How David Lynch changed television forever—and for the better

In movies like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Dr.” Lynch has proven that he can create scenarios that raise maddening, compelling, unsettling questions that often don't have easy answers, if any at all. Perhaps why questions such as “Who killed Laura Palmer?” so disturbing is the fact that the answers are almost impossible to come up with. But while viewers were initially enthralled and drawn to “Twin Peaks,” ratings dipped slightly to the point where ABC executives, including future Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger, demanded that Lynch and his writing team get to the bottom of it and tell the truth. viewers who killed the young woman in a critical episode of the second season that aired in November 1990. Although there were still plenty of dedicated fans, the show's ratings never peaked, and Iger (then president of ABC Entertainment) canceled the show after its second season.

However, even at first, “Twin Peaks” was something of a creative earthquake in Hollywood. While the ratings never reached the highs they did when it premiered, it was clear that a wider audience was ready to enjoy weird, restrained, enigmatic material on network TV (as well as the burgeoning cable and pay TV landscapes). It's often easy these days to know how successful a piece of art is, especially since it will often inspire potential contenders, copycat shows, and movies that seem too lazy to work. But in the case of Twin Peaks, some of the shows inspired by its deliberately confusing style and genre-blending are some of the best of its kind, and it took years to put them together. Sometimes the connections are obvious; A show like Fox's The X-Files may have been mostly a procedural, but Fox Mulder felt cut from the same cloth as Dale Cooper, especially in his no-nonsense style and desire to get the truth no matter what. (And like “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files” made the leap from the small screen to the silver screen while also garnering a lot of attention for its lingering mysteries and romantic relationships.) When ABC returned to the genre in 2004 with its incredible and the still-controversial show Lost, it was as if JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were paying Week after week, Lynch's work is honored, especially after the mysterious Dharma Initiative was introduced in season two, one of the many new questions that viewers had to resolve.

However, the impact goes deeper than just these science fiction programs. Kids of the 2010s could delight in Disney's animated series Gravity Falls, a high-octane, fast-paced mix of silly humor, family feuds and weirdness set in the Pacific Northwest, culminating in a battle between good and evil. , the latter symbolized by a strange, chatty, yellow triangle, an image that would feel right at home in the mysterious Black Lodge of “Twin Peaks.” Series creator Alex Hirsch was never shy acknowledging either reference point. And even the mid-2000s procedural comedy “Psych” was created by the show's fans, until the fifth-season episode “Dual Spire” was a deliberate homage that featured many of its cast members as guests.