocelyn Packard (Joan Chen), an exotic beauty from Hong Kong who inherited the Packard Sawmill, the biggest business in Twin Peaks, from her late husband. Black hats are year-round attire for Audrey’s father, Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), who owns the Great Northern Hotel, and Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re), a truck driver who beats his wife with a bar of soap wrapped up in a sock. Put a gray hat on James’ uncle, Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), who seems like basically a nice guy although he is running around on his wife.

Music is a major element in Twin Peaks, but it doesn’t sound like the music you hear on other TV series. For one thing, it often goes against the flow of the action, not with it, refusing to give you any audible clue about how you should feel and react. The brooding, often overwrought, sometimes teasing score is by Angelo Badalamenti, who also wrote the music for Blue Velvet and for Lynch’s next movie, Wild at Heart, which will premiere this month at the Cannes Film Festival.

Although Twin Peaks includes many diverse characters, such as the Log Lady, who converses with a piece of firewood she always carries with her, the most exotic and fascinating face belongs to Chen, 29, one of the most praised actresses in China before she moved to America in 1981.

The daughter of physicians who still live in China, Chen was a teenager studying acting at the Shanghai Film Studio when she made her movie debut as a deaf country girl in Youth (1976). She won the Golden Rooster, China’s equivalent of the Academy Award, for her portrayal of another ,country girl in Little Flower (1979).

Chen made three more movies before she decided to emigrate. Her Chinese work, seen at film festivals, won her a scholarship to California State University at Northridge. When China saw her on screen again, she looked much changed from the country-girl roles with which she began — she starred as the opium-addicted Empress Wan Jung in The Last Emperor (1987).

Seen most recently on the big screen as Kidda, a spunky futuristic athlete in The Blood of Heroes (1990), Chen decided to try for the role of Twin Peaks’ Jocelyn Packard even though the part was originally written for an Italian.

“I heard about the series,” Chen said during a telephone interview, “and I was intrigued because I loved his films,” she said of Lynch. “So I went in and met him and he said, ‘Chinese? Why not?’ ” And so Jocelyn became the wife that Andrew Packard met on a trip to Hong Kong. Jocelyn has found solace from widowhood in the strong arms of Sheriff Truman. She can use the protection because her sister-in-law, Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie), is bitterly plotting against her. Catherine is adulterously conniving with the father of the murdered Laura, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), whose foreplay with Catherine begins at the tips of her toes.

Catherine and Leland may be facing a tougher cookie than they suppose, however. Dropping a clue about Jocelyn, Chen said, “She has a huge past hidden from everybody in town, including her late husband.” In this season’s final episode on May 24, Chen said, a detective from Hong Kong will arrive in Twin Peaks.

Lynch wouldn’t be diabolical enough to turn this plum into a rotten apple, would he? Say it ain’t so, David.

Although Twin Peaks has a purported population of 51,201, the pilot was filmed in a town much smaller: Snoqualmie, Wash., population 1,500. The series has already produced a mini-boom in the economy of Snoqualmie, a century-old logging town 27 miles east of Seattle.

The Great Northern Hotel you see in Twin Peaks is actually the Salish Lodge, perched on a cliff overlooking 268-foot Snoqualmie Falls. Since the series got under way, said Salish desk clerk Robin Oldenberg, “our bookings have gone through the roof.”

The dark doings on Twin Peaks find little reflection in placid Snoqualmie, according to police chief Don Isley. “In the six years I’ve been chief,” he said, “we’ve never had a single murder.”  

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, ‘TV WEEK’ FOR MAY 6-12, 1990 | PAGE 49

On page 49 of “TV Week,” you will find the brief synopsis for Twin Peaks episode 1.005 which aired on May 10, 1990:

Truman (Michael Ontkean) and Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) discover a macabre scene in the woods; Hank Jennings gets out of prison; Audrey goes to work for her father.

Download high-resolution images of this magazine from my Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aloha75/albums/72177720336469474