Twin Peaks first aired on the 8th of April, 1990, in an era where primetime television was mostly
dominated by safe, unambitious, and loud sitcoms and soap operas like Cheers, Full House and Dynasty with mostly standalone episodes. In the midst of this television culture of shared consciousness and predictable plot lines emerged Twin Peaks, with its elements of occultism, irony, horror, soap opera, canned narrative, Lynch’s dream logic, and a prepossessing cast diddling-about.

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David Lynch and Mark Frost transfigured how televisions tell season(s) long plots. For Twin Peaks, it was who killed the electric homecoming queen Laura Palmer. The first season, with only eight episodes, unheard of in that era, introduced the audience to a new cinematheque way of storytelling in television in the misty Northwest town of Twin Peaks.

 

The second season of Twin Peaks disclosed the central mystery early on due to studio pressures from ABC and the writers having a misunderstood sense of the Lynchian style. Even with overblown character arcs, continuous tonal shifts, and James taking up an unnecessary amount of screen space in that season, Twin Peaks still managed to set precedents for plot breakdowns and plot branching that shows even today follow well into their fourth or fifth seasons.

 

Twin Peaks, from its pilot, with so much focus on a variety of characters and subplots, developed a new structural formula that let go of the expectation that every episode was to end with a plot closure. It pioneered the idea that this experimental storytelling approach would catch on with the audience and challenge them to move around confusing plot threads involving multiple realities, psychiatric disorders, and regular detective procedurals subverted by a supernatural presence that plays important parts in the story.

 

The best part of the show is how distinct and fleshed-out each character feels, and even though there are so many of them, they never blend into each other. The inhabitants of Twin Peaks are nothing like what they seem and at the start, everyone is a suspect with underlying darkness within them. The ensemble’s character growth is done through quirks and personal intrigue elements. A big reason is that Twin Peaks spends a lot of time showing us these characters doing mundane chores unrelated to the plot. This creates tangents that, instead of repelling the viewers, draw them in. Every scene, in reality, gives the viewer a chance to take a closer look into the everyday life of an odd society.

 

Even though David Lynch only directed six episodes among the thirty episodes of the first two
seasons, his visual techniques and artistic vision are all over the show. Whereas most shows at
that time tried to minimize the presence of a camera, the Lynch-Frost productions overturned
television grammar by introducing film cinematography techniques like stage blocking to make
the angles and the movements of the actors more rigid and focused. Quite a contrast from
regular television provides the actors with large frames and more than adequate light to
maneuver around, which shows like Madmen and Breaking Bad went on to use later on. David
Lynch also innovated conventional television camera techniques, such as odd angle cameras, to
emphasize the emotional turmoils of the characters and deep depth of feel to heighten tensions
in the scene. He used a lot of empty shots to create anxiety and ambiguity about the accurate
nature of the threat. The camera work also held onto characters for much longer than necessary
to give out details on their emotional state. With all these visual techniques, Twin Peaks
transformed TV into a legitimate art form and the origin point for the golden age of television.
This show, for how dark and dense it gets, still manages to remain funny, which helps, despite its
absurdity, to remain grounded.

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Twin Peaks created its atmosphere by executing the sound design and a Lynchian motif through
the contrasting atmosphere of a façade of a regular Americana town with a lurking ominous
terror. The motif is further established by how natural entities like waterfalls, trees, or owls
hold occult menacing forces. The soundtrack, composed by Angelo Badalamenti, works as an
emotional surrogate for the audience and has both dark and light qualities. The lighter tunes
composed of finger-taping jazz and 50’s sparky guitars suggest the lover’s innocence and
romantic longing. The darker sounds rely on harmonic suspensions and discordance to register
a feeling of the supernatural unknown. Besides, the show also specifically lets motifs for
characters, feelings, and ideas hammer in significant ideas about the plot or the inhabitants of
the town. The music and the production give the town of Twin Peaks an element of
timelessness, as if it still exists somewhere in the Northwest, unfathomed by time.
Although television up to this point was mostly experienced as a disquieting activity in the
background as they do other chores, Twin Peaks required the viewers to attentively watch the
show. The show’s moral ambiguity and cloudiness, with nonexistent boundaries between
dreams, the supernatural, and reality, urge the viewers to construct their meaning and explanations.

 

​Since Twin Peaks aired, television has had drastic changes on all fronts. Even though not all of
it was due to Twin Peaks, it’s still hard to imagine the current landscape without its existence.
Almost every show since has shared some DNA with Twin Peaks or has paid tribute to it
somehow. For instance, its focus on the supernatural directly influenced legendary shows like
the X-files, Lost, and more recently, Stranger Things. Twin Peaks also formulated the concept of
how a story does not need to centre around a single protagonist but can be a larger playground
for creators to tell more complex and involved stories and for the audiences to do a
well-rounded investigation of it using intuition and logic. It also instilled confidence in TV authors
to trust instincts over meaning or create moods over logic. Yet the show’s biggest achievement is how it changed the perception towards television and how viewers interacted with it. Twin
Peaks drew the narrow line of not revealing an obvious truth, and the beauty of the show at its
centre is - it can be whatever the viewer feels about it.​

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At its core, Twin Peaks is an odyssey of good-natured FBI agent Dale Cooper, as Lynch Frost
production arguably made the single greatest TV protagonist of all time with his distinctive
mannerisms, candid love for trees, coffee, cheery pies, and the significance of Tibet and his
investigation of murder, but more so, its enduring resonance in popular culture, foreshadowing
the rise of binge-watching and how it elevated television from the idiot box to a critically
acclaimed medium of artistic storytelling.

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