John Thorne and Craig Miller
When Twin Peaks premiered on ABC television in 1990 it was heralded as a new direction for network programming. Unique because it had distinct links to both film and television, Twin Peaks cleverly incorporated elements of both media into its visual presentation and narrative structure. Such a fusion was not totally unexpected considering the co-creators of the series.
David Lynch was primarily a filmmaker (and a rather avant-garde one at that whose controversial work rarely found mainstream success). He had never worked in television and knew nothing about the mechanics of getting a show on the air, or even of the (rigid) structure of a television screenplay.
Mark Frost, on the other hand, had limited film experience (he adapted a
Nicholas Condé novel into the screenplay for a 1987 John Schlesinger movie,
The Believers). But Frost had years of experience writing for television, most notably on Steven Bochco's innovative Hill Street Blues.
In fact, the serial structure of Hill Street Blues (and subsequent
“ensemble dramas”) established a template for the Twin Peaks narrative.
The dominant story arc in Twin Peaks concerned the investigation into the murder of a young girl, Laura Palmer, in a small town in Washington State.
Meanwhile, each episode featured numerous subplots about the town's various residents. From this basic structure, however, Lynch and Frost were able to explore territory never before seen on a network television series— from mystery and melodrama, Lynch and Frost cleverly slipped into the surreal and abstract (introducing the demonic character of "Bob" and the existence of alternate worlds known as the Black and White Lodges).
The unusual story elements of Twin Peaks made the show difficult to categorize. It seemed to be a mix of different program types—a deliberate effort on the part of Mark Frost who designed Twin Peaks so that it would

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 2 resist labeling. Before the show aired, he described it as "a moody, dark soap opera murder-mystery, set in a fictional town in the Northwest, with an ensemble cast and an edge." (Pond, “Naked” 54)
Lynch envisioned a series that would begin with the mystery of a young girl's murder, then shift focus to the lives of the other people in town as the murder mystery receded into the background. For Lynch, Twin Peaks wasn’t “about” anything in particular; rather, the show was a unique place— a landscape of mood, style, and emotional resonance. Accordingly, Lynch explained, “I guess what made Twin Peaks Twin Peaks is hard to talk about.
I don't think we even knew what it was." (Lynch on Lynch 158)
The fact that such an unusual show found a home on ABC Television speaks to the desperate nature of the three major American networks during the latter part of the nineteen eighties. All three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) had been steadily losing market share to competing media outlets, namely cable television, home video, and the emerging Fox television network.
Attempting to regain this lost audience, the networks experimented with strikingly different program types and styles, an approach entirely unheard of a decade earlier, when safe, broad appeal programming was the norm.
Initially, reviewers and audience alike embraced Twin Peaks. TV critics, so used to mundane prime time programming, hyperbolically hailed Twin
Peaks as a "masterpiece," a "triumph," a "miracle," and as the series that would "change TV." When the two-hour Twin Peaks pilot premiered on April
8, 1990, it drew 33% of the viewing audience—the highest rated TV movie of the season.
But it didn't last. The promise of continued high ratings never materialized. Twin Peaks’ audience never grew—it declined. Steadily.
Although the show continued to experiment, to eschew the formulaic conventions of prime-time drama, the audience continued to flee. As quickly and enthusiastically as the public had embraced the show, they became

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 3 disillusioned with it. Twin Peaks may have been new and different, but despite complaints to the contrary, many viewers expected the series to conform to the rules of the medium. These viewers also expected decipherable storylines and predictable characters. Twin Peaks delivered none of this, and many viewers moved on. In the end, little more than a year after its premiere, Twin Peaks was canceled.
Twin Peaks: Subverting the Norms
In an analysis of the narrative structure of Hill Street Blues, Caren
Deming observed that the series text insisted "the audience engage in more conscious efforts to fill in and to comprehend the narrative" (17). Twin
Peaks, which evolved out of Hill Street Blues’ complicated narrative structure, made even greater demands. Twin Peaks’ audience was expected to adjust to many innovative, rarely seen narrative and stylistic techniques.
For example, critical plot information often appeared in the background of scenes, or in snippets of dialogue, or in dream images. Expository dialogue was rare (although Agent Cooper's recorded messages to his unseen assistant, Diane, often helped recount story information). Twin Peaks’ serial nature required viewers to be aware of story events, and to recognize characters, from past episodes—a job made more challenging because of the show’s huge cast and numerous plotlines. What’s more, Twin Peaks, unlike most serial television series, did little to recount its backstory from episode to episode; viewers were required to remember all manner of esoteric plot detail. In short, Twin Peaks forced its audience to watch closely. It was not a show for the casual viewer who might be distracted by other factors in his or her viewing environment. The entire program—from opening to closing credits—demanded undivided attention.
What’s more, Twin Peaks did not fit neatly into one particular genre category. At first it appeared to be a standard mystery with soap opera

