For a decade and counting, I have given some version of this talk to every single person who's agreed to watch Twin Peaks with me, both because I'm an insufferable enthusiast and because I think it's unethical, on some level, to tell someone to watch Twin Peaks without giving them context and a few warnings first. I'm writing it out, not because I want to stop giving people this talk in-person, but because I want to share more of my giddiness about this very strange and very wonderful show.

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The first thing to know about Twin Peaks is that it is possibly, probably, the greatest artistic achievement in the history of television.

Well, parts of it are. Parts of it definitely are. The other parts... complicate matters somewhat.

Because the second thing to know about Twin Peaks is that it is an absolute goddamn disaster. It is one of the most iconic instances of network interference absolutely ruining a TV series. It is also one of the most iconic instances of a series creator more-or-less nuking his own creation—in this case, to the surprise of (and without the permission of) his co-creator. And for a long time, that's where the stories of this series ended: with Twin Peaks getting absolutely demolished by both network suits and by an idiosyncratic and temperamental artist. That has since changed, and it has changed in perhaps the weirdest way possible, but we'll get to that in due time.

The third thing to know about Twin Peaks is that it played an absolutely seminal role in the establishment of television as a serious art form. Narrative television, serial TV storytelling, more-or-less would not exist in the way it does today were it not for Twin Peaks. And while The Sopranos, which came out nearly a decade later, is generally credited for being the start of "peak television," it's fair to say that The Sopranos couldn't have existed in the form that it did without Twin Peaks coming along first. (It's also fair to say that the reason that The Sopranos turned out as timelessly that it did, in ways that mean it still outshines most TV that came after it, is that it learned lessons from Twin Peaks that few shows bothered to learn in turn from The Sopranos.)

Is it worth pointing out that, while Twin Peaks' approach to narrative storytelling was groundbreaking, it paled in comparison to its creators' original storytelling ambition? Or that it only finally realized its ambitions more than twenty-five years after its release, stunning critics and contemporary showrunners alike with just how radical its approach to storytelling was even after the rest of the world had had a quarter century to try and catch up? I mean, sure, but again: we are getting way ahead of ourselves. There's a lot to this story, and we're doing no favors by trying to rush things along.

After all, Twin Peaks didn't just pioneer a form of storytelling. It pioneered a vibe. Its influence extends far beyond its initial viewership, for all that it was a hit show on its release: among other things, its musical stylings pretty much served as the basis for Lana Del Rey's entire sound and persona, along with the indie dreampop scene of the late 00s. Its wardrobes, which fused 50s and 80s fashion sensibilities, had a formative impact on fashion in the 90s, and influenced the throwback fashion aesthetics of the mid-10s as well. Its colorful, quirky approaches to set design and character writing were imitated by a wide variety of cartoons—Gravity Falls even features a location that apes a Twin Peaks set down to the last detail. And above all, its slow, unhurried manner of storytelling, in which even tightly-plotted film noir events unfold with a sometimes-parodic patience and deliberateness, often placed more emphasis on atmosphere, ambiance, and experience, using the sheer duration of TV shows as an excuse to tell less story rather than more, and to take time lingering in mood, letting viewers sink slowly into its world.

(On the flip side, you could just-as-easily argue that some of Twin Peaks' biggest influence came down to how its ever-evolving mysteries, elaborate-and-elusive lore, and intense cliffhangers affected TV-viewing culture both online and offline. It was one of television's earliest "event shows," where every episode generated furious conversation among its viewers, as well as one of the earliest examples of a TV series having a "mythology" whose lore was eagerly compiled and debated over online. Twin Peaks debuted just as fandom and fan culture was starting to develop, and it served as an object example of just how a show could lure in new viewers by continually confounding them, raising new questions not only about its various plot points, but about the nature of the series itself.)

Twin Peaks' alumni went on to direct some of the best and most formative TV series to come in its wake. One of Mad Men's and Gilmore Girls' top directors got her start working on Twin Peaks. (Mad Men's approach to storytelling and ambiance is directly indebted to Twin Peaks', and Gilmore Girls' Stars Hollow has a warmth, a colorfulness, and a quirkiness that all come right out of Twin Peaks' playbook.) This is no coincidence: Twin Peaks taught a lot of people how, exactly, a television show has to go about telling its story, how it creates its world, how it balances different tones without them feeling entirely disconnected from one another.

And how did the people working on this show learn how to do all this? Well, mostly by horrendously fucking it all up. That's right: watch Twin Peaks, and you can watch the people who learned how to make television fumble and fail at it, scrambling to work things out on-the-fly and with precious little time to prepare or experiment or revise. Watch the accidental farce as a bunch of very talented people try, in vain, to follow the lead of an artist who pretty much everyone agrees is inimitable. And then, gloriously, watch them finally figure something out... only to have the artist in question return to set one final time, and nuke everything to kingdom come.

