10. Twin Peaks
Before television was cinema and everything was Lynchian, we had Twin Peaks, the original slice of all-American horror. The genius of David Lynch really needs no introduction at this point, but there's something so cool about him turning to television to make his masterpiece, especially at a time when it was still seen as an inferior medium to film. Twin Peaks is the perfect culmination of everything that people love about David Lynch, from the dark dreamy surrealism of his experimental work to his fascination with the deceptive quirkiness of small town America, and it says a lot that more than 30 years after it premiered, people are still going back and pondering its mysteries
It's a show that starts by posing a fairly straightforward question- who killed Laura Palmer?- before drifting slowly and gleefully into Lynch, as well as co-creator Mark Frost's nightmare realm and solidifying itself as a truly singular work of horror. See, the mystery here doesn't matter, not really anyway- the answer comes halfway through the second season and the show just carries on following the goings on of the townspeople- but the real thrill of Twin Peaks come from the questions that arise without you even realising that the show is asking them. Who is this dancing man in a red suit? Who or what is BOB? What does any of it mean? In many ways, it's a show about the horror of looking closer, of investigating too deeply and uncovering a larger insidious plot that you were never meant to see
This is emphasized so well by the show's atmosphere. You feel that cozy, nostalgic sheen? Yeah, that's just a mask for some of the most horrifying ideas ever put to television. For all of the quirky warmth and the spacey riffs on old soap operas, Twin Peaks ultimately falls right back into Lynch's trademark style of recreating nightmares. It deliberately defies logic to get the viewer to focus on what really matters: the feeling of it all. The inescapable dread, the chaotic cruelty, the searing sadness of an irreversible tragedy. I know this is a list about TV shows, but I'd also be remiss if I didn't use this as an opportunity to mention how fucking horrifying Fire Walk With Me is. It's as bleak and disturbing as it gets, and it perfectly sums up how deeply tragic the Laura Palmer story is too. In exploring the fallout of her death, David Lynch poses a highly disturbing question: what can you do when it's too late to save someone who was so clearly going through a crisis? For a show that deals in dreamy abstraction, the answers to this are played devastatingly straight
Not that it's hopeless, either. Peaks is deeply disturbing TV but Lynch keeps a certain sort of optimism too. BOB may be the sum of all evil, but in pushing back against his sinister plot, Kyle MacLachlan's incomparable Dale Cooper must be doing something right. The show also gets into fascinating, nearly fairy-tale style ideas of Laura Palmer as the good that rises to challenge BOB's endless evil, and this is brought to life in the beautiful and deeply confusing eighth episode of the show's third season, a self-contained art film about the birth of cruelty and the golden orb of human goodness sent to combat it. The show is dark but it's far from cynical, and although the warm comes from unorthodox places, it's always there to convince us that, although the end is coming, at least we're not alone
And then there's The Return. Not an 18 hour film like some claim, but a victory lap of TV perfection that saw David Lynch come back to everything we knew and loved, only to break it afresh and deliver an utterly singular experience that's actually kind of hard to sum up in words. Where most pop-cultural revisits are content to recycle nostalgia and call it a day, Lynch denied his audience what they wanted and doubled down on his strangest trademarks to give them what they needed. There was no fanservice, no references for old-times sake, and barely any love for the past. Instead, The Return was the rare late-stage sequel that actually felt like it was moving forward, presenting a strange tale-of-two-Coops and gradually introducing the old guard in ways that were unexpected and deeply affecting. Audrey's fate in particular chills me to my core, a bold and disturbing send-off to a fan favourite that few shows would dare to replicate. Even after all those years, there was nothing quite like Twin Peaks, not even, well, Twin Peaks
Speaking of, few shows on this list are as influential; pick a show from the last 30 years and there's a fair chance it's making some sort of nod to Lynch's opus, from the focus on style that redefined what TV could be to the instantly iconic characters who recur time and time again. My personal favourites include Gordon Cole (Lynch's self-insert character who ends up solving most of its later mysteries), Diane (it takes a while to actually meet her but trust me it's worth the wait), and of course Coop himself, TV's greatest hero no question. They're central to the style of this show, an oft-imitated but impossible to fully mimic blend of the hokey and the deeply disturbing. It's the show that Riverdale so desperately wants to be, but accept no substitute: there is only one Twin Peaks
It's perfect TV, the kind of abstract, long-form storytelling that could only exist on television. That's why I continue to find it so ridiculous when people insist it's cinema, because it invalidates the medium-defining magic act and Lynch, Frost and the rest of the team have pulled off here. And while the future is uncertain- no one has ruled out returning to the Black Lodge- it's hard to think of a better ending than part 18 of The Return. It's the perfect bow on the story because it takes the neat answers of the previous episode and blows it totally open with a soul-destroying, mind-scrambling, primal scream of a woman doomed to an ambiguous fate. As far as endings go, it's hard to top that. Damn fine television indeed
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