In the spring of 1994, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein were in the process of writing The Simpsons' groundbreaking two-part murder mystery when they ran into a problem. In the first part of "Who Shot Mr. Burns?," the evil Mr. Burns, who stole the Springfield Elementary's oil, is planning to block out the sun over Springfield to double nuclear power consumption. But before he can complete his plan, he's shot outside of the town hall meeting and collapses on a sundial. The list of suspects is long: Homer was pissed Mr. Burns couldn't remember his name, Moe and Barney are angry that their dingy drinking hole was closed, Grampa Simpsons is homeless after Burns' drilling destroys the retirement castle, Bart's dog Santa's Little Helper is injured from the rig, and Lisa's friend Tito Puente is laid off when Springfield Elementary loses its oil money. Everyone in town (well not Krusty the Clown, who was vacationing in Reno) has a motive. And Dr. Hibbert, pointing to the camera and says, "I couldn't possibly figure this out, can you?"
"I'll give it a shot," Chief Wiggum says, as Hibbert was actually pointing to Wiggum.
And that's where the episode ends: the first Simpsons cliffhanger in the first Simpsons whodunnit. Oakley and Weinstein had laid out all the clues, but they only had one more half-hour episode to get to the conclusion. "Basically, there had to be some sort of really cheap way for Wiggum to make a lot of progress for no reason in his investigation," Oakley said. They needed to figure out a way to solve the mystery of who shot Mr. Burns.
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"Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 1" originally aired on May 21, 1995—almost five years to the day after another whodunit captivated the TV watchers of America. By the end of its first season, Twin Peaks left the question—"Who Killed Laura Palmer?"—hanging over the summer of 1990. In eight episodes, creators David Lynch and Mike Frost had launched one of the most innovative shows in television history. "It was so baffling," said Al Jean, the current Simpsons showrunner, who was on the show's original writing team when it was airing its first episodes alongside Twin Peaks. "That was definitely one of the influential first shows that brought so many movie features to a television show. I think that that was what people responded to."
That spring of 1990, Twin Peaks and The Simpsons ushered in a new era of television, one that shaped the scope of which art can be made on the small screen. Outsiders were finally making an impact on major network television, and these voices brought a new perspective to the soap operas, sitcoms, and cartoons prevalent in the '80s.
"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.""Both Matt Groening and David Lynch come from the alterna world," Weinstein said. "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."
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Nothing like it had ever been seen on TV before. Oakley and Weinstein, who joined The Simpsons in 1992, were aspiring late night TV writers and would get together with their friends to watch Twin Peaks every week. "At that time, there were just a few networks, and so there wasn't a lot of great stuff to watch," Weinstein said. "But you could really feel it when this came on. There was just something special about it." It was during that spring of 1990, when The Simpsons and Twin Peaks were airing their first seasons simultaneously, that Oakley and Weinstein changed their career aspirations.
"The fact that TV was broadcasting these things like The Simpsons and Twin Peaks was super exciting," Oakley said. "The kind of thing that both Twin Peaks and The Simpsons did was make people like me and Josh interested in going into scripted television, rather than trying to stay in New York and get a job on David Letterman."
In that first season, while Agent Dale Cooper is trying to solve Twin Peaks' central mystery, he has a dream. There's a red room, a dancing little person who talks backwards, a few armchairs, lamps, and cryptic clues. That's the scene that stuck with Oakley and Weinstein five years later after they'd joined The Simpsons full time and were struggling to write a way for Chief Wiggum to figure out who shot Mr. Burns. "I think we had been hoping that he could actually make progress through some legitimate way, but in fact we were like, 'Well, maybe he could just have a dream,' Oakley said. "Then it became obvious that it needed to be a Twin Peaks reference."
And the Simpsons joke goes like this: While unraveling the mystery of who shot Mr. Burns, Wiggum drinks some warm cream (which Oakley tells me isn't a reference to Cooper's affinity for warm milk before bedtime—"It's just completely the opposite of drinking coffee"), and finds himself in the iconic red room from Twin Peaks. Lisa is there in place of the backward-talking little person. ("It was also a way to give Lisa some lines, because she barely had any lines in the whole episode," Oakley said) They had Yeardley Smith read the syllables backward and then played them forward again. After Lisa finally explains the clue to Wiggum like he's an idiot, the chief wakes up with his hair askew. "There's an episode where Cooper wakes up in bed and his hair is standing up in this crazy way because he wears product in his hair," Oakley said. "Wiggum's hair standing up was also a Twin Peaks reference, and I don't think anyone ever noticed that."
With his vision, Wiggum is able to go on and find Simpson DNA on Burns' suit, which, of course, turns out to be Maggie's DNA, because she's actually the shooter. (Fun fact: Weinstein said they originally had Barney as the shooter and he would actually go to jail for a period on the show, but then decided that it had to be one of the Simpsons. "Once we came up with Maggie and all the different clues relating to her, we were like, 'That's great,'" Weinstein said. "It would have been kind of depressing if it was Barney.")
"I think both Josh and I were marveling at the fact like, 'Wow, is this the first Twin Peaks reference on The Simpsons?'" Oakley said. Initially, the joke itself didn't really get noticed—it got lost in all the fervor of the Simpsons mystery. That summer, "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" became the subject of telephone and internet contests to guess the killer, as well as a TV special titled "Springfield's Most Wanted." "It's now only years later that people are still talking about Twin Peaks that it becomes memorable," Oakley said. But even five years after Twin Peaks ended, The Simpsons reference didn't seem too obscure.
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"On The Simpsons, we never worried if people would get the reference or not, because we knew a certain subset of people would, and that's kind of enough," Weinstein said. Now, Weinstein and Oakley note, it's interesting to see the joke take on new life, as streaming services and relentless Simpsons syndication gives audiences the chance to put the pieces together.
And beyond helping the writers figure out plot shortcuts, the Simpsons-Twin Peaks connection goes a little deeper. At the end of the '80s, both shows emerged as a new type of television that was responding to the popular sitcoms and soap operas of the '80s.
"Both of them were very different from what you'd seen before," said Jean. "I know there were great '80s dramas, but they were standard narratives. Twin Peaks was very surreal. The '80s had also been the rebirth of sitcoms, and the genre was really strong, so it was sort of ready for satire because of it."
Two years after "Who Shot Mr. Burns?," Jean wrote the only other Twin Peaks reference on The Simpsons. The episode, "Lisa's Sax," is a flashback to 1990, and in one scene, Homer is staring transfixed to the TV watching a man dance with a horse. "That's damn good coffee you've got here in Twin Peaks—and damn good cherry pie," a voiceover says. Homer, staring at the TV with fascination, says, "Brilliant. I have absolutely no idea what's going on."
It's exactly what Jean was feeling when he watched Twin Peaks for the first time while writing The Simpsons' first season. It's this crazy idea that the Twin Peaks writers had cool visual ideas and were just making it up as they went along. Like The Simpsons, there was no blueprint for Twin Peaks—both shows were experimental television and pushing the boundaries of what could air on major networks.
So here we are, nearly 30 years later: The Simpsons is still on TV, and Twin Peaks is returning on Showtime for a third season. And though one has been on more than 10 times longer than the other, they're equally as influential in their own right. "We're like the astronaut who gets on board the space station going near the speed of light, who doesn't age and comes back," Jean said. "Everybody's 100 years old. That's how we feel sometimes."
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