The experience of recommending Twin Peaks to people in 2024 is fundamentally different than it was in, say, 2014. Because it's fair to say that, at its (heh) peaks, the original run of the show had some stunning achievements—moments of artistry that television has struggled to equal, let alone surpass. But it's also hard to deny that the series ended on a note that, while brilliant, is deeply upsetting, frustrating, and unnerving. It doesn't help that the show was followed up by a prequel film, which not only refuses to tie up loose ends but is R-rated, profoundly sad and disturbing, and pretty much revolves around the last week in the life of a traumatized teenage girl who is subsequently brutally murdered. For fans of the show who wanted closure—and it's hard not to finish the original Twin Peaks without desperately seeking closure—there's pretty much no worse way for the series to end.

But now there is a final season to Twin Peaks, filmed decades after the original, which not only completes the series as a whole but is hands-down the best thing the show ever did. I'd go further and argue that the final season (which was fittingly called The Return) is the best television ever made—and I'm far from alone in thinking that. I could go even further and argue that The Return is one of the greatest artistic achievements in any medium, and—again—I'm not at all alone in making that claim.

Which makes introducing new people to Twin Peaks feel like less of a cruel rug-pull. But it introduces a new dilemma: namely, that to show people one of my favorite works of cinema, one of my favorite works of art, I have to ask that they work their way through an unprecedentedly messy two seasons of early-90s TV, one which includes such a noticeable drop in quality at one point that you can literally spot it in charts of episode-by-episode IMDb ratings of the show. This chart, in fact, which I have helpfully labeled for your viewing pleasure:

If you're watching Twin Peaks for the first time, it helps immensely to know that your experience of watching the show will vary drastically based on one basic data point: at the start of each episode, when the credits roll and the writer and director get their due, do you see the names David Lynch or Mark Frost? If yes: congratulations! If no: you're about to watch a fundamentally different show.

The other thing it helps to know is the backstory of what Twin Peaks really is: what it was originally envisioned as, in other words, and what it became instead, and why there's such a disparity between the two. And to explain that, we have to start with the strange disagreement between the two people who created it, and address the elephant in the room: that, at some point, the two creators had fundamentally different ideas of what they were making, to the point that one of them abruptly and dramatically cut the other one out of the picture altogether.

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The original vision of the show can be summed up in a single sentence: What if a movie never had to end?

It was the elusive dream that brought Mark Frost and David Lynch together. Two very different filmmakers, from two very different backgrounds, united over a singular excitement for what they saw as television's real untapped potential: a chance to tell, not episodic and formulaic stories, but a story that wouldn't ever be the same thing twice. A story that changed and grew, starting from an unassuming point and evolving into something twisted, unbelievable, and unforgettable.

Mark Frost was a consummate veteran of television writing and production. He got his start writing for Hill Street Blues, one of the most critically-acclaimed series of the 1980s. (For a quick sense of its impact: Hill Street Blues won so many Emmys that some of its records weren't surpassed until The West Wing, which is maybe the most award-winningest series to ever win awards.) Among other things, Frost was a huge enthusiast of US history and conspiracy theories, a fan of all things Americana, and a superb craftsman who could write snappy dialogue and tense cliffhangers with the best of 'em. For him, Twin Peaks presented an opportunity to create an ever-expanding universe of characters, with intricate and convoluted lore, and with mysteries that spanned years, growing endlessly stranger and more intriguing over time.

David Lynch, on the other hand, was a controversial hotshot painter-turned-arthouse filmmaker. He'd made an indie horror film that won the attention of Stanley Kubrick and Mel Brooks, the latter of whom hired him to direct The Elephant Man, which was a massive success that earned Lynch Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. (Its makeup, which Lynch worked on directly, was so good that the Academy Awards literally created the Best Makeup and Hairstyling award the next year, because of how many people complained that The Elephant Man should have had an award to win.) It was such a hit that Lynch was asked by George Lucas to direct Return of the Jedi (which he refused), then asked to create a big-budget adaptation of Dune, which went so disastrously that film studios subsequently refused to touch the series for another four decades.

(Should this mainstream box office failure have served as an ominous warning sign for the future of Twin Peaks once it became a surprise megahit? Perhaps. Perhaps.)

The studio that had hired Lynch for Dune unceremoniously yanked his contract for another big-budget film away from him, offering him instead a minuscule budget and the freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted with it. Lynch came back with Blue Velvet, a dark erotic film about suburban America whose intense and violent sex scenes made it wildly controversial and successful—successful enough, at least, for a director with Lynch's erratic resume to land a prime-time TV series with ABC, a network that has never at any point been known for taking risks, supporting the arts, or being anything but conservative and bland.

On the surface, Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet share an awful lot of DNA: hokey suburbia, violent melodrama, kinky sex, Kyle MacLachlan. But Lynch's background in the fine arts meant that his vision of a never-ending movie was somewhat different from Frost's. Lynch is fond of quoting a passage from the Upanishads, the full text of which eventually wound up in Twin Peaks itself:

This vision of reality as endlessly mutable, of us as ever-changing dreamers whose experiences of the universe never stop changing... this, to Lynch, was the appeal of television. His dream was of a show whose very nature never stopped changing: something that could never be pinned down to a single genre, a single tone, a single method of storytelling, a single way of understanding the story itself.

