If director David Lynch and co-writer/co-creator Mark Frost have proven anything in this inventive, powerful relaunch of their supernatural soap opera, it’s that they can do pretty much anything they damn well please. A show that spends minutes on end inside a nuclear explosion one week can depict lovable goofballs Deputy Andy and Lucy Brennan ordering living-room furniture the next.
But take a close a look at the Sheriff’s Department’s power couple, and you’ll see that their debate over what color chair to get (she wants beige, he wants red) reveals hidden strengths of the show and its fundamentally warm heart. After a deadpan back and forth in which the couple stomp from one computer to another, the deputy finally relents, apologizing and hugging his wife before telling her she can go ahead and go with the beige. When he returns to his desk, however, she grins and picks the red instead – a surprise he’ll no doubt cherish.
It’s not just the decision itself that makes you swoon, though. It’s the way the Lucy spins around in her office chair after clicking the “add to cart” button, as giddy in love as Amanda Seyfried’s Becky was when her meathead of a man drove her around with the top down and the sun out. [...] Is it going to sear itself in the brains of millions the way, say, “This is the water and this is the well?” did? No. But it’s the kind of attention to emotional detail that makes the show so endearing, despite its many terrors. [...]
On the show, the tiniest details are often a gateway to something bigger. The hole that the mentally disabled Johnny Horne leaves in the wall he crashes into head first; the bright red rash that Ella, a junkie played by musician Sky Ferreira, scratches obsessively; the dimly audible hum Ben Horne and his romantically interested assistant Beverly Paige continue to hear in his hotel; the squeak voice Ben’s brother Jerry believes is coming from his own foot; the electrical socket Coop, a.k.a. Dougie Jones, stares at in the Las Vegas police station where he’s been brought for questioning – all of them feel like gaps that could widen at any moment and swallow us. Whether haunting or heartwarming, this is a series can do a lot with a little.