10. The Small Town's Huge Population Was A Network Mandate
As the ubiquitous Welcome To Twin Peaks sign will tell you whenever it appears on screen on the show (and in various merchandise, including the soundtrack cover), the small logging town has a population of just...51,201?! Well, Frost and Lynch had originally planned for Twin Peaks to boast just 5,120 residents, which would be more in keeping with the quaint mountain town whose charm gets overturned when it turns out nearly everyone's harbouring a dark secret. 51,201 doesn't give the same sense of scale at all. And apparently the change was a decision by the network for whatever reason ABC had decided that the viewing public was starting to turn against shows set in small towns, and so demanded that the population of Twin Peaks be increased by a not insignificant amount. The perceived backlash against rural-themed shows was carried over into Twin Peaks, with ABC suggesting that suburban home owners couldnt sympathise with small industrial towns. Frost and Lynch sneakily explained away the cognitive dissonance of the clearly small and rural Twin Peaks in their Visitor's Guide to Twin Peaks, which told readers that the population was indeed 5,120, but the sign had a "typo".
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