When Lynch moved from painting to filmmaking, it was because he wanted to create paintings that could transform. His first film, Eraserhead, is often described as a waking nightmare, one that powerfully suspends you in an experience that's visceral and emotional and consistent, fixating you on its singular mood not despite its constant transformations, but through them. It's as evocative and hard-to-define as a Francis Bacon painting, but, because of its continual shifts, it holds your attention, keeps your focus, and locates you more and more deeply within the place it intends to bring you. It's a disturbing movie... but it's an astonishing one. It's a film that wants to accomplish what paintings do, rather than a film that particularly cares about what films normally set out to do.

For Lynch, Twin Peaks was the ultimate canvas: one that not only stretched across time, but never stopped moving. It represented an opportunity to create the vastest artwork possible, in a medium that, across its existence, had never really been explored. And all he had to do was convince a major television network to let him make it in the year 1990. It was simple, really. What could possibly go wrong?

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Of the show's two creators, Mark Frost is often unfairly overlooked. In part, that's because Lynch is by far the more famous of the duo, and the one whose career fascinates film critics and art critics alike. Lynch's other works are far more successful, and far more talked about; Frost's novels mostly go overlooked, and his contributions to television largely stopped in the late 90s, which is unfortunately right before The Sopranos changed television forever and led most viewers and critics to disregard the bulk of 90s television altogether. It was awkward timing all around.

But there's another reason why I think that Frost fades into the background and Lynch jumps out, and it's this: throughout the original run of the series, Frost stayed with the ship. Everyone involved with the show agrees that Lynch was more-or-less absent during the bulk of the production of season 2, which makes up for 75% of the length of the original show. Frost was the one who worked out story arcs, who collaborated with the other writers to hammer out the fine details, and who took his duties as a showrunner seriously. Lynch returned to the series at several pivotal moments, directed nearly all of its most-acclaimed episodes, and vanished again, mostly to work on an unrelated film that he continually poached Twin Peaks actors to make cameos in.

While there are moments where the two creators work in tandem, and where their visions seem equally clear, Twin Peaks is in many ways a Mark Frost show that occasionally turns into a David Lynch show. And while both creators are credited with various ups and downs, Mark Frost is saddled with taking credit for a series that... well... had its high points, and had its low moments. Lynch, on the other hand, is credited for a series of moments that—whether you love them or despise them—are absolutely fascinating and memorable.

Many of Twin Peaks' most beloved qualities are directly attributable to Frost. Frost is why the mysteries are so compelling, why so many lines are delightful and quotable, why the world evolves the way it does, and (seemingly) why it dips into the extraterrestrial and the occult. But if Frost was the only person who had made Twin Peaks, nobody would talk about Twin Peaks.

Lynch's influence on the show as a whole is hard to pin down. But the influence of Lynch's episodes is undeniable. Of the original Twin Peaks' thirty episodes, the six that Lynch directed are the singularly most-memorable, the most-discussed, the most-beloved. (There're exactly two other episodes that come remotely within the orbits of those six, one of which is controversial, and the other of which was the only episode directed by Frost himself.) And there's never any question as to why that is. Every scene in every Lynch episode is deeply unusual, has unexpected contours, includes startling and bizarre flourishes, and generally just works differently than we're used to television working. Even today, even after nearly thirty-five years of directors responding to Lynch's direct influence, it's hard not to watch his work in Twin Peaks and feel like you're witnessing something new, something that had never been tried before. It feels like it shouldn't work, but it should.

You might differentiate the show's creators like this: Frost is the one who demonstrated what television shows were capable of, what made television delightful, what made television work. Lynch, on the other hand, offered glimpses of what television could be.

People remembered Frost's work affectionately. But it was Lynch's work that they never quite forgot.

And that could not have become clearer in the dual ways that Twin Peaks went off the rails.

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The first season of Twin Peaks is a brisk eight episodes long. It's short, in part, because nobody at ABC expected it to succeed: the pilot episode, which was filmed as a 90-minute-long movie, was strange and slow and artful, and drastically different from the conventions of late-80s entertainment. To everyone's surprise, it was a hit: viewers were caught completely off-guard, everybody started talking about it, and the sheer fact of the show's unexpected success became a conversation unto itself. Those water-cooler conversations turned into a frenzy when, two weeks later, the second Lynch/Frost episode aired, abruptly taking Twin Peaks from "small-town murder mystery" to "weird little man dancing backwards while speaking riddles, and possibly also demons??" Everyone agreed that this was, and I quote, "huh."

Excited by this unpredictable turn of events, ABC renewed the series for another twenty-two episodes, one of which would again be a feature-length film. But somewhere in the production process, they got cold feet. ABC made a demand which its creators worried would kill the show altogether: solve the show's central murder, and solve it quickly. The killer is revealed seven episodes into season 2's twenty-two episode run; two episodes later, they are brought to justice, reducing the show's longest-stretching arc to the kind of double-episode resolution that made it indistinguishable from the narrative storytelling seen in shows decades earlier.

