Twin Peaks
The pilot episode... beauty and terror.
This was hard to find for years because of rights issues. You had to get a Japanese DVD or look for someone's VHS recording until it was finally released with the Gold Box Edition DVD set in 2007. There was also an international edition of the pilot that ends differently (spoiler alert).
It still packs a punch, years later (and I've rewatched it several times). I can see how audiences and critics were disturbed and baffled by its artistic choices... the reactions to Laura Palmer's death are strangely mannered and formal, but still visceral. You find out later in the show why there seems to be more than simple grief from people in the town at the news of Laura's demise.
I don't know when the media started using the term "desensitization" to violence and horror, but Twin Peaks went against the grain by making it personal and painful where network television would fear to tread. Not all of the reactions were predictable... Audrey Horne's (Sherilyn Fenn) cheshire smile at hearing of Laura Palmer's death leads to more questions than answers, decades later.
There aren't any hints of the supernatural elements that would enter the show. To the viewing public, it would have played like an extremely odd mystery show with an "exotic" setting (the show was originally titled Northwest Passage). The pilot also contains absurdist or comedic elements amidst the growing horror... we are introduced to Nadine's obsession with curtains, Lucy and Andy, and the South Pacific-loving Dr. Jacoby.
Kyle MacLachlan looks almost too young to be an FBI agent: his cryptic, unpredictable debut goes from straight-laced Fed dictating daily expenses to the unseen Diane to schoolboy in the blink of an eye (Douglas Firs!, his delight in donuts and cherry pie). He and Joan Chen almost share the same hairstyle... he seems oddly unsuited to being a hardened crime investigator (the definition of a straight man) until you seem him focus on the case.
David Lynch had a strong influence on and wrote the lyrics for the music (along with composer Angelo Badalamenti). The mostly-jazzy musical themes are used brilliantly to develop the mood and themes of each scene, whether heavy or light, without being stylish for their own sake.
Which leads me to the brilliant cinematography. All the defining bits of Twin Peaks are there... the stoplight, the presence of the lumber mill and surrounding forests, the oddly-retro styling of clothing, cars, and decor. The camera captures the beauty of the rainforest as well as its menace. The Lynchian bits, like a shot of the ceiling fan or the dropped telephone receiver at the Palmer house, the neon lights of the roadhouse bar, are there, but not in an overly distracting way. Color composition is brilliant... each scene is clearly lighted, but with dramatic contrasts and a sense of potential movement and vitality.
The pilot's shooting began on Tuesday, February 21, 1989. Although we often think of Twin Peaks as an early-90s television phenomenon, it is very much of the 80s. Although many shows have been influenced by Twin Peaks (famously parodied on The Simpsons and elsewhere), it never spawned a wave of imitators. You'd have trouble making a Northwest Gothic murder show that wouldn't feel like a blatant ripoff.
If the creators were swinging at the fences to get a reaction, I think they succeeded. I didn't discover Twin Peaks until years later on reruns, but it has left an enduring impact on my life.