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 4 overtones. But soon the show took on a decidedly supernatural flavor. As the series progressed, the supernatural became more pronounced. Unearthly beings and paranormal settings became regular features in the complex and challenging storyline.
The use of such supernatural devices allowed the creators to explore larger themes such as good versus evil, duality, and the conflict between free will and predetermined destiny. But the incorporation of the supernatural and the horrific into what was ostensibly a mainstream show was unusual. Audience expectation was confounded—the series didn't seem to be following the implicit rules of prime-time narrative.
Another unusual aspect of the series was the way Twin Peaks looked and sounded, which was decidedly different from anything else on TV at the time. For one thing, Twin Peaks took a new approach to incidental music.
Until Twin Peaks, dramatic television programming had always relied on soundtracks to help alert viewers to specific kinds of plot information.
Television narratives cued viewers through non-diegetic music (i.e., music that is not part of the fictional world) which was "far more commentative, far more likely to identify—usually just before it happens—even the slightest incident to the savvy listener" (Altman 577). Twin Peaks turned this convention on its head. The series' moody, haunting melodies functioned as more than simple cues: they provided Twin Peaks with a sense of strangeness and uncertainty. Music didn't merely complement the images on screen, nor merely punctuate the narrative with specific and limited meaning, it became as much a part of the show as the visuals. The audience, used to television where music signaled important narrative events, was sometimes left confused. Without the cueing guidelines of nondiegetic music they were often forced to assign their own meanings to what they saw on screen.

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 5
Twin Peaks brought a number of other filmic conventions to television.
Unburdened by static close-ups and simplistic, routine editing, the series exulted in wider shots, framed to show more characters and greater scenographic space (recall Agent Cooper's rock-throwing exercise in the woods, or Laura Palmer's funeral). The show also spent more time allowing scenes to unfold. In a medium where scene duration is measured in mere seconds, Twin Peaks expanded the length of many critical (and not so critical) sequences: the infamous opening scene of Episode 2001, 1 in which an old room-service waiter makes a long farewell to a wounded Agent
Cooper, took an excruciating 4 minutes; the murder of Madeleine Ferguson in Episode 2007 lasted an unflinching 5 minutes; and Cooper’s dream in
Episode 1002 mesmerized viewers for over 6 minutes. Rarely on television was this amount of time devoted to individual scenes.
Twin Peaks, unlike most dramatic programming, did not impose itself on the audience with blatant, unambiguous imagery. With Twin Peaks, the audience could never be sure of the importance (or lack of importance) of what appeared on screen. The series often crowded its scenes with cryptic or contradictory information; the images on screen were rich with data, but the importance of this data was never explicated. The visuals stood on their own, and viewers were expected to process what they saw, to sift out extraneous information, to determine and focus on what was vital in each shot. Twin Peaks did not shepherd its audience. As a result, the show's unusual stylistic conventions unsettled those casual viewers who expected television programs to operate in a specific, easily understandable way.
Just as almost every stylistic feature of Twin Peaks worked contrary to the rules of television, so did the show's story content. From the beginning,
Twin Peaks was about murder. The death of Laura Palmer was the critical event that set all the stories and subplots in motion. But Laura, and her murder, became more than just an instigating plot point—Laura Palmer,