With fully half of the show's run remaining, it lost the one thing that kept it running. It was forced to scramble for an alternative. And boy oh boy did it scramble.

I find it helps to think of the original Twin Peaks, not as two seasons—one limited series and one full—but as four seasons of 6-8 episodes each. The first season, more-or-less everyone agrees, is pretty excellent through-and-through. Its plots are compelling and neatly interwoven; its characters are largely intriguing. Its method of using each episode to chronicle a single day and night gives the show a pacing that's simultaneously languid and suspenseful: as people set dates for events in the near future, you start to know which things are going to happen when, which questions will be answered on which day (and in which episode), and what routines will draw characters into each other's orbits. At the same time, the show never stops throwing out dark new mysteries, and the truth seems ever-murkier, ever-more-sinister. It's heartwarming and ominous in equal parts, somehow relaxed and tense all at the same time.

These are not Twin Peaks' pinnacles—not by a long shot—but these are its glory days. It will never be as simple or as straightforwardly good ever again.

The first leg of season 2 is extraordinary and frustrating: more extraordinary than frustrating, but you can feel the rot start to set in. Lynch directs three of these seven episodes, and television has rarely been as unpredictable, as compelling, or as bizarre. But the show also starts to treat certain characters, and certain narratives, as completely rote: there are scenes which clearly exist only to lay groundwork for future developments, and which give the distinct impression that they are bored with themselves, and impatient to move along to the next bit. It also introduces a number of new characters and scenarios which, for lack of a better word, are just kind of twee: they're wacky for the sake of being wacky, and lack the heartache and emotional turbulence that gives Twin Peaks its gravity. They're unmoored, weightless, fleeting, trivial.

But the central mystery of the series never loses its weight. The show is spiraling towards its killer—not just the revelation of their identity, but the growing sense that unmasking them might unleash something horribly, terrifyingly dark, something that will make it impossible to ever find solace or comfort in this tiny town again. And against all odds, Twin Peaks pays this promise off. The reveal of the murderer—who the show's creators had been determined to never reveal—remains one of the best and most astonishing moments in television history. Frost has never been better as a writer; Lynch has never been better as a director. Even by today's standards, it makes for unusually disturbing and horrifying filmmaking; in 1991, there was nothing on TV you could possibly compare it to.

After that... what else was there to do?

ABC had made it clear that they wanted this murder over. Solved. They wanted to put a neat little button on the only thing the show had ever been. Sure enough, the resolution of this little arc functions as a literal and figurative exorcism: the purging of an evil from this world, a tidy resolution to the untidy. Depending on how you look at it, the end of this arc is either captivating and cathartic melodrama, or it's the antithesis of everything that Twin Peaks had originally stood for. And either way, with nine episodes down and thirteen episodes left, the central story of Twin Peaks had come to an end.

(It's both symbolically fitting and literally, functionally important that Lynch vanished after revealing the killer, and effectively didn't touch the series until the very end of its original run. The idea which had so captivated him had entirely disappeared. Whatever remained was... well, not the show that Lynch had set out to make.)

The seven episodes that follow are—there's no way to mince words—dogshit. Is it possible for a television show to have an identity crisis? If so, these episodes are the definitive proof. Whereas Twin Peaks once presented itself as a satire of—and a more artful version of—a soap opera, for a brief spell it is genuinely just a soap. A new central plot gets spun up, and it's absolutely weightless, utterly unconvincing. A series of characters are written off the show, one episode after another; I suspect that these episodes were designed primarily as a kind of bookkeeping, a way of removing all the pieces from the board that no longer served a purpose. Fittingly, these episodes start and end with a side plot that comes out of nowhere, stars one of the series' most reviled characters, and introduces a new cast of surreally uninteresting guest actors who cannot remotely act.

All this is capped off with an abrupt and incoherent development, involving a wholly unearned plot twist and a weird and idiotic sequence that feels like a mean-spirited parody of Lynch at his most surreal. It drastically changes the personality of one of the show's central characters, and a minute later, kills them off. In a strange way, it makes a kind of poetic sense: a flourish so awful and stupid that it underlines just how terrible the show has become, just how little its writers know how to write for it, just how easy it is to slide from "the next era of TV storytelling" to "the worst possible iteration of a TV era long since past."

Generally speaking, I advise viewers to drink heavily during this stretch of the series. Certainly there are plenty of ways to make a drinking game out of it, so long as you don't mind a little liver damage and the risk of accidental death.

But then... then! But then, something of a miracle happens. For the first time in television history, a group of writers and directors works out how to create serial TV.

All of a sudden, everything just works. It's almost buoyant. It's fun. Characters are enjoyable to watch again, and their arcs are even somewhat compelling. The mysteries feel mysterious. The suspense is almost suspenseful. Twin Peaks has figured out how to be a longform television show, and it's figured it out about a decade before anyone else—with the exception of Babylon 5—even made an attempt.

