Television series

Twin Peaks

Name: Twin Peaks
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Supernatural
Released: 1990
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Horse, Richard Beymer, Kimmy Robertson, Harry Goaz

Twin Peaks is less a murder mystery than a hallucination that happens to have one. FBI Agent Dale Cooper arrives to investigate the killing of homecoming queen Laura Palmer and finds a town of pie-loving eccentrics, backwoods dread, and doors that open onto somewhere else entirely. It's soap opera, horror, and dream logic stitched together by David Lynch, and it rewards patience with imagery you won't shake for years.

TVMaze rating

8.0

If you liked this

Fargo2014

Noah Hawley borrows Twin Peaks' trick of hiding genuine menace inside a folksy, deadpan small-town comedy, and it's every bit as unsettling and darkly funny as it sounds.

But The seasons vary wildly in quality, and the cartoonish violence can tip into cruelty for its own sake.

Sharp Objects2018

A woman returns to her poisonous Missouri hometown to investigate a murder, and the show drenches every frame in the same swampy, secret-keeping dread as Twin Peaks, minus the whimsy.

But It's punishingly slow and genuinely bleak — there's no Cooper-style warmth to cut the misery.

The Leftovers2014

Damon Lindelof's meditation on grief and mystery shares Twin Peaks' willingness to leave big questions unanswered and let mood, not plot, do the heavy lifting.

But It can be relentlessly sad, and its refusal to explain itself will frustrate anyone wanting resolution.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Peyton Place1957

Lynch has cited Peyton Place directly as the format he was riffing on; Twin Peaks is essentially this show broken open and possessed by something stranger.

The primetime soap that gave small-town America its taste for scandal behind white picket fences — earnest where Twin Peaks is knowing, but built from the same bones.

But It's a straight melodrama with none of the surrealism, humour, or menace — just soap, sincerely played.

True Detective2014

Rust Cohle's investigation into a ritualistic Louisiana murder has the same slow-burn dread and detective-as-mystic energy Cooper brought to the Pacific Northwest.

But It trades Lynch's playful surrealism for grim machismo — there's little humour to lighten the darkness.

Big Little Lies2017

A death upends a picturesque coastal town full of people hiding things behind perfect facades — the same secrets-under-the-surface engine, dressed as prestige soap.

But It's more interested in marriage and class than mystery or menace, so the payoff feels domestic rather than eerie.

Broadchurch2013

A tight-knit English seaside town is torn apart when a boy is found dead and the whole community becomes a suspect — classic small-town murder mechanics done beautifully.

But It's a much more grounded, procedural watch with none of the dream sequences or cosmic weirdness.

MINDHUNTER2017

FBI agents interviewing serial killers to understand the nature of evil carry the same patient, atmospheric dread and fascination with what lurks beneath ordinary American life.

But It's cerebral and deliberately paced with no supernatural element — pure procedure, not mystery.

Riverdale2017

A teen soap that wears its Twin Peaks debt openly — a dead girl, a small town of secrets, and comic-book melodrama turned up to eleven.

But It gets increasingly ridiculous and self-parodic; go in expecting camp, not craft.

Wayward Pines2015no page yet

A federal agent arrives in an idyllic mountain town that turns out to be hiding something very wrong — pulpy, twisty, and unmistakably in Twin Peaks' debt.

But It's a much more conventional sci-fi thriller than eerie art project, and the mystery-box plotting can feel mechanical.

Picnic at Hanging Rock1975

Same structural gamble as Laura Palmer's story: a vanished girl as an excuse to study a community's hidden rot, with the mystery left deliberately open.

Schoolgirls vanish on a sunlit rock in the Australian bush, and the film never explains why — an earlier, quieter master class in unresolved dread and beauty as threat.

But There's no investigation to follow and no answer coming; if you need closure, this will infuriate you.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst2015

Swap Agent Cooper's supernatural intuition for a documentarian's patient camera and you get the same slow unraveling of a seemingly ordinary man's secrets.

A real true-crime documentary about a suspected murderer that plays out as an obsessive, atmospheric investigation into one small closed world — and ends with a jaw-dropping twist.

But It's nonfiction with real victims — none of the dream logic or dark comedy, just the discomfort of watching something true.