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 6 even in death, became one of the narrative's most critical, vibrant characters.
Television programs usually establish an emotional distance between audience and victim. Police and detective series are about the investigators and their reaction to crime, rather than about the victim. Viewers become involved with how the protagonist is reacting to the crime and how he takes actions to solve it; the victim is a mere functional piece of the story that permits the detective/investigator to take center stage in the narrative.
Twin Peaks started this way; the murder of Laura Palmer appeared to be a plot contrivance that allowed the story to focus on Cooper, Truman and the other residents of the town. But as the series progressed, it delicately shifted Laura Palmer from story-object to story-subject. (In his essay,
“David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace argues that Lynch didn't attempt this shift until the feature film, Fire Walk With Me. But while the film provides a more robust, explicit transformation of Laura, this same transformation had already subtly started in the series.) After only a few episodes, Twin Peaks became as much about Laura as it was about those around her.
The details of Laura's violent death at the end of Episode 2001 (the second season premiere) provided viewers with an affective connection to the suffering Laura endured. But this suffering was eclipsed by the pain endured by Laura's cousin, Madeleine Ferguson, when she was killed six episodes later. The explicit scene depicting Madeleine's death at the hands of
Bob/Leland was a televisual slap in the face. Viewers were subjected to horrific, unprecedented violence toward a character for whom they had grown to care. What's more, because Madeleine and Laura were played by the same actress (Sheryl Lee), Madeleine functioned as a surrogate Laura— the horror of whose earlier, off-screen, murder was now made manifest.

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 7
The trauma for the viewer was magnified when they learned that
Leland Palmer—Laura's father—was the murderer. The brutality of the scene had been compounded by incestuous sex (viewers had long been aware that
Laura's assailant had sexually abused her before killing her). Twin Peaks was now unflinchingly depicting horrific visuals and taboo subject matter. This was tough material to absorb, even for Twin Peaks fans. For the casual viewer, such material may have been too much to take.
Twin Peaks had lured viewers into a superficial prime-time facade and then surprised them with uncomfortable, unsettling images and content.
Warren Goldstein echoed the thoughts of many viewers when he wrote,
"Lynch had seduced me into his forbidden world. And now it's the morning after and I'm ashamed. If taboo sex and violence with classy background music add up to a vision, I'll pass" (742).
So, both the style and content of Twin Peaks made many viewers uncomfortable. This reason, among all others, may explain the show's failure to succeed as a mass entertainment. Twin Peaks—thematically similar to
Lynch's previous films—discomforted its audience. As David Foster Wallace observed about Lynch's work, "the real problem a lot of us cinéastes have with Lynch is that we find his truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable" (203). An audience at home in their living rooms or snug in their beds especially did not want to be made uncomfortable. For them, television had no place being so blatant and raw. Twin Peaks, with its demanding narrative and disturbing content, was a turn-off. Literally.
Cooper’s Dream: The Subjective Nature of Twin Peaks
As we've already discussed, because Twin Peaks was on network television (the same network, in fact, which broadcast such predictable and formulaic fare as MacGyver, thirtysomething, and Father Dowling Mysteries)

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 8 there was an implicit promise that the show would obey the rules of television drama: plotlines would achieve neat, satisfactory closure, characters would act predictably, and, of course, the story would make sense.
For the story to make sense, all the vital clues gathered by Cooper et
al. had to point toward the killer. Viewers expected that when the Laura
Palmer mystery finally reached conclusion there would be simple, neat closure to the story.
In the beginning, David Lynch and Mark Frost were explicitly telling a murder-mystery story. It was the mystery that gave the original seven episodes their narrative momentum; Twin Peaks’ first season was inexorably moving toward revealing the killer. Viewers paid careful attention to clues each week expecting a satisfying, logical conclusion.
2
No viewer, however, could know, so early into Twin Peaks’ run, that the series wasn't playing by the rules. They couldn't know that scenes which seemed important and meaningful on the surface were often only the results of abstract, experimental filmmaking. A perfect example of such a scene was
Cooper's dream from Episode 1002. The sequence is one of Twin Peaks’ most memorable, artistic moments. Directed by Lynch, the dream sequence is powerful, unsettling, and hypnotic. It is also positioned as crucial to the narrative: It purports to reveal meaningful clues toward the identity of
Laura's killer.
In his dream, Cooper sees an image of Mike, the One-Armed Man, who reveals otherworldly information about himself and Bob. Bob appears and promises to kill again. The dream shifts to a place known as the Red Room.
There, a noticeably aged Cooper sits across from a little man who speaks oddly, and his cousin who "looks almost exactly like Laura Palmer." Both the little man and "Laura" utter cryptic comments such as, "That gum you like is going to come back in style" and "Sometimes my arms bend back." As the