For the first time in a long time, this feels like a show that you wouldn't want to end. It's a show that you'd stick with for season after season, probably a few too many seasons, watching for reasons that were equal parts familiarity and curiosity. It's the kind of show that contemporary fans would've written fanfiction about. It would have inspired shipping and headcanons. Cosplay would abound. There would almost certainly be a wiki.

This, recognizably, is television as we've come to know it. It isn't great television, but at least it's good television. And TV shows are like pizza: sometimes good is more than enough, right?

Of course, none of this was enough to save Twin Peaks' life. ABC had been panicking about declining ratings at the end of the first season, which was practically forever ago. It had played its one trump card—the killer reveal—entirely too early (or ever). The middle stretch of the new season had been a disaster. There was no way it would be given another chance, and—apart from the now-obligatory "fan letter-writing" campaign—pretty much everyone knew it.

So they resigned themselves to going out with a bang. One last spectacle. One last stunning moment to make sure the world would remember Twin Peaks.

And they got one. They got one hell of a bang. An all-time Hall-of-Famer make-TV-history last hurrah.

It just wasn't the one in the script.

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There is a script for the final episode, if you're curious. You can hunt it down online. Mark Frost's name is emblazoned proudly on its first page. It is, in many ways, the sort of writing that Frost does best.

The first season of Twin Peaks ends with the only episode that Frost both wrote and directed, and it's a doozy. In many ways, it's a masterful demonstration of how to end a story on as many shocking notes as possible: every outstanding plot is resolved in a satisfying, startling way, and immediately replaced with a new cliffhanger. Nearly every scene, in fact, leaves off with a TO BE CONTINUED... of some sort—and the season's final moments most of all. It's almost as if it was calculated to punish ABC were it to cancel the series prematurely: the thought of it ending after season 1 is torturous. Imagine not getting resolution! Imagine the show ending there, of all places!

It's a tremendous showcase of the sort of craft that Frost does best. In his only turn as a director, he shows a no-nonsense emphasis on moving us, as slickly as possible, to the moments that matter most: climax, resolution, cliffhanger. You can read his script for the end of season 2—for the end of all of Twin Peaks, initially—and imagine what it would have been like to watch his version of the finale. It probably would have been a blast.

You can imagine this. But you can't watch it. Because the finale was directed by David Lynch. And Lynch, given control of his show's final moments, decided to end the show the way he wanted to end it. Even if, in this case, that meant throwing out the vast majority of his co-creator's script.

There's no other way of putting it: the original end to Twin Peaks is jarring. It is deeply, deeply disturbing. Something about it feels wrong. We'd caught glimpses of Lynch's m.o. before this, moments where Twin Peaks lost even its veneer of normalcy and turned into something new and unsettling, but never before like this. And never in this kind of context, where it felt like the show we knew, the show we'd grown familiar with, was being ripped apart by something savage and awful, something that had been lurking beneath the surface, temporarily covered up, momentarily forgotten, but finally unleashed and even vengeful. In its final moments, Twin Peaks became the show that Lynch had wanted it to be all along—and in the process, it ruthlessly annihilated the show that everyone else had allowed it to become.

Laura Palmer's murder had been Twin Peaks' original sin. It was the horrible, gruesome act that meant this town could never fully be at peace—not because it had unearthed some ancient evil, but because it proved that this evil had always been here, and that it would never go away. After Laura's killer was abruptly and summarily brought to justice, however, Laura Palmer and her family did somewhat-abruptly vanish. The show's scripts had no room for her parents or her cousin anymore. Laura's best friend, her ex-boyfriends, stopped mentioning her. Evil still roamed, but it was a silly evil, a fun evil, cruel but whimsical. There were broken hearts, but no grief. There was tragedy, but no remembrance. The show exorcised Laura's murder and her murderer, and then it acted like that murder had never been. If the original show, like Blue Velvet before it, showed an idyllic American suburb and the savagery that lurked underneath its veneer, the new Twin Peaks had become all veneer.

Well, no longer.

It's not just about what happens during the filmed finale. It's about how it happens, how uncomfortable it feels, how unsafe it feels. Instead of offering resolution, instead of offering the fun kind of cliffhanger, Twin Peaks ended on a note that felt profoundly and disorientingly wrong. There may not be a single more upsetting end to a TV show. And then... that was it. Show's over! Go home, folks!

Lynch returned to Twin Peaks again one more time, with the prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me. For the first and last time, Twin Peaks was created exclusively by Lynch—he wrote and directed, without the input of the show's original writers, and without the assistance of Frost (who would have preferred to write a sequel and offer closure, but had no interest in a prequel film). The majority of the show's cast either refused to come back, or wasn't given an offer. Kyle MacLachlan, the show's star, appears in only a couple of minor scenes, and otherwise is shunted to the side. Lynch's focus was solely on Laura Palmer, the girl whose death opens the original show, and whose final moments alive are excruciatingly bleak.

