Why Twin Peaks Remains The Most Confusing TV Show Decades Later

More than three decades after it arrived as a beloved cult classic, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s supernatural soap opera Twin Peaks is still the most confusing TV show ever made. All these years later, fans are still unpacking the mysteries of Twin Peaks. It was way ahead of its time in terms of Easter eggs and rewatchability and the many layers of its storytelling.

Before Lynch tried his hand at television, TV shows were traditionally very straightforward. There had been the occasional surrealist gem like The Prisoner, but for the most part, the airwaves were full of sitcoms and procedurals and soap operas telling very conventional stories in a very traditional way. But Lynch never did anything in a conventional or traditional way.

He and Frost dressed up Twin Peaks as a small-town soap, set in a sleepy little community where everyone knows everyone else. It has a sprawling ensemble full of quirky, colorful characters getting into affairs and love triangles and bitter feuds. But this town happens to be situated near a portal to a strange alternate dimension, and it only gets more befuddling from there.

Plenty Of TV Shows Are Confusing, But None More So Than Twin Peaks

There have been a lot of confusing TV shows over the years, many of which have been directly influenced by Twin Peaks. Dark is a mind-bending time travel story set across several different timelines, all tied together by the grim history of a small German town, but it makes perfect sense if you pay close attention.

The mysteries of the island in Lost had audiences scratching their heads for years, but the final season revealed the harsh reality that the writers didn’t have a clear plan to resolve many of these mysteries. Westworld is a baffling sci-fi thriller about the philosophy of artificial intelligence and the personhood of cyborgs, but it’s mostly self-explanatory.

After all these years, Twin Peaks is still the most confusing TV show ever made. In just the third episode of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper is transported to the Black Lodge, where he learns that there’s a paranormal component to his investigation. From there, it just gets more and more confounding as you get deeper and deeper into the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder.

There are some extracurricular materials to help you make sense of Twin Peaks, from the movie spinoff Fire Walk with Me to the companion book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, but they’ll only get you so far. Twin Peaks is a show that doesn’t make sense at all until you’ve seen it twice — and even then, you’ll still have a lot of questions.

Twin Peaks Was Still Great, Despite Its Baffling Approach

Despite its deliberately ambiguous approach, Twin Peaks is still one of the greatest TV shows ever made, because it works just as well as a straightforward soap opera as it does a surreal sci-fi odyssey. There’s a lot of lore and mythology to wrap your head around, but the town is populated with wildly entertaining personalities to keep you engaged.

Even if you can’t keep track of any of the plotlines, or you have no idea how the Black Lodge and Killer B.O.B. and the Man from Another Place all tie together, you’ll still have a ton of fun watching Twin Peaks. Kyle MacLachlan and the rest of the cast are utterly watchable, and having a great time sinking their teeth into the weirdo roles Lynch gave them.

Lynch’s stories might leave a lot of viewers in the lurch, struggling to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but his characters are much more accessible. From Cooper to Audrey Horne to the Log Lady, Twin Peaks is full of classic Lynch characters, whose quirks will keep you invested even when you’re totally lost.