Stephen King Credited A David Lynch Classic For CBS Greenlighting His TV Series Golden Years

The Log Lady and the King of Horror have more to do with each other than you might first think.

Horror author Stephen King has had TV shows based on his writing for years, HBO's "IT: Welcome to Derry" among the latest. Back in 1991, he and Josef Anderson co-wrote "Golden Years" (also known as "Stephen King's Golden Years"), a sci-fi one-season wonder that aired on CBS. The story follows an elderly janitor who gets caught up in an explosion and begins aging in reverse, making him the target of a secret government agency known as The Shop. It's a fascinating premise, but King credits the late David Lynch's seminal "Twin Peaks" for the CBS miniseries' existence.

It was harder to get horror and sci-fi shows off the ground in the early '90s than it is today: In an interview with The New York Times, King argued that the success of Lynch's surreal genre-bending show paved the way for other oddities to be greenlit, and CBS took a chance on "Golden Years" as a result.

"Up until 'Twin Peaks' came on, the only sort of continuing drama that TV understood was soap opera, 'Dallas,' 'Knots Landing,' that sort of thing," King said. "To some degree, David Lynch gave them that. But he turned the whole idea of that continuing soap opera inside out like a sock. If you think of 'Twin Peaks' as a man, it's a man in delirium, a man spouting stream-of-consciousness stuff. 'Golden Years' is like 'Twin Peaks' without the delirium."

The plot of "Golden Years" follows the protagonist, Harlan Williams (played by Keith Szarabajka), and his wife, Gina (Frances Sternhagen) as they go on the run, trying to evade forces who want to capture the janitor. According to King, the story was partly inspired by "The Fugitive," a show he grew up loving because of its forward momentum. That said, he also wanted to tell a love story; at that time, he hadn't penned one since "The Dead Zone." As King revealed in Entertainment Weekly, " I loved [the couple] almost as much as they loved each other, and I was passionately interested in knowing how things were going to turn out for them."

King also wasn't interested in writing a standard TV show. In fact, he set out to make a miniseries because he felt conventional shows hit too many lags, whereas this format was designed to prompt stories to move along at a quicker pace. Early on, though, network executives he pitched the idea to were only interested in producing a series in the vein of "The Twilight Zone," while King was keen to make an ongoing anthology show that told fresh stories with brand-new characters every season — a la "True Detective."

They eventually settled on the one-season miniseries, with a cast that also included Felicity Huffman, Stephen Root, and Margo Martindale. Ultimately, the show wasn't successful enough to convince CBS to roll with King's ongoing seasons idea, but "Golden Years" is still well worth checking out if you are a fan of his other shows and movies.