Whether Twin Peaks will work as a continuing series remains to be seen. The second episode (co-written by Lynch but directed by Duwayne Dunham) shifts into more conventional gear as the murder investigation begins to unfold. At worst, Twin Peaks could turn into an aesthete´s version of "Who shot J.R."? At best, it will be mesmerizing.

Few filmmakers would seem less likely candidates for TV than Lynch. His first feature, Eraserhead, was a dreamlike horror story about a couple taking care of a monstrous mutant baby. Blue Velvet, his bizarre 1986 black comedy, started with a severed ear and descended into sadomasochistic horror. Trained as a painter, Lynch has written song lyrics and directed a performance piece, Industrial Symphony No.1, featuring a midget sawing wood and dozens of baby dolls lowered from the ceiling.

At 44, Lynch has a Boy Scout´s cherubic face and nice manners. His conversation is filled with wholesome jargon like "thrilling" and "cool." But eccentricities lurk just beneath the surface. He always keeps his shirt collar buttoned to the top because "I have this thing about my neck. It´s just an eerie feeling about my collarbone." For seven years he drank milkshakes every day at a Bob´s Big Boy in Los Angeles. "I´d have coffee, sometimes six cups, along with the shake, and I´d have sugar in my coffee," he says. "But then I would be pretty jazzed up, and I´d start writing down ideas. Many, many things come out of Bob´s."

Lynch, who has been divorced and is now involved with actress Isabella Rossellini, was born in Missoula, Mont. His father, a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, moved the family several time around the Pacific Northwest before settling in Washington, D.C. Lynch found high school "worthless" but put up with it, then went to art school in Boston. After a brieg sojourn in Austria, he moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

"Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me," says Lynch. "It´s the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time." He lived across the street from the city morgue, where he was fascinated by the empty body bags hung on pegs. "The bags had a big zipper, and they´d open the zipper and shoot water into the bags with big hoses. With the zipper open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like these big smiles. I called them the smiling bags of death."

He tried filmmaking as an extension of his painting. Lynch´s first work was a "film sculpture," a one-minute animated loop in which six people get sick over and over while their heads catch fire. A painter who saw it commissioned Lynch to make another animated film. Lynch bought a camera and spent two months shooting before he realized the camera was broken. "It was one long piece of blurred film," he says. "But it was the weirdest thing; I wasn´t one bit depressed."

Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and spent five years making Eraserhead. The film became a cult hit and led to his first mainstream film, The Elephant Man. Lynch´s next project, the big-budgeted sci-fi movie Dune, was a critical and commercial disaster, but Blue Velvet brought him widespread critical acclaim. A couple of aborted projects later (including a script for Steve Martin called One Saliva Bubble), Lynch is finishing a new film, Wild at Heart, starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

Lynch and his partner, former Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost, developed Twin Peaks by drawing a map of the fictional town. "We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there," says Lynch. "The the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story." The pilot was written in only nine days and shot in 23. Lynch was apprehensive about the restrictions of TV but found the experience satisfying. "I didn´t feel we compromised, and I felt good."

Will TV audiences feel just as good about the mutant soap opera he has concocted? Frost hopes the series will reach "a coalition of people who may have been fans of Hill Street, St. Elsewhere and Moonlighting, along with people who enjoyed the nighttime soaps." ABC entertainment chief Robert Iger admits the show will be a hard sell (especially in the time slot opposite Cheers on Thursday nights.) Says he: "A lot of people have said Twin Peaks is the critic´s dream. But is it the viewer´s nightmare? I would hope that the answer is that it isn´t."

Lynch seems confident that viewers will catch on. "These shows could cast a spell," he says. "It´s sort of a nutty thing, but I feel a lot of enjoyment watching the show. It pulls me into this other world that I don´t know about." Well, if he doesn´t know about it, what are we outsiders to do? Nothing but sit back and succumb to the spell.

- Reported by Denise Worrell / Los Angeles