Logs, Lunatics and David Lynch

Twin Peaks may have premiered in 1990, but it was 2014 when I found myself ranting about the laborious twisty writing of Pretty Little Liars – complaining that they always ended the season without the reveal, and kept you watching for another season to find out the answer – and my dad said, “That’s probably because of Twin Peaks.” The phrase ‘genre-defining’ is banded about a lot in discussions about television and film, but it’s perhaps nowhere more applicable than to the way that David Lynch’s Twin Peaks changed the landscape for longform television dramas. It was brave and wide in scope, it was unafraid to be strange and affronting and, most notably, it was comfortable in leaving the audience without the answers they had waited all season for. And that made all the difference.

It’s torturous to write about Twin Peaks without filling this page with emphatic explanations of the show’s most impactful and frightening spoilery moments, but for anyone reading who has not yet seen the show, I will spare as much as humanly possible to protect your future enjoyment/puzzlement.

Needless to say, and as my dad went on to tell me, Twin Peaks follows FBI agent Dale Cooper as he attempts to solve the murder of small-town girl Laura Palmer. What follows is a surreal and psychological narrative arc that spans across metaphysical realms, dreamscapes and the unassuming locale of Twin Peaks, and eventually lands at one of the most terrifying killer reveals in crime drama history – but not until its second season.

When the shocking finale of season one aired, it struck countless scandalous narrative beats, but left several questions unanswered in a move that left contemporary audiences furiously hooked. Ken Tucker wrote at the time, for Entertainment Weekly, “Are you one of those who felt ripped off by the final episode of the most exciting new show of the year?… that the murderer of Laura Palmer was never revealed… Well, pour a cup of strong black coffee and join the club. At the same time, it’s a good kind of annoyance, isn’t it? How pleasurable it is to really care about a TV series, to the point of (national) obsession.”

And obsessed they were, as 19.1 million US viewers tuned in months later for the premiere of season two. Though ratings dwindled towards the show’s eventual cancellation, something had shifted for the television industry, and for the way fandom worked. And though fourteen-year-old Aaron connecting strings on a pinboard to solve Pretty Little Liars (not a joke, very much did that) did not know they were acting in the shadow of a legacy of television thrillers sparked by the mind of David Lynch, they’d soon come to understand. I watched Twin Peaks for the first time that year and, like the audiences before me almost two decades prior, I was hooked.

Its format was not the only way in which it was revolutionary too. The show’s hypnotic use of the surreal and the paranormal saw it pushing a genre box that had previously felt quite rigid. It’s fair to say that shows like Lost or the more recent, and personal favourite of mine, Yellowjackets wouldn’t have seen the cult success they have without the elements they learned from Lynch. In one television show, he’d managed to prove that you can produce something soapy, human and understated whilst also exploring the sorts of darkness and abstractness usually saved for arthouse cinema. There’s so much light in Twin Peaks that it brings you to tears of laughter and yet, the show contains one of the only episodes of television that I have ever had to switch off because it’s so genuinely unsettling. There’s a reason the show has had its staying power, and there’s a reason we’re all still yapping about it in 2025.

But Aaron, why are you yapping about it on the blog right now? Well, I’m trying to give you fair warning – because if you listen to me right now, you’ve got just about enough time to binge the whole show and then attend Hyde Park Picture House’s screening My Log has Something to Tell You: Three Episodes from Twin Peaks on Sun 3 August 2025, as part of their season David Lynch: Between Two Worlds. Three specially selected episode from across the show’s various seasons, plus a discussion afterwards hosted by The Evolution of Horror, an exploratory podcast unpicking the titans of the genre. Or don’t listen to me! That’s fine. Just don’t blame me when the log starts telling you to book a ticket instead…