It's an extraordinary movie that very few people feel like watching more than once. Trauma victims have lauded it as an unusually incisive depiction of what it feels like to live with serious trauma. It is a powerfully compassionate depiction of a young woman who experiences things that parents have nightmares about their children experiencing. It is rough and harrowing where the TV show is gentle and folksy. And while it includes a few oblique references to the series finale, none of those provide closure in any of the ways that viewers were desperate to receive.

That, for the longest time, was the end of Twin Peaks. That was your reward for suffering through a seven-episode soap opera, for investing in the show's mysteries, for growing attached to all of its characters. The painting had mutated, sure, and in all manner of wondrous and unprecedented ways... but did you like it? Did you feel rewarded for your time? Sure, paintings are often gruesome and unnerving and give you nightmares, but you don't usually commit 20+ hours to paying attention to a single painting. Paintings usually don't have entire sections that just suck.

As a vision of what TV could be, as a work of art, Twin Peaks remained singular and unparalleled. You could argue that The Sopranos reaches similar moments of strange astonishment, perhaps. You could certainly point to shows that were better-crafted, often ones that had been created by the show's original writers and directors. Other TV shows have achieved many lovely, incredible things that Twin Peaks never aspired to, and fulfilled television's promise as a medium in ways that Twin Peaks had never been allowed to. But even so, twenty-odd years after the original series had ended, many enthusiasts (myself included) felt like it had attempted something that was profound in ways that other shows had shied away from, something that had to do with more than storytelling and character arcs, or with the artistry of any single shot.

It doesn't hurt that David Lynch went on to have a storied career, including another infamous struggle with ABC execs that produced an undisputed masterpiece. Ten years after the catastrophic end of Twin Peaks, Lynch created a pilot for what had originally been imagined as a series spin-off, Mulholland Drive. As had been the vision for Twin Peaks, that pilot was designed to introduce a series of open-ended plots that would likely never have stopped opening. But ABC passed on the series, and Lynch was forced to improvise, and the resulting film (also called Mulholland Drive) was a fascinating chimera, with scenes from the original pilot bent to a new purpose, now telling a story that came to a close only an hour past the pilot's runtime, rather than the dozens and dozens that had originally been intended.

Every new Lynch film broke new ground, pushing into stranger territories, stranger visions of what cinema could become. A generation of directors grew up aspiring to be "Lynchian," whatever that meant to them. Twin Peaks was often cited as a precedent. (Donald Glover originally described his series Atlanta as "Twin Peaks with rappers," and probably came closer to understanding what the original Twin Peaks was than anyone else who's ever tried to make a similar comparison.) Twin Peaks became fabled, as if shrouded in mist, just inaccessible enough to daunt and lure in equal measure.

And then, just shy of twenty-five years after the series had ended, The Return was announced by Showtime. Eighteen hours' worth of new episodes, exclusively co-written by Lynch and Frost, exclusively directed by Lynch. Before its release, Showtime's CEO described it as "the pure heroin version of David Lynch." Twin Peaks as it had always been intended, without compromise, without network interference, and with a budget that dwarfed even what Lynch had been given to make his failed blockbuster version of Dune.

Nobody—absolutely nobody—knew what to expect.

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The only thing that was revealed about The Return before its debut was its cast list. I tell people who are curious about the show not to look at it, because there's one famous actor in particular whose appearance is so delightful, and such a brilliant extension of the original series, that it's a little jaw-dropping when he's finally revealed. But the cast list itself is pretty jaw-dropping too: it's unreal just how many well-known actors were cast, and just how good they are. The Return occasionally drops Emmy- and Academy Award-winning actors into scenes just to deliver a single line with breathtaking perfection. Lynch's own pantheon of beloved actors and actresses—including but not limited to Laura Dern and Naomi Watts, both of whom are legends in their own right—nearly all made an appearance. Don fucking Murray—Don Murray! The man who costarred with Marilyn Monroe!—showed up in a role, and knocked it out of the park. And the original cast—at least, the members of the original cast who were still alive—almost all showed up too, often in ways that could not have possibly been predicted.

In the quarter century since it had been released, Twin Peaks had become revered. Multiple generations of actors, including a couple of bewilderingly famous names, were all ecstatic just to get to take part. Not just actors, either: it's bewildering how many musicians make an appearance, including Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, Moby, Eddie Vedder, and—my favorite—Skye Ferreira, making a wretchedly disgusting appearance which I utterly adore.

But The Return wasn't a victory lap. It wasn't a celebration. It was Mark Frost and David Lynch's opportunity to make TV on their terms—to do what they'd wanted to do all along, but had never had a chance to. It was a vision of what TV could be that was over 25 years in the making, one that—it was immediately apparent—was unlike anything that had been attempted even in the era of Peak TV. It operated differently than any other TV show; its episodes were each structured in ways that episodes had never been structured; its departures fucking departed. Critics had wondered, beforehand, whether Twin Peaks would come back and claim its place as the show that had inspired everything, now nestled comfortably among the TV greats it had inspired. Instead, Twin Peaks returned and demonstrated that none of those shows had come within spitting distance of what it had wanted to become.