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 9 little man dances, "Laura" whispers something in Cooper's ear. Cooper is jolted from sleep. He calls Sheriff Truman and announces he knows who killed Laura Palmer. The next morning Cooper has forgotten the killer's identity, but he believes his dream holds all the necessary clues to solve the puzzle.
Cooper's explicit comment, and the dream scene's masterful, gamelike structure, clearly indicated that the mystery could be solved by piecing together the clues from the dream. Viewers of Twin Peaks, still believing that the series obeyed the rules of television drama, expected the dream to have specific meaning—to be the crucial key to the puzzle. Many viewers spent weeks parsing each line of dialogue in order to deduce meaning. They believed that proper analysis and interpretation of the dream would lead to revelation.
What they didn't know—what they couldn't know—was that the dream sequence was pure visual poetry on Lynch's part, an almost ad-libbed sequence developed only to provide an ending to the pilot for its overseas release as a stand-alone movie. This "European ending" originally had little connection with the Twin Peaks story; it was something Lynch had created almost at the last minute of filming. In describing the creation of the alternate ending, Lynch said he was "just winging stuff for the ending we had to do," and that "nothing was really that thought out" (Lynch on Lynch
165).
The European ending was never intended to be part of the pilot as aired. Later, when production began on the first season's weekly episodes, much of the European ending was incorporated into the final segment of
Episode 1002 as Cooper's dream, effectively becoming an essential element of the story. But because Lynch is the kind of filmmaker who has an intuitive approach to filmmaking, one where he "frees himself to receive ideas, images and impulses . . . during the directing process" (Nochimson 17), the

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 10 dream sequence was never designed to mesh precisely with the rest of the narrative. According to Lynch, the European ending "may or may not relate to anything else" (Lynch on Lynch 165).
Cooper's dream sequence is a good example of how the series, as a whole, operated under its own highly subjective logic. Those viewers who attempted to impose a formal structure on the series, to create some unified theory in order to reconcile Twin Peaks’ many disparate, dream-like components, were attempting an impossible task.
Why Twin Peaks Failed to Change Television
Twin Peaks worked in an abstract, arbitrary manner, and most viewers were unaccustomed to such unconventional television. They expected the show to supply all the answers, not realizing that Twin Peaks was offering viewers an opportunity to supply their own. Twin Peaks was designed for those viewers who "presumed to relish or at least respect the kind of challenge posed" (Chisholm 391) by a narrative. This was exactly the kind of viewer Mark Frost had in mind when developing the series, the kind of audience who watches television in order to engage their minds, rather than disengage them. Twin Peaks was one of the "occasional television productions . . . designed to appeal to viewers who enjoy a challenge to their sense-making abilities" (Chisholm 390).
Frost deliberately (and Lynch intuitively) designed Twin Peaks to be a subjective experience for viewers—one that would allow them to develop their own interpretation of the text, to supply their own meaning to what they heard and saw. The fact that Twin Peaks attempted the ambitious task of throwing off the shackles of passivity made the series an artistic success.
The show proved that television was capable of much more than leastcommon-denominator content. Unfortunately, Twin Peaks’ appeal was limited to a comparatively small audience. For the series to have succeeded

