With a quirky mixture of murder mystery, soap opera, film noir, and the avant-garde, Twin Peaks rewrote the formula for prime-time television drama in the early 1990s. Created by American filmmaker David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway), Twin Peaks was a character-driven show, sporting a cast of more than one hundred, and used intricately interwoven subplots to keep viewers tuned in. This unconventional epic revolves around the murder of Laura Palmer, small-town beauty queen, and the investigating FBI agent whose dreams and quasi-Buddhist methods reveal the Black Lodge, a surreal waiting room inhabited by the personification of pure evil known only as BOB. Twin Peaks was canceled in 1991 after only twenty-nine episodes.

Further Reading:

Chion, Michel. David Lynch. London, British Film Institute, 1995.

Lynch, Jennifer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1990.