The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 321

CHRONICLE TELEVISION CRITIC A Landmark in TV Drama 1 1 ments, or even the usual batch of telegraphed clues. Tonight's episode ends the mystery expanding, and with Twin Peaks shrouded in an almost supernatural sense of malevolence. Lynch wraps the show in stylish stitching with his production elements an effectively eclectic score that alternates between pure creepiness and blue jazz, and a camera technique that's far more cinematic than television's usual boxy approach. He throws dozens of shades of red into the settings. He runs his camera languidly down a telephone cord.

He sets up a long tracking shot of an empty high school hallway to accompany the principal's announcement on the intercom that the girl has been murdered. He focuses on a traffic light swinging over an empty intersection at night Some of it is a bit too precious, but overall it works. The shots serve to tell us that some unseen force has permeated Twin Peaks, and you can be sure it's ugly. If you like your television quick, tidy and rational, "Twin Peaks" isn't for you. But the arrival of "Twin Peaks" on ABC is an event that will be remembered and discussed for years.

It's a wholly original departure and, just possibly, a foothold for auteur television that comes from someplace besides the network cookie cutter. "Twin Peaks" moves to its regular quarters on Thursday, when it'll occupy the 9 to 10 p.m. time slot opposite the midsection of NBC's strongest night. ABC has contracted for seven episodes besides tonight's movie-length premiere, and says Lynch, the executive producer with Frost, will direct one of those remaining seven. Whether the show makes the fall schedule depends, as always, on the ratings.

show of the 1990s or the last dark movie of the 1940s. Either way, it's all that you've heard it is smokily mysterious, sardonically fun ny, iconoclastic, self-consciously brilliant and utterly hypnotic. ABC signals its conviction that "Twin Peaks" is something special by airing the premiere as a two-hour movie (9 tonight, Channels 7, 11, 13) with limited commercial interruptions. After toying with the idea of eliminating commercials altogether from the premiere, ABC settled on 11 commercial minutes instead of the usual 14. 'Twin Peaks" hits a television landscape that neatly divides among episodic dramas, soap operas, situation comedies, mysteries and action-adventure shows, and defies categorization.

Its closest cousin is "Blue Velvet," the 1986 film in which director David Lynch peeked beneath the surface of an American town and found a kinky strain of evil. Lynch co-created "Twin Peaks" with Mark Frost Street and directs tonight's first episode, and he returns immediately to the same theme. He gives us Lake Wobegon as seen by the Brothers Grimm. Twin Peaks is a lumber mill town somewhere in the scenic Northwest (the show is filmed largely in Washington state). It's television's most pristine setting.

"Here in Twin Peaks, health and industry go hand in hand," local promoter Benjamin Home (Richard Beymer) assures a gaggle of prospective real estate investors from Norway. But the town is something less than healthy. One morning the corpse of a high school beauty queen is found along a rocky shoreline. The body is nude and TV WEEKAPRIl Kyle MacLachlan wrapped in plastic sheeting. Sheriff Harry S.

Truman (Michael Ontkean) arrives with a deputy who begins boo-hooing while he takes photos of the girl's corpse. "Is this going to happen every damn time?" asks the sheriff. It's a Joke thrown out on a grisly scene, and it's not Lynch's last shot at macabre humor. "Twin Peaks" mixes modes with an abandon that's unprecedented in TV, and gets away with it. The show's murder mystery is an intriguingly thick fog, but never without the sudden cackles.

The lead character in the big cast is FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, another "Blue Velvet" carry-over), who's young, whip-smart, coolly composed and comically eccentric. He arrives in the town with an abrupt sense of command and equal enthusiasms for solving the murder, sampling the cherry pie at a nearby roadhouse and sniffing the scent of Douglas firs. Don't expect conventional denoue.