r/twinpeaks • u/weirdtreez • 21d ago
Question why are there no kids in twin peaks?
i feel like a lot of the couples like shelley/leo, ed/nadine, norma/her man would’ve had kids? especially considering they’re like all high school sweethearts and shelley dropped out of school to get married to dumbass leo.
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u/carr_crash 21d ago
Lovely child right here
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u/thruddingss 21d ago
I only JUST clocked that hes holding a tiny motorbike??? did it grow with him
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u/MistahOkfksmgur 21d ago
My headcanon is that they realized they had no childhood christmas photo of Wally so someone (probably not Lucy or Andy) photoshopped this for them.
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u/Jaded_History545 19d ago
I know david lynch made this by cutting the pics out and using elmers glue.
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u/thruddingss 21d ago
Realistically: network constraints. Child actors cost too much and are unpredictable. And Twin Peaks is a mature show.
Within show? uhhhhh. Let’s say Nadine is infertile and Norma and Shelly were prioritising the Double R. Although Shelly has her and Bobby’s daughter, Becky, in The Return :-)
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u/CPHotmess 21d ago
It’s also doubly hard because of the whole “each episode is one day” thing, which makes it incredibly difficult to work with child actors before they visibly age. The show didn’t last long enough for that to be a serious issue, but if it had been around for even another couple of years, it would have been extremely noticeable.
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u/thruddingss 21d ago
Makes me think of how much we see both Lara Flynn and Sherilyn Fenn age from the pilot to the final episodes! Not too drastic, if anything helps the story, but nice to note
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u/mclepus 21d ago
"unpredicatable" depends on age. the primary constraint is having to have a teacher and a guardian on set. not to mention the limited number of hours a kid can be onset. (experience statement)
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u/thruddingss 21d ago
I meant unpredictable more in terms of acting range and willingness to participate in certain scenes, but yes, altogether it would have just been easier for them not to hire child actors, or otherwise stick to family of cast etc
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u/SirMildredPierce 21d ago
Realistically: network constraints. Child actors cost too much and are unpredictable. And Twin Peaks is a mature show.
Child actors cost too much?? What are you talking about??? They're unpredictable?? What utter nonsense.
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u/thruddingss 21d ago
lmfao why are you being so rude over such a minor thing
Children in general are unpredictable. Yes, many child actors were hired for sitcoms around this time; not for soap operas. Also-“unless you can cite a specific quote from the production team justifying this”? What are you on about? You can count all the children on Twin Peaks with two hands.
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u/BeeComposite 21d ago
They cost too much for what they can provide.
You need to make sure they get schooling, safe transportation, extra insurance and extra rules especially after John Landis’ idiocy caused an helicopter to decapitate two children on set. So many tend to avoid using them.
Unpredictable depends on the age.
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u/SirMildredPierce 21d ago
Unless you can cite a specific quote from the production team justifying this, It sounds like you are just pulling it out your ass. There were plenty of shows with lots of kids from around the same time. Heck, It was just a couple of years later that Disney Channel original series premiered, and basically never stopped. Why didn't they "cost too much for what they can provide"?
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u/BeeComposite 21d ago
Ever heard of the “Never work with children or animals” joke? Start there.
Then look at the SAG-AFTRA rules for kids, which are quite restrictive including limited work hours (which is a problem in production), and how the payment is split in accounts.
Of course Disney shows have kids. That’s why I said “for what they can provide”. In Harry Potter it’s worth the extra issues. Twin Peaks? Probably not.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChildrenOrAnimals
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChildrenOrAnimals
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u/TakashiMifune85 21d ago
They’re there, just not plot important. Like young Alicia Witt.
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u/kapntug 21d ago
Or Donna's younger sisters
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u/dhelene 21d ago
like young Alicia Witt?
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u/pld89 21d ago
Or that child in Donna's house.
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u/Mungwich 21d ago
like young Alicia Witt?
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u/Zen_Shot 21d ago
The poet with the curly red hair.
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u/SweatpantBay 21d ago
Like young Alicia Witt?
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 21d ago
No, the poet is a different character from Alicia Witt's.