Lynch and Frost found themselves working with one of the strangest canvases ever made: the memory of the original series, combined with everything that had happened in the quarter-century since. The Americana-loving show that had concluded its original run before George H. W. Bush left the White House was now premiering in the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. A series whose pilot had opened with a long, lingering shot of a phone cord was coming back in an era where Skype was already passé. The world had changed. Television had changed. And Twin Peaks' cast had changed, in that everyone was now a generation older, and half the cast was either dying or already dead.

In the original series, there is a character—colloquially known as the Log Lady, because she's the lady who always holds a log—who was written specifically for Catherine Coulson, who had supported Lynch in his earliest days as a filmmaker and was given one of the show's strangest and most affectionate roles. When The Return was announced, two years before it began shooting, Coulson had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before the rest of the series was written and shot, Coulson was filmed one last time as the Log Lady, herself dying of cancer, making phone calls to a man who, when the other half of her scenes were finally shot, knew that he was talking to a ghost. By the time The Return aired, Coulson had been dead for nearly two years. Her final appearance was a love letter to once of the series' oldest, dearest friends.

Mark Frost's father Warren had been cast in the original series, aged 63, as the father of Laura Palmer's closest friend. When The Return started filming, Warren's health was rapidly failing; he makes an appearance, his age and illness immediately apparent, speaking his final scripted lines in a weak and trembling voice. He passed away three months before the series finally aired.

The structure of The Return's plot is necessarily structured around which actors were still alive to appear in it. It is conscious, at times, of which characters' performers hadn't lived to see the show return. At the same time, it casts younger actors who weren't alive when the original series aired, or who were too young to remember a world without Twin Peaks in it.

Just as the original Twin Peaks finale had deviated sharply from the tone of the series that came before it, and just as Fire Walk With Me had deviated even-more-sharply from the tone of the series as a whole, The Return is exceedingly aware of what it isn't. Its departures from the original are played to astonishing effect, sometimes setting up a tonal contrast between the town of Twin Peaks and other places, and other times intentionally underscoring an emptiness, a hollowness, where it knows you want the warmth of the original, or where aspects of the original come back in ways that can't help but seem altogether changed. When it does return to the feel of the original series, on the other hand, it leans unabashedly into the melodrama, the sweetness, the emotion, in ways that both feel comforting and reassuring and accentuate your awareness that the memories can't last, and that the old times will never come again.

The biggest difference between the original series and the new one, though, isn't that its tone changes. It's that its tone never stops changing. Every sequence in The Return feels like something new, something strange. You can't draw direct parallels between it and other Lynch (or Frost) works; you also can't draw parallels between any of its scenes. At first, this can feel superbly disorienting: you keep wanting to figure out "what it is," how to summarize it, how to determine whether it's primarily heartwarming or horrifying, primarily silly or upsetting, primarily reassuring or bleak. This isn't helped by the way that individual scenes seem to have tones that fold in on themselves, with "gritty" sequences getting so gritty that they turn cartoonish, or flat-out farces that gradually start to feel like tragedies. At times it's hard to determine whether the show wants you to take it seriously or whether its sense of humor is just that dry and deadpan, so flat-out humorless that you start to get the giggles. At other times, it pivots so quickly from gory to ridiculous that the transition itself feels like a punchline. It has such goddamn fun just finding ways to be itself, and a part of that fun seems to be the way it keeps you wondering, getting you to try and figure out exactly what you're looking at, shifting in such subtle and blatant ways that it continually confounds your attempts to pinpoint what it is.

It's Frost's dream realized of a story that never stops revealing new facets, a world that never stops unfolding. (It's almost a recurring gag how often The Return presents you with a completely new cast of characters, seemingly an entire series' worth, often with a pantheon of acting talent that would be robust enough to stand alone as its own show.) And it's Lynch's dream of a painting that never stops changing, the dream that never ends, the spider that is its own web. In strangely literal ways, it feels like the future and the past all at once, with a present suspended between the two that is always, always in flux. And if the world it depicts is sometimes a grim and nauseating one, well, that world is so utterly superseded by wondrous possibility, by love and hope and joy, and by the reminder that the unknown and the yet-to-come are just as likely to be incomprehensibly beautiful as they are to be incomprehensibly vile, that it feels like the only truly futile choice would be to forever root yourself in the unwanted now, to surrender to all that is undeniably awful when there is always, there will be always, more to the world and to ourselves than we can ever possibly figure out, or even see more than the briefest glimmer of. The depths of is will always dwarf the limits of seen, and it is correct to be horrified and overjoyed by that all at the same time.

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I don't want to make the mistake of trying to "get to the point" of what Twin Peaks is, or of what it wants to say, or of what it means. Trying to summarize or explain Twin Peaks is more-or-less the only way to miss the point. (Which, of course, guarantees that a hundred thousand YouTubers spend all day every day trying to do exactly that.)

