On Twin Peaks, the world ended long ago. Now we live in the ashes. (Preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion.

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I find Twin Peaks almost impossible to talk about. Yes, I have spilled a lot of words about it over the years, and when the show came back for its third season in 2017, I dutifully "explained" it for Vox. But I don't know how to talk about it. Perhaps that's why I started this article with a several-hundred word aside about an unrelated country artist.

In some ways, I resent its cultural ubiquity because that cultural ubiquity is almost entirely built around a handful of quirky, immediately noticeable elements from the show's first handful of episodes — "damn fine coffee," a dancing dwarf, the Log Lady. These elements, though campy, are integral to what makes the show work. Twin Peaks succeeds because it balances, constantly, on a high wire with horrific tragedy on one side and goofy comedy on the other. To watch it is to wait for it to fall and almost like it more when it does.

But I hate how much the show has been reduced to its goofiest self because Twin Peaks is important to me in a way almost no other TV show is. Some element of it is in everything I've ever written, even the TV criticism, and the way it contemplates cycles and legacies of abuse and trauma strikes me as getting closer to the truth of those experiences than anything else in the history of filmed entertainment. But it's the rare TV show that I approach with trepidation. Writing about it feels like pressing on a bruise. For as much as Twin Peaks is my favorite show ever, I prefer it hovering in my peripheral vision.

Except also, the goofy side of the show is real. Creators David Lynch and Mark Frost have spoken often on how much they love sinking into the show's world because for as dark and foreboding as Twin Peaks is, it also takes place in a kinder, more loving world, one where the hollowing out of America has happened but not yet been victorious. It is set in a place where tiny moments of good can elbow out the darkness. Which brings me to "Part 8," the eighth installment of the aforementioned third season.

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