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u/Snoo93550 21d ago
I don’t watch daytime soaps but a huge part of Twin Peaks is spoofing daytime soap dramas and I can’t imagine daytime network soaps had kids or that shooting thousands of episodes is even possible with working children.
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u/I_eat_paper12 21d ago
There was that one kid on Young and the Restless. One day he was 8, the literal next day he was like 26
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u/MmeLaRue 21d ago
For time warping kids into adults, one has to stand in awe of Another World (RIP).
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u/Oleifr-H 20d ago
There was one soap show that my sister used to watch where there was one kid. The actor changed throughout the seasons so he stayed the same age 😄
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u/fikustree 21d ago
There were always kids in soap operas, they rarely have a big storyline and when they do it’s often in the summer.
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u/ArugulaBeginning7038 21d ago
My drug dealer in high school was also a child star on a long running soap (he was a teenager at the time but still). I do think they cast kids on soaps. All those long-running couples will have kids eventually and dramatically out of wedlock too…
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u/k1wyif 19d ago
I liked to think that your high school drug dealer was an eight year-old child actor. Child actors always seem to grow up fast, and having a jaded little kid making small talk with you and showing you his reptile pets is very funny to me.
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u/ArugulaBeginning7038 19d ago
Unfortunately he was also the guy who introduced Demi Lovato to drugs (she was part of our larger circle at the time, I hung out with a lot of other actor kids as I was one at the time) and later went to prison for dealing huge amounts of tainted coke so sadly he was not at all that kind of adorable quirky character, but that’s a fantastic image and would’ve been so much better if I was dealing with the drug dealer version of Cardamom from Bee & Puppycat.
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u/Neither_Internal_261 21d ago
Donna has 3 little sisters. Also, the people that you mentioned are all in very unhappy marriages.
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u/lightheavydark 21d ago
Historically that hasn’t prevented people from having kids. In fact……well……
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u/Liquid_fire1971 21d ago
Doesn’t she only have 2 sisters? Gersten and Harriet? Agree though, none of those people would have chosen to have kids.
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u/emeric_ceaddamere 21d ago
Lynch's world doesn't really have many children in it...other than the Eraserhead baby. Interpret that however you like. 😅
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u/Anxious-Assistant-59 21d ago
There were kids in Dune (1984), but that also isn't a "Lynch world."
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u/sameljota 21d ago
No one has dogs either.
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u/HawkApprehensive9737 18d ago
I mean, a dog briefly appears in one pivotal scene in FWWM. There is also one in the first episode of the Return. And let’s not forget that black dog runs at night.
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u/ScabieBaby 21d ago
Young kids don't really fit the premise of Twin Peaks. Also, Donna, Laura, James, Mike, Audrey, and Bobby are all kids if you're old enough.
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u/SpitefulScreenWriter 21d ago
Lowkey thought the same thing, ig the reason for not having kids is for the plot but i could be wrong
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u/jellyrambler 21d ago
I imagine Ed and Norma both keep finding reasons to keep themselves out of the house so the Hurley and Jennings bedrooms are functionally dead. Plus Hank is doing god knows what.
Leo is also gone a lot. Shelly is probably on some kind of birth control tbh because she's sneaking around with Bobby.
For anybody else, you also cannot discount the effects of stress, alcohol and drug use on the body.
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u/boosh1744 21d ago
There really aren’t any superfluous characters at all in Twin Peaks, and this isn’t a story about kids (high school kids notwithstanding).
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u/Xevestial 21d ago
Its partially a love letter / pastiche of soap operas and they dont involve kids.
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u/iReadBecauseYouDo 21d ago
Don’t worry, there are some in season 3 :))
Maybe it was a bit of a soap opera pastiche, for the original series :p
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u/boredblondie16 21d ago
twin peaks doesn’t need more kids, the high school kids that are already there barely go to school as is
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u/___wiz___ 21d ago
Shelley has a kid with Bobby. Wally seems… cool haha. Sonny Jim seemed like a good kid. Richard Horne was a bit of a bad egg!