What I'll say is that there is a strange near-contradiction to almost all of David Lynch's work, and it seems to echo in Mark Frost's preoccupations as well.

Twin Peaks is sometimes seen as a scathing critique of suburbia, or of America as a whole. A nasty satire of "folksiness," of "small town" meaning innocence or purity, or of the blithe assumption that everything is fine, that everything will be okay. And on some level, that's probably true.

But Lynch is also known for having an earnest, almost childlike, belief in love and hope as powerful, redeeming forces. Twin Peaks may depict a corrupt and fallen America, but at the same time it's weirdly reverential towards both America and towards its institutions. It's not just that the FBI is so straightforwardly a force for good in the world of Twin Peaks that it feels a bit juvenile. It's that every member of the FBI who we meet holds that same borderline-juvenile belief that it can be a force for good, and holds themselves to those almost-immature high standards, in a way that becomes how and why the FBI of this world manages to be that force for good in the first place.

In Frost's Twin Peaks books—that's a whole nother tangent that we're not delving into—America is presented simultaneously as a sinister evil and a utopian hope. It's not that America has been corrupted exactly, which implies a former purity that has since been lost. It's that America was always both these things, that there was never a clear distinction between the two, that there's nothing to be returned to, and that the difference between good and evil must be found here and now or not at all.

The distinction, in other words, isn't between "delusional people who believe in the possibility of goodness and love" and "cynical realists who know that only bad things happen." It's between denial and awareness—between the flavor of "everything will be okay" that requires you to deny or overlook everything that's not okay, and the version that, instead, recognizes the depths of horror and evil and cruelty and injustice of the world, but also recognizes warmth and kindness, compassion and righteousness, happiness and hope.

Perhaps this is why Twin Peaks seems to inexorably revolve around trauma and grief, despite being such a warm and silly show in so many other ways. Trauma and grief are two sides of the same coin, in their way: both represent a struggle to reconcile the world's horrors and its loves, with trauma asking its bearers to live despite having known horrors, and grief asking its bearers to live through the loss of once-known love. Neither can be denied or forgotten or permanently repressed; each feels impossible to live with, or to live through, unless it is embraced—and embracing is the last thing that anybody wants to do with either, because it feels like the embrace might just destroy you altogether.

But people are harder to destroy than we think, and trauma and grief are both proof of that. People live on, even when they don't. The feeling of them remains, even when—especially when—that feeling is utterly excruciating to bear.

And the heaviness of that feeling exists alongside a matching lightness—so nimble and whimsical and unexpected that it sometimes feels implausible, even miraculous. This, by some definitions, is the nature of the truly sublime: that mixture of impossible lightness and impossible heaviness, joy laced with sorrow, sorrow laced with joy, hope amidst horror, horror amidst hope.

What does it mean for art to reflect the world, to capture something truly meaningful? What of the world is worth reflecting? What is it important for people to experience, what is it important to help people experience, what should you want to try and help people experience? And how on earth do you go about finding ways to let people experience it? How can you possibly bend any artistic medium—mired as it is in earthly limitations, inhibited in ways both profound and mundane, circumscribed by petty interference and by existential quandary alike—towards a truly worthwhile expression, even if you can find the faintest clue as to what such a worthwhile expression might look like in the first place?

I can say with confidence that Twin Peaks, to me, feels like it comes closer to answering those questions than nearly anything else I have ever encountered—anything, not just television or cinema, though compared to Twin Peaks no other TV show comes even close. I can't tell you why it feels that way to me. I can't even begin to tell you what those answers are. (Possibly there is no way of "knowing" those answers, in the sense that they reside fully in your head, taking forms that words can easily capture. Perhaps the only way to answer is by dancing, by weaving, by dreaming and then living in that dream.) I know what I can confidently say, and I am confident about what I can't say at all, and that is the closest to an answer than I presently know how to give.

What I can do is explain the strange, strange story of a show that disappeared and returned, a show that can at times be very hard to watch, a show whose birthing pains were very strange and are simultaneously inextricable from the show itself, in ways that I find both useful context for people getting started watching, and also happen to think make for a pretty fascinating story in and of themselves.

It's weird and silly stuff. I think it's neat.

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All this time, and I haven't even explained what the show is like! I've avoided describing even a single scene. Hell, I barely even touched upon the Laura Palmer murder, which is what the whole damn plot of the show is about!

Where to start, where to start. Hoo boy. Okay, here goes.

The very first thing you see when you watch Twin Peaks is an adorable bird. That bird is sitting on a tree.

Every time you watch Twin Peaks, you get to see that bird. It's part of the opening credits of the show. The opening credits feel very nice, because they mean you get to watch Twin Peaks, and also because you get to see a very cute little bird.

After that, the shot of the bird fades into a shot of a lumber mill. Lumber mills can be very interesting, too.

If you'd like to see a little bird, I think that you would probably at least like the first five seconds of Twin Peaks. After that you can watch the rest too, maybe. It's very good and I like it very much.