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 11 on a national network, it would have had to appeal to a much larger group of viewers.
The business of television—to sell audiences to advertisers—is not conducive to ambiguous, challenging, or discomforting content. If Lynch and
Frost had hoped to succeed with their subversive, subjective series, they had set for themselves a daunting task.
As a filmmaker, Lynch was used to expressing himself in certain ways with a minimum of interference. Working on television, Lynch had to contend with the dynamics of a different medium. In the television business, the quality or merits of a series are secondary considerations to a network. Their main objective is to appeal to the widest audience possible so as to sell commercial time to advertisers at premium prices. This is the primary rule of the business, but Lynch, an artist who rarely had to contend with mainstream commercial considerations, 3 was unschooled in the workings of the medium. His naïveté is revealed in comments he made about commercials interrupting program content: "They break up the show, and people have gotten used to these little twelve-minute segments, then a commercial, a twelve-minute segment, then another commercial. And the commercials are very, very loud so people just 'mute' them anyway. I would turn the whole thing off! What are they doing to everything? They're ruining everything with this! I don't know how anything can work when they're so destructive" (Lynch on Lynch 175).
What's more, the failure of Twin Peaks to draw a lasting, large audience was, to Lynch, the result of flawed system based on Nielsen ratings. He saw the system as arbitrary, "but it works for the advertisers, it works for the executives, and so they keep it in place like precious, valuable treasure. But the whole thing is based on absurdity" (Lynch on Lynch 183).
Such quotes reveal Lynch to be naïve about the dynamics of the television

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 12 business. He didn't understand that television is never about content (the artistic quality of a show)—it's only about audience.
Broadcast television proved to be an inferior medium for Lynch, one that frustrated and thwarted him. Many have interpreted the opening sequence of the Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk With Me, in which a lead pipe smashes into a television set, as a clear statement about Lynch's feeling toward the medium. Although Lynch has produced more programming for television since Twin Peaks (including the pilot episode for the ill-fated and aborted Mulholland Drive—another weekly serial Lynch had hoped to air on
ABC 4 ), it's unlikely he will ever be completely comfortable working in such a finicky and confining environment. Television simply does not allow for the fullness of Lynch’s artistic expression.
When Mark Frost started work on Twin Peaks, he knew the medium as well as anyone. An accomplished television writer who, as previously noted, had written for the acclaimed Hill Street Blues, Frost understood the economics of the industry and the limitations of the medium. Nevertheless,
Frost set high goals for the series. He intended it to be "very subversive to the medium . . . a show that you had to pay attention to, that you couldn't watch passively" (Miller and Thorne, “Frost Interview” 3). Frost wanted to create a program that undermined television conventions—and audience expectations.
Perhaps Frost felt Twin Peaks had a good chance for success given the desperate state of the networks in the late eighties. But he may have overestimated the audience. The series held great appeal for a literate, cinema-savvy demographic, but for the vast majority of viewers, used to viewing television as a simple escape, the series was too cryptic and equivocal. It made demands on viewers, many of whom were unwilling to participate.

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 13
Frost also found that ABC was not as supportive as he had hoped. The network's decision to schedule Twin Peaks on Saturday nights (a night Twin
Peaks’ target demographic would not likely be home watching television), was, to Frost, "a completely inexplicable decision," and "actually willfully destructive"(Miller and Thorne, “The Mark Frost Interview” 3). This unusual scheduling reveals ABC's timidity regarding the show, a timidity that dated back to their indecision regarding the Twin Peaks pilot. Despite ABC's desire for innovative and off-beat programming, they were still hesitant to commit to a show so deviant from typical network fare.
Twin Peaks’ failure as a result of both audience and network disinterest soured Frost to television for some time after the series cancellation. Frost later seemed resigned to the economic nature of television. He observed that television programming was designed simply to "give people a really interesting, yet somehow predictable, experience within a narrow range of storytelling" (Miller and Thorne, “Interview with Mark Frost: Looking Beyond the Borders” 4).
In 1991, ABC and the other networks quickly realized that their new strategy of providing diverse or "niche" programming had failed. The networks, in attempting to imitate their cable competitors, were programming to audience fragments and specific demographics. As a result, they had even less to offer a mass audience. The 1990-1991 television season was notorious for experimental shows that now seem absurd: Cop
Rock (a musical police show), Dinosaurs (a live-action comedy about a family of dinosaurs, meant, no doubt, to cash in on the popularity of The
Simpsons), and Elvis (about the early years of Elvis Presley). Each show attempted to offer something different to audiences. None of these programs was a success.
The networks fell back and regrouped. The new strategy was not to imitate cable competitors, but to return to what the networks did best—