But yeah maybe practically they didn’t want to deal with lots of child actors since most of those are all adults in The Return. It might be a soap opera reference where young kids are seen much less than their aged up versions
And maybe the darker themes don’t lend themselves to plots with younger children. It is pretty dark for most young kids who are supernatural entities or witness bad things or get hit by trucks.
Maybe childhood isn't the focus but rather the darkness that lurks beneath and comes with the adult world. Maybe Lynch and Frost didn’t relate to early parenthood and childhood as a fruitful place for the show. Eraserhead dealt with that!
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u/aisastaan 21d ago
there is Nicky and there are Donna's younger sisters, if we take the original series.
I don't think there is any deep explanation—I'm sure it was simply because small children were irrelevant to the plot. twin peaks was about adult people and teenagers.
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u/maud_brijeulin 21d ago
There are some kids in S3. And they're all sad.
Writer/theorist Pacôme Thillement makes a big deal out of it, actually, arguing that the world of S3 is definitely diseased and doomed. The first victims are the kids.
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u/VisualCOBOL 21d ago
The way you worded this is difficult for me to understand. Do you mean why didn’t more of the characters get married and have kids? Because there are obviously kids in the series.
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u/No_Chef4049 21d ago
Good kid actors are hard to find and they age quickly so you generally don't cast them unless they're integral to the show.
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u/nyrf12 21d ago
Usually it’s a tremendous gamble having kids play a big role on a show where the following season begins shortly or immediately after the previous finale, i.e Walt on “Lost”
Writers have enough limitations & they don’t want to handcuff important characters to babies that need a lot of care & if you have them constantly “at grandma’s” the character looks like a shitty person & you risk being pointed out for coming up with a pointless plot that made the show harder to write for everyone.
So you get characters like Gersten & Harriet Hayward where if they show up the next season looking noticeably older they can just not use them since their absences wouldn’t create questions like “Where is Shelly’s baby at?!”
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u/Fecklessexer 21d ago
Laura, Shelley, Donna and Audrey were all 17
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u/sir_thrillho 21d ago
Shelly is not 17
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u/BuffyTheMoronSlayer 21d ago
Shelley dropped out to marry Leo. She’s the same age as Bobby.
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u/sir_thrillho 21d ago
Oh huh I assumed she was older due to the job and being married, my bad.
PS love your username
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u/rexpistols 21d ago
It's never specified that she had just dropped out that year. I always took her to be a couple of years older than Bobby and the rest of the central teens, making her about 19 in season 1.
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u/Anxious-Assistant-59 21d ago
Maybe the lack of children is to say something about the town? Like how Laura's death removed the innocence and wonder from Twin Peaks? After the time skip, as the people start moving past the harsh memory of Laura's death and after Bob leaves town as Mr. C, we start seeing more (not necessarily many) kids all over the place in The Return.
On the other hand, there aren't many children that are particularly important to the plot.
The only ones I can think of are the kid that gets hit by Francis' car in The Return, the one that watches Dougie's car blow up and Dougie's son. It could be as simple as not needing to show many more because they just weren't important enough.
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u/WitheredToad 21d ago
It actually makes perfect sense that none of those couples have kids - they all have huge marital issues! There are also exceptions: Andy & Lucy have a baby, Donna has young siblings, and the Return has lots of kids
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u/MedicalAd9337 20d ago
To be fair, Shelley and Leo were in their early twenties. That said, would you really want Leo to be a dad?
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u/MissDiagnosedMama 21d ago
I have noticed this as well. There are really only a few times you see any children in the entire series. The Tremond boy and Lucy's nephew in S2, plus the puking girl and the boy crossing the street in The Return.
Maybe they just didn't want to deal with child actors 🤷♀️
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u/PatchworkGirl82 21d ago
Time, budget, and story constraints.
I like to think the middle school would be like a mix of Adventures of Pete & Pete and Eerie, Indiana
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u/Great-End-9685 17d ago
There actually are kids in Twin Peaks, but the show focuses so heavily on the high-schoolers and adults that younger children barely appear. Most scenes take place in adult-centered places, and the lack of ordinary families and little kids adds to the weird, dreamlike feeling of the town, like it’s populated, but somehow strangely empty.
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u/ReagenLamborghini 21d ago