Twinsburg -- A Fantasy TV Parody

In the summer of 1990, Twin Peaks gave me a new way of seeing the world. I had passed on the series when it first aired that spring -- I wasn’t normally interested in crime dramas, and I'd never seen any of David Lynch's films. But months of nonstop chatter about it had gotten me curious, so when the pilot episode was rebroadcast in early August, I tuned in. I had never seen anything like it. I was hooked. And like many other die-hard fans, I was very disappointed when ABC put the show on hiatus the following February, after 24 episodes.

For reasons I can no longer fathom, I sat down and wrote a parody of the pilot episode before Twin Peaks returned for a few weeks in late March. As I had grown up in northeast Ohio, I called my script Twinsburg, and I incorporated elements of my own life as well as characters I'd created in my college Creative Writing classes. I found the result pretty amusing, and I shared it with my family. After the final broadcast of Twin Peaks in June 1991, I returned to my parody and planned out an eight-episode season. I'd just graduated from college and hadn't secured gainful employment, so I suppose writing the scripts provided a refuge from the stress of job-hunting.

I finished Episode 8 a few days before Halloween, but within a week I started planning out season two. I just had too many ideas to put it away yet, and chronic underemployment meant I still had too much time on my hands. So I kept writing scripts through the winter, spring, and summer of 1992. In late August, I finished Episode 19, and the very next day went to a midnight screening of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I was one of the few people who loved the movie. Inspired, I completed the cliffhanger final episode, number 20, within a week or two.

Then I was off to graduate school, and I didn't do anything more with Twinsburg. I literally put it in a drawer. In early 1995, I wrote a treatment for a grand finale "movie" inspired by Fire Walk With Me, but didn't get around to actually writing the script for it. But when Mark Frost and David Lynch announced they were returning to Twin Peaks 25 years later, I decided the time had come to dust off my parody series and share it online. As such, I finally wrote the grand finale script between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2014.

Each episode of Twinsburg tries to capture the soap-opera melodrama, quirky humor, chilling violence, and moody mystery that made Twin Peaks such a treat. The scripts are peppered with references to the original, sometimes lifting scenes directly and sometimes intentionally going the opposite way. I also tried to tighten up my overall story, as one of the main critiques of Twin Peaks is that it wandered around too much during its second season. Anyway, I played around with it, I had fun, and ultimately let the story go where it wanted to go.

I hope you enjoy Twinsburg.

-- Tony Lewis


Go to Episode 1