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 14 provide safe, comfortable, reliable programming aimed at the widest audience possible. Shows like Twin Peaks did not fit the new/old ideology.
After 1991, programming provided by ABC, CBS, and NBC was familiar fare—cop shows, domestic sit-coms, and news magazines. There were still quality shows here and there on the schedule, but even these programs—
Northern Exposure, LA Law, or Roseanne—were steeped in the formulaic conventions of the prime-time past. After Twin Peaks, no boundaries were pushed and no chances were taken on network television. The mass audience wanted—and was given—the tried and true.
This return to the unsurprising—often uninspired—network programming prompted Mark Frost to observe, "I don't think that [Twin
Peaks] changed TV one iota. No trend developed from this show, whatsoever" (Grimes, “Welcome” 33). Some might argue that Frost's words are extreme, especially in light of the many programs that followed in the wake of Twin Peaks and which, at least in part, appeared to emulate some of its characteristics. In the years since Twin Peaks many series seem inspired by, or related to, Twin Peaks, including Northern Exposure, The X-Files,
American Gothic, Murder One, and Eerie, Indiana.
And yet none of these shows broke any new ground, or moved beyond the parameters defined by Twin Peaks. If anything, these shows moved backward, becoming diluted versions of Twin Peaks. Most simply refined and tamed the Twin Peaks template, making it more palatable for a mass audience necessary for sustaining a network series.
To be sure, The X-Files and Northern Exposure and American Gothic were quality programs. But they still adhered to the formulaic conventions of prime-time drama: storylines were basic, narrative surprises few, and the overall style of each series seemed tempered by maintaining a mainstream— clearly televisual—look (despite superficial production techniques such as

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 15 extreme lighting or moody music). Put simply, these series never exceeded audience expectation.
Nor were they designed to. In her analysis of Northern Exposure,
Betsy Williams observes that the series "was almost certainly conceived as a kinder, gentler, Twin Peaks" (148). Harley Peyton, the producer of Twin
Peaks’ second season, also notes that Northern Exposure was a gentler version of Twin Peaks, proving that "you can do a show like Twin Peaks and stay on the air"(“Peyton’s Place” 7). Implicit in Peyton's statement is that
Northern Exposure succeeded because it obeyed the rules of television—it didn't surprise, and it certainly didn't disturb. In a similar comment, Shaun
Cassidy, creator of American Gothic, the show that in many ways bore the closest resemblance to Twin Peaks, contrasted the two series and noted how
American Gothic conformed to the conventions of television: "I think in [a] sense they're similar. . . . I thought Gothic was much clearer. There were questions that were unanswered, but there were a lot of questions that were answered every week. . . . There was a method to the madness" (Miller,
“Interview with Shaun Cassidy” 6).
As to challenging content, no series has yet to match Twin Peaks’ rich, enthralling themes of duality and identity, nor its unique approach to presenting open, ambiguous material. David Lynch was blunt about Twin
Peaks’ reputation: "All these rip-off things that came after Twin Peaks didn't catch one little whiff of what Twin Peaks was" (Lynch on Lynch 184).
So it's an overstatement to claim that Twin Peaks changed television.
At best, Twin Peaks nudged network programming in a particular direction, a direction taken by a hand-full of notable series. But in terms of redefining the content, structure, and style of network programming, Twin Peaks was a mere anomaly.
Why Twin Peaks Succeeded in Changing Television

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 16
Twin Peaks may not have changed the mechanics of television—
Nielsen ratings still determine hits and flops, networks still program to a mass audience, and audiences still expect simplistic, unchallenging entertainment—but the series had a lasting effect on the institution of television. Twin Peaks profoundly altered the way people perceive the medium. It showed what prime-time drama could do, and it made an indelible impact on the people who work in the television industry (network executives and television producers). It made an even greater impact on those people who analyze the industry (media critics and scholars).
Put simply, nobody has forgotten Twin Peaks. The show brought something new and invigorating to television. Since the series was broadcast, any new series, mini-series, or made-for-TV movie which was even remotely inventive has been compared to Twin Peaks. A short list includes programs such as Northern Exposure, Picket Fences, American
Gothic, Eerie Indiana, Wild Palms, Babylon 5, EZ Streets, Murder One, The
Kingdom, Nowhere Man, Strange Luck, V.R. 5, Medicine Ball, and The X-
Files.
The show's impact has moved beyond the television medium. Many types of popular entertainment have been compared to Twin Peaks, including comic book series (Strangehaven by Gary Spencer Millidge), mystery novels (The Edge of the Crazies by Jamie Harrison), and even classical music such as Wagner's The Ring (which is compared to Twin Peaks in the Deutsche Grammophon liner notes).
This constant referral to Twin Peaks proves that the series has become a pop-cultural archetype with specific connotations. Like The Twilight Zone from decades past, the term "Twin Peaks" is a label for anything quirky or off-beat.
5 And audiences understand the reference, even if they've never watched the series. Twin Peaks has become a resonant cultural artifact—a term recognizable as more than just the title of a television show.

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 17
References to Twin Peaks have popped up all over the mainstream media. The Simpsons has twice paid homage to Twin Peaks. (In one episode, Homer Simpson watches Twin Peaks and exclaims, "Brilliant. I have absolutely no idea what's going on.") The hit film Clueless makes a direct reference to Twin Peaks. Even reporters in Bosnia nicknamed the city of Pale
"Twin Peaks" because of the "spooky" aura of the place. Twin Peaks has transcended its medium; the show that was, itself, difficult to label, has become a label.
Twin Peaks seared itself into the public's consciousness. Just as it made an enduring impact on the popular media, it also stirred the minds of the academic community. Few series provide so much rich narrative and discursive material on which to study. The content and the format of Twin
Peaks has been deconstructed, re-interpreted, and subjected to various forms of analyses over the years. And because Twin Peaks has not faded from public memory, more analyses continue to be written.
Twin Peaks may not have changed what audiences see on television, but it did change the way many viewers perceive television. To many, Twin
Peaks legitimized television; it proved that the medium could be as challenging as any other art form—that complex, rich, meaningful art could find a home in the culture's most pervasive mass medium. And while television has since shied away from the strange territory occupied by Twin
Peaks, viewers (and media observers) know such territory is accessible, and that possibility exists of going there again. If Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle holds true—that by observing something, we change it—then perhaps Twin Peaks has succeeded, however slightly, in changing television.
Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror is the second book of essays solely devoted to studying the various aspects of Twin Peaks. The first, Full of
Secrets was published in 1995 and collected most of the academic writing in existence at the time about Twin Peaks. Since then, the journal

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 18
Literature/Film Quarterly has devoted an entire issue to Twin Peaks, and many analyses of the series have appeared in the pages of Wrapped in
Plastic, a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the study of David Lynch and
Twin Peaks. Many of the essential, instructive pieces from these journals, as well as others, are collected in this book for the first time. With Full of
Secrets and Twin Peaks Revisited, students and enthusiasts can now conveniently access much of the important writing about Twin Peaks from the past ten years.

Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror 19
Notes
1 Throughout the book, we have used a now accepted format for numbering episodes in which episodes from the first season begin with 10 and the second with 20, followed by the number of the particular episode.
2 It seems impossible to reconcile the narrative direction of Twin Peaks’ first season with David Lynch's claim that he and Frost were not planning to reveal the identity of the murderer for a long time. It is possible that Lynch and Frost did not expect the series to catch on so enthusiastically with the public; they may have planned the series to be only an experiment—one that would last a few short episodes and then be gone. In such a scenario, the murderer's identity might not have been important to the creators.
3 The exception is Dune, a film in which Lynch was basically a hired hand assigned to make a hit movie for his producers. Lynch's approach to filmmaking clashed with the producers' methods and is part of the reason why Dune is inferior to Lynch's other work.
4 For a blow-by-blow account of the failure of Mulholland Drive, see Tod Friend’s
“Creative Differences.”
5 A more common term is "Lynchian," which David Foster Wallace describes as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveals the former's perpetual containment in the latter" (161), but Wallace also notes that “Lynchian” is probably a word “that’s definable only ostensively—i.e. we know it when we see it” (161).