This is a very short little piece I wrote about one of my favorite TV shows...
I should say that Twin Peaks is perhaps my favorite TV series of all time. No show has ever matched it for its uniqueness, its air of mystery and intelligence. It was superficially a supernatural soap opera, but, as might be expected of a series created by somebody like David Lynch, the series was more a satire of life in small- town America than anything else. The series began with the murder of a seemingly innocent teenage girl named Laura Palmer; as the series went on, we began to see, more and more, the dark and often sinister subculture that lay beneath the seemingly placid surface of American small towns. It turned out that Laura was killed because she was mixed up in evil things she could not understand, forces of evil that are far beyond her control. A sinister supernatural figure called BOB inhabited the body of Laura's father and, in circumstances that are mercifully not completely explained, murdered her.
BOB was only one of a large group of supernatural creatures that lived in the netherworld that always existed in the shadows of the own of Twin Peaks. Among the other supernatural characters were Steve, BOB's former friend who reforms by sacrificing his arm to defeat the evil side of himself. There was a riddle-telling and backwards-speaking midget who lived somewhere in FBI Agent Dale Cooper's consciousness and who told both future and past in a complex riddle. And there was my favorite character, the giant who appears to Cooper and tells him three riddles that help to lead him to discover the true murderer of Laura.
All of this makes the series sound as complicated as can be. In fact, the show is complