Watching Twin Peaks for the first time in 2026, after spending years surrounded by everything it inspired.
A guest post by JC Pass from Simply Put Psych
Contains discussion of Twin Peaks Season One.
For years, I've described things as being "very Twin Peaks".
A strange little town populated by eccentric characters? Very Twin Peaks. An unsettling mystery wrapped in mundane everyday life? Very Twin Peaks. An FBI agent who seems considerably more interested in his morning coffee than the average murder investigator? Well, you get the idea.
It's a description I've used often enough that you might reasonably assume I was familiar with David Lynch and Mark Frost's television series.
I wasn't.
Despite spending years enjoying films, television programmes and video games that either draw upon its influence or share its distinctive sensibility, I had somehow never actually watched Twin Peaks.
Not because I was avoiding it. I simply never found the time. Whenever the possibility arose, there was something newer to watch, something else demanding attention, or the lingering suspicion that a television programme from 1990 might feel a little dated.
More importantly, I thought I already understood it.
I knew the premise, the atmosphere, the reputation and plenty of the imagery. I knew about the coffee, the peculiar inhabitants and the mysterious death of Laura Palmer. I had encountered enough references, homages and spiritual successors to feel that watching the original would be less an introduction than an exercise in filling the gaps.
At some point, Twin Peaks had stopped being merely a television programme and had become something resembling a genre.
Which raises an interesting question: Can a work become so culturally influential that we begin to mistake familiarity with its influence for familiarity with the work itself?
In October 2026, thirty-six years after the original broadcast, I finally decided to find out.
When the Original Comes After Everything Else
There is something peculiar about discovering a cultural landmark backwards.
We generally imagine artistic influence as a relatively straightforward progression. An original work introduces ideas, subsequent creators develop or reinterpret them, and audiences encounter those developments within an expanding cultural tradition.
But our individual experiences rarely follow such a tidy chronology.
Sometimes we encounter the descendants long before the ancestor.
For me, one of the clearest examples is Deadly Premonition, the gloriously peculiar 2010 video game directed by Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as SWERY.
I love the original game. Its awkwardness, eccentric characters, bizarre dialogue and strange mixture of the everyday and the supernatural somehow create an experience that feels more distinctive than many considerably more polished productions.
It features an unusual FBI agent arriving in a small American town to investigate the murder of a young woman. The inhabitants are wonderfully peculiar, ordinary conversations can become unexpectedly surreal, and the protagonist takes his coffee rather seriously.
Sound familiar?
The similarities between Deadly Premonition and Twin Peaks have been widely discussed, including in academic work examining how the game translates the programme's distinctive combination of the familiar and uncanny into an interactive medium (Novitz, 2018).
That doesn't mean every similarity must be understood as direct borrowing. Creative influence is rarely that straightforward, and SWERY has resisted reducing the game's origins to any single work.
Nevertheless, watching Dale Cooper enthusiastically discuss coffee after spending so much time with Francis York Morgan felt like encountering a family resemblance that nobody was particularly interested in concealing.
And this is where watching an influential work retrospectively becomes interesting.
Something can be historically original while feeling strangely familiar to someone encountering it decades later.
The techniques, imagery and conventions that once distinguished a work may have become widespread enough that they no longer register as innovations.
What once seemed revolutionary can begin to look conventional, not because the original has changed, but because everything around it has.
There is a psychological dimension to this familiarity.
Reber et al. (2004) examined the relationship between processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure, arguing that the ease with which we process something can contribute to positive aesthetic responses. Familiarity, repetition and prior exposure can all influence this ease of processing.
That doesn't mean people automatically prefer whatever they've encountered most frequently, nor does it explain my response to Twin Peaks on its own.
But it offers an interesting way of thinking about the experience of recognising something before properly knowing it.
I was encountering unfamiliar characters and situations through an aesthetic vocabulary that already felt familiar.
In some respects, I was watching Twin Peaks for the first time.
In others, I'd been encountering versions of it for years.
The First Hour Wasn't Quite What I'd Ordered
Given the programme's reputation, I'd expected something darker, more disturbing and considerably more mystical.
What I actually encountered was a relatively slow introduction to a small-town murder investigation, complete with complicated relationships, peculiar social interactions and an impressive number of people apparently having affairs.
The opening hour dragged.
There is probably a more flattering way to describe that experience, perhaps involving deliberate pacing, atmospheric construction or the patient establishment of narrative foundations.
But the truth is that I spent much of that first hour waiting for the programme to become the Twin Peaks I thought I already knew.
Then a mounted deer head appeared lying on a table.
Apparently, it had fallen off the wall.
There was nothing supernatural about it, nothing particularly sinister and nothing requiring an elaborate explanation. Yet it was the first moment that struck me as genuinely absurd.
A perfectly reasonable explanation for a perfectly unreasonable-looking situation.
And somehow that was more interesting than if the deer head had floated into the room accompanied by ominous music.
What followed was not the relentless psychological horror I'd anticipated, but something frequently funny, occasionally ridiculous and rather more grounded in recognisable human behaviour than its reputation had led me to expect.
Dale Cooper displayed an almost childlike enthusiasm for trees, wildlife and the quality of his coffee. Bobby Briggs seemed to spend an unreasonable amount of time interacting with his jacket zip. Lucy Moran became an immediate favourite, largely through her ability to make ordinary administrative conversations entertaining.
Then there was the Log Lady.
My initial response to her was essentially, "Hmmm."
Sometimes that is all the analysis a situation requires.
Television scholar Linda Ruth Williams (2005) describes Twin Peaks as combining the familiar structures of soap opera and crime drama with grief, humour and horror. That mixture is important because the programme's unsettling qualities don't exist independently of its ordinary television conventions.
The mystery matters, certainly, but so do the romantic entanglements, strained family relationships, small-town gossip and absurd conversations.
The more I watched, the more I realised that I had arrived expecting something rather different from what Lynch and Frost were actually presenting.
I had expected the strange.
I hadn't expected quite so much of the ordinary.
The Unexpected Pleasure of Paying Attention
There was, however, something notable about that slow first hour.
I hadn't reached for my phone.
I'm not particularly proud of how unusual that feels, but I suspect I'm hardly alone in recognising the experience.
Modern entertainment exists alongside an extraordinary number of competing demands for our attention. Even when we're supposedly watching something, the temptation to check a message, browse a website or investigate an entirely unrelated thought is rarely far away.
And yet, despite not being particularly impressed by the opening hour of Twin Peaks, I found myself watching it without the usual inclination to divide my attention.
I wasn't captivated in the sense of being overwhelmed by excitement. I was simply engaged enough not to look elsewhere.
Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Research into narrative transportation provides a useful distinction. Green and Brock (2000) examined how becoming absorbed in a narrative involves attention, imagery and emotional engagement, and how such absorption can influence people's responses to stories.
Their research doesn't establish that failing to check one's phone is evidence of transportation, and much of their experimental work concerned written narratives rather than television.
Still, it helped me think about an aspect of viewing that is easily overlooked.
Something doesn't have to be immediately thrilling to hold our attention.
By the second and third episodes, the distinction became increasingly apparent. I was no longer merely paying attention. I was enjoying myself.
The peculiarities that initially seemed like interruptions began to feel integral to the programme's appeal. Its eccentric inhabitants became more familiar, the tonal changes less surprising, and the apparently mundane aspects of the town increasingly enjoyable.
Not because the programme had suddenly become conventional, but perhaps because I'd stopped expecting it to conform to the version of Twin Peaks I'd imagined.
There was another unexpected pleasure, too.
Watching something without smartphones.
People in Twin Peaks can be genuinely difficult to contact. Information travels through telephone conversations, face-to-face encounters and people physically going somewhere to find somebody else.
Characters can simply be unavailable without anyone demanding an explanation for why they haven't responded to a message.
I'm not suggesting that 1990 was some golden age of human communication, nor that smartphones have somehow destroyed meaningful conversation. Modern communication technology has obvious advantages, many of which I wouldn't particularly enjoy surrendering.
But there is something rather pleasant about watching a fictional world in which permanent connectivity isn't an expectation.
It creates a different rhythm.
Although I did notice that virtually nobody seems capable of ending a telephone conversation with an actual goodbye. They simply hang up.
Apparently, even before smartphones, television characters had little patience for conversational etiquette.
Is It Dated, or Am I?
One reason I'd delayed watching Twin Peaks was the suspicion that it might feel dated.
This is a slightly strange concern when you think about it.
I happily revisit older films and games, appreciate historical aesthetics and frequently complain about contemporary entertainment's dependence on familiar formulas.
Yet a television series from 1990 somehow felt like a commitment to another era.
And Twin Peaks certainly belongs to another era.
The presentation, pacing, hairstyles, performances and technical conventions are frequently recognisable as products of their time. Some of the acting has an exaggerated quality more readily associated with soap opera than contemporary prestige television.
But I began to question whether I was interpreting those differences as deficiencies simply because they weren't what I had become accustomed to.
It would be equally unconvincing to argue that everything old is automatically better, or that slower storytelling is inherently more sophisticated.
Sometimes a slow scene is simply slow.
Sometimes an unusual performance is an interesting artistic choice. Sometimes it's just an unusual performance.
The important distinction is between recognising that a work has aged and assuming that age necessarily diminishes its value.
And there was something rather amusing about discovering that aspects of the programme I had feared might feel outdated were precisely those I found refreshing.
The absence of smartphones, the slower circulation of information and the willingness to spend time on apparently inconsequential interactions all contributed to a viewing experience that felt different from much of what I'd been watching recently.
Not necessarily better in every respect.
Just different enough to make me notice the assumptions I'd brought with me.
More Human Than I Expected
Perhaps the greatest surprise was how recognisably human the programme felt.
For all its dream sequences, unusual imagery and peculiar inhabitants, much of the first season concerns ordinary social and emotional experiences.
People conceal affairs, worry about reputations, struggle with jealousy, behave possessively, make questionable decisions and attempt to maintain appearances.
The town may be eccentric, but its inhabitants are rarely driven by concerns that feel completely alien.
Even the humour contributes to this familiarity.
Cooper's enthusiasm for everyday things makes him more approachable rather than less. Lucy's unusual conversational style is funny because it operates within recognisable social situations. The Bookhouse Boys, with their talk of an ancient evil lurking in the woods, briefly resemble a rather earnest adult version of the Scooby-Doo gang.
The programme repeatedly places the ridiculous alongside the serious without insisting that one must invalidate the other.
This is part of what makes its tonal identity distinctive.
Novitz (2018) discusses the way Twin Peaks disrupts audience expectations by combining familiar narrative conventions with seemingly incompatible elements. The uncanny effect emerges partly through those juxtapositions, rather than through supernatural imagery alone.
I think this helps explain why the deer head stayed with me.
It wasn't frightening.
It was absurd in a world that, until that moment, had largely behaved as though everything were perfectly normal.
And that's perhaps where my expectations had been most misleading.
I had associated Twin Peaks with surrealism, mystery and psychological darkness, partly because those are the elements that tend to survive in discussions of its influence.
But influence can be selective.
When later works borrow from an earlier one, they don't necessarily preserve all its qualities in equal measure. Some characteristics become exaggerated, others are transformed, and some barely survive at all.
By the time an original work has filtered through decades of reinterpretation, its cultural reputation may describe only a portion of what it actually contains.
In my case, I'd inherited the strangeness without fully appreciating the humour and humanity surrounding it.
Knowing Something Isn't the Same as Experiencing It
By the season-one finale, I was hooked.
I had developed theories, revised impressions, become attached to characters and grown increasingly frustrated by the programme's reluctance to confirm what I thought I understood.
I was enjoying the uncertainty while simultaneously wishing it would be resolved.
A fairly typical human contradiction, really.
But looking back, the most interesting aspect of the experience wasn't whether I had correctly anticipated any of the mysteries.
It was how different the programme had been from the version I'd constructed before watching it.
For years, Twin Peaks had existed in my mind as a collection of familiar associations: surreal small towns, eccentric detectives, unsettling mysteries, dreamlike imagery and the apparently ordinary concealing something inexplicable.
Those associations weren't necessarily wrong.
They were incomplete.
I knew enough about the programme to recognise its cultural influence, but not enough to anticipate my own experience of watching it.
That distinction matters beyond television.
We routinely encounter books through quotations, films through references, historical events through popular retellings and scientific ideas through simplified explanations.
Sometimes those second-hand encounters are valuable introductions. Sometimes they provide all the information we actually need.
But occasionally, familiarity becomes a substitute for direct experience without our noticing the difference.
We begin to think that recognising something is equivalent to understanding it.
As a psychologist, I find that temptation particularly interesting. Our ability to categorise, generalise and draw upon previous experience is enormously useful. Without it, we'd spend an exhausting amount of time treating every new encounter as though nothing remotely similar had ever happened before.
Yet those same abilities can encourage us to approach unfamiliar experiences armed with conclusions we've already reached.
That's not necessarily a cognitive failure. It's how much of ordinary understanding works.
The difficulty arises when we stop distinguishing what we know from what we merely expect.
And I think that's what watching Twin Peaks in 2026 made me appreciate.
I'd spent years thinking I understood what sort of programme it was. I knew its cultural identity, recognised its descendants and could describe its aesthetic well enough to use the name as an adjective.
But I hadn't encountered the thing itself.
Not the slow opening. Not the surprisingly gentle humour. Not the pleasure of watching Cooper become excited about a tree. Not the strange satisfaction of finding a fallen deer head inexplicably funny.
And certainly not the experience of spending hours in a fictional town that was simultaneously stranger and more ordinary than I'd anticipated.
I still think it's reasonable to describe certain things as "very Twin Peaks".
At least now I've actually watched enough Twin Peaks to have some idea what I'm talking about.
Although, having finished only the first season, I suspect I should remain cautious about that claim.
References
Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
Novitz, J. (2018). Expansion, excess and the uncanny: Deadly Premonition and Twin Peaks. Arts, 7(3), Article 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7030049
Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
Williams, L. R. (2005). Twin Peaks: David Lynch and the serial-thriller soap. In M. Hammond & L. Mazdon (Eds.), The contemporary television series (pp. 37–56). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748619009.003.0004
