It's fun to revisit "Twin Peaks" with substantial enough distance from the hype, but one realizes how symbiotic the show and its fans were. Every clue was once met with both media hype and water-cooler debate and transformed into something faddish; now we see them as signposts on a deserted avenue, in particular those of us who already know the identity of Laura Palmer's killer--and are aware that "Twin Peaks" is tugged along by an increasingly uncoordinated school of red herrings.

Eleven years later, "Twin Peaks" is a far less common experience; I am no longer a Sherlock Jr., no longer a Nielsen statistic, and no longer a newcomer to the work of co-creator David Lynch. As such, I find myself lamenting the disparity between the Lynch-helmed hour(s) and everybody else's, all of which seem the product of one proficient but anonymous filmmaker. The only episode that Lynch directed besides the pilot in season one (#3, which ends with the dream sequence involving a marble-mouthed dancing dwarf (Michael Anderson) and a Laura Palmer clone (Sheryl Lee) revealing their secrets to Agent Cooper) is a mini-masterpiece of dread so idiosyncratic by comparison to the non-Lynch broadcasts (the cornpone humour, for example, feels the most sincere coming from Lynch) as to make one wish that "Twin Peaks"' creative unity had been sacrificed more often than it was.

The first season of "Twin Peaks", then, is a little weak in sum (season two is a whole 'nother ball of wax), but its highlights are blinding and not necessarily limited to David Lynch's contribution: director Tina Rathbone staged Laura Palmer's funeral with a queasy tragedy; Coop's rapport with on-screen Watson Sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) is a consistently warm delight; a string of cliff-hangers sneaks up on us in Mark Frost's ingenious, nihilistic season finale; and so on and so forth. If Lynch's episode transcends the others (it manages to incorporate the Tibetan plight into a scene that's more or less about a chalkboard in the middle of a forest), it's in good company.

Artisan's 4-disc set of "Twin Peaks: The First Season" lacks the show's feature-length pilot but contains unbelievably good transfers of the seven episodes that followed it. HiDef remasters in their original fullscreen (1.33:1) aspect ratio, they look as crisp and clean as one of Cooper's starched shirts, with colours that do not bleed or skew towards oversaturation as they do when "Twin Peaks" airs on regular television. The Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 remixes restore some much-needed LFE information to the show that was previously dampened as a means of averaging out the sound quality for TVs across the globe. Surround activity is minimal but effective and voices are anchored squarely in the centre channel. Angelo Badalamenti's themes at last haunt with CD-clarity.

The audio and video presentations are so good that I'm disinclined to pick on the weakling bonus material. The coolest addition to the discs is a succession of script notes detailing excised scenes and/or dialogue; you can either be alerted to these via a pop-up icon during a relevant juncture in the episode or read them separately among chapter listings. On average, they're more informative than the seven screen-specific commentaries, which tend to keep as many secrets buried as the show itself. The consensus seems to be that episode #4 got the best yak-track, and I'm inclined to agree: director Tim Hunter and writer Robert Engels mix their own backstory with that of "Twin Peaks" to great appeal. Michael Anderson (a.k.a. "The Little Man from Another Place") provides an audio introduction to each commentary, not to be confused with the optional words of wisdom from The Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) that precede each episode proper. (These were initially prepared for the cable outfit Bravo.)

The bulk of the extras are on Disc Four, in a section called "Tibet." Here Mark Frost is interviewed over the telephone by the two honchos behind the "Twin Peaks" fan-mag "Wrapped in Plastic". The 15-minute piece gets off to a rocky start, with conversation between the pair focusing on the World Trade Center as they prepare to dial Frost; Frost, videotaped in a lush hotel room by DVD producer Mark Rance, addresses every last one of their sycophantic queries comprehensively--'tis a shame that neither he nor Lynch participated in any of the commentaries. "Learning to Speak in the Red Room" is, at four minutes, a novelty tutorial from Anderson in which he teaches us to talk "like the voices in David Lynch's head." The 21-minute "An Introduction to David Lynch" is a retrospective from "Twin Peaks" cast and crew (minus such key players as Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn (above)) interspersed with the insights of film prof (and dadaist) Charles Ramirez-Berg.

In the charming "17 Pieces of Pie" (10 mins.), Pat Cokewell remembers supplying the production (and eventually scores of tourists) with an endless supply of pie. (Her quaint truck-stop stood in for the "R.R. Diner.") Rounding out the set, not counting its various Easter eggs, is "The Twin Peaks Directory," a tangle of extensive production notes, interactive maps linking the relationships between the residents of Twin Peaks, bios, and embarrassing testimonials ("Video Postcards") from select cast members. Packaged with a foldout Sheryl Lee interview.-Bill Chambers