For pop-culture obsessed folks like us, drawing parallels between TV shows is our favourite thing. Well, more accurately, it’s the only thing. Tracing all of the stylistic and tonal qualities in this ceaseless wave of television content helps to make sense of it all.
Across genres, years, and even mediums, we reckon these shows can thank David Lynch and Mark Frost for their 90s groundbreaker. And, with Twin Peaks: The Return now out in the wild, there hasn’t been a better time to crack out the coffee and do some investigating.
Oh, Mädchen Amick’s in both, too. That counts for something, right?
Donald Glover, showrunner and overall genius behind Atlanta, quite famously said “I just always wanted to make Twin Peaks with rappers.” The resulting product does assume elements of the 90s cult hit, but probably not the ones you’d first expect.
While there are pockets of left-field surrealism dabbed around the show, it’s easier to see Twin Peaks‘ influence in terms of place. Atlanta is a show defined, literally and figuratively, by its location. Glover ruminates on the mystic weirdness of a neighbourhood fried chicken joint with the same reverence Lynch showed a pie-slinging diner; chirping insects in the summer night echo hooting owls in the cold northwest.
The show’s creator Alex Hirsch even admitted as much, saying he thought he’d “acknowledge [Twin Peaks] with some design choices that influence. I’ve been very surprised and pleased that people have picked up on it and embraced it.”
Twin Peaks initially buried its oddness within the tropes of deliberately sappy soap operas, and it allowed Lynch and Frost to slowly introduce its audience to the dark wonders underneath. In 2014, Nic Pizzolatto found an audience who’d been prepped for that crushing bleakness, so his show True Detective got right on with it.
A howling maw of a first season saw Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson riff on each other like a nihilistic, hollowed-out Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry Truman, as they investigated – you guessed it – the murder of a young woman. Once again, what could have been a solid crime procedural spiralled out into something cagey and unknown; watching the first series’ mind-expanding finale, you have to draw comparisons to Twin Peaks.
Oh, you didn’t actually think we’d omit this one, did you?
Much has been written about Lost and how its interwoven mysteries borrowed from Twin Peaks, but a few years on, what sticks out most about the genre-bending show is the community it created. Each and every week, viewers shared their theories on black clouds, polar bears, plane crashes and walking paraplegics; ask your cool auntie about her time catching Twin Peaks the first time around, and she’d probably tell you the exact same thing.
Don’t forget the only place you can catch the brand new Twin Peaks is over on Stan, so get on over there and sign up for your 30-day free trial and start the binge.