‘The Simpsons’ Love Affair With David Lynch

Pour one (cup of coffee) out for a true cinematic genius — David Lynch has died. 

And while he’s obviously had a huge impact on the worlds of art, film, and, sometimes YouTube, for those of us who were too young to watch Twin Peaks when it came out, and waaay too young to see Blue Velvet when it played in theaters, our first taste of Lynch’s style was in a cartoon. 

In the second installment of The Simpsons’ “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” two-parter, Chief Wiggum chugs a carton of warm cream while attempting to pull an all-nighter. After immediately falling asleep, he’s transported to Twin Peaks’ red room, the extra-dimensional space full of jazz music and designer furniture. Not unlike how “The Man From Nowhere” and other supernatural entities aided Agent Cooper on the original show, Lisa provides Chief Wiggum with the clue he needs to crack the case — but only after dropping the whole backwards talking routine. 

Clearly the Simpsons staff were big fans of the show. The Twin Peaks set was faithfully reproduced in animation form, complete with that weird shadow thing floating behind the curtains.

The central mystery of “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” was inspired by Dallas’ “Who Shot J.R.?” stunt, but it also owed a debt to Twin Peaks, which teased the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer for as long as ABC would allow.

Oddly enough, years earlier, when the Television Critics Association picked Twin Peaks as its “program of the year,” co-creator Mark Frost accepted the award and joked, “I can reveal to you here tonight that Bart Simpson killed Laura Palmer.”

Twin Peaks premiered less than a year after The Simpsons, and some have argued that both shows, though tonally different, had a lot in common in terms of their ambitions. “Both Matt Groening and David Lynch come from the alterna world," Josh Weinstein told Esquire in 2017. “The Simpsons and Twin Peaks were our reactions to these crummy, hackneyed sitcoms and TV shows where it’s the same old story, told in the same old formula. I think there was a real desire on a lot of people to do something interesting. Those are certainly two of the first real alternative visions that hit some chord in the mainstream.”

Before either of them had their own TV shows, Groening and Lynch wrote alternative comics for the Los Angeles Reader. Groening, of course, created Life in Hell, and Lynch had a comic called The Angriest Dog in the World, which consisted of the same five panels, along with new words added for each installment that Lynch delivered over the phone.

Groening was an admirer of the comic, and he was sometimes the one responsible for answering Lynch’s phone calls and adding in the text. “Oh, the editor of that time got tired of it: ‘Lynch is getting away with murder, like the rest of you cartoonists!’” Groening once recalled. “Hey, it’s David Lynch. As long as he can follow this grand conceptual scheme, he should keep doing it.”

The Simpsons would parody Twin Peaks again in its ninth season, this time as a way to establish that the episode “Lisa’s Sax” was a flashback, set in the early ‘90s. While the scene spoofed the show’s confusing nature, its deep cut references to the Twin Peaks lore (the Giant and the mysterious white horse) indicated a genuine affection for Lynch and Frost’s creation.

Even if Homer has “absolutely no idea what’s going on.”