‘Twin Peaks’ Executive Gary Levine On David Lynch’s Legacy: “He Revolutionized Television”

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Throughout his career, visionary filmmaker David Lynch, whose death was announced today at the age of 78, made 10 features and dozens of short films.

He only ever did two TV series (plus a 3-part anthology), but through one of them, Twin Peaks, his impact on the medium was profound. “Even though, he’s probably better known as a filmmaker, when he entered TV, he revolutionized it,” says Gary Levine, Senior Creative Advisor at Showtime Networks who was a development executive on both the original Twin Peaks series at ABC and its continuation at Showtime.

In summer 1988, Levine, then a senior drama executive at ABC, had just seen Lynch’s Blue Velvet a few weeks earlier when they got word that the director was coming to pitch his first television show. “I was scared to get in the room with him to tell you the truth,” Levine recalls of the meeting, which took place Aug.

25, 1988. “And of course, he’s the exact opposite of that in the room, the sweetest kind of Midwestern and aw-shucks, soft-spoken guy he could possibly be.” Lynch, joined by Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, pitched the show to then-ABC head of drama Chad Hoffman and Levine. “They had a hand-drawn poster board that showed all the characters and all the connections between the characters,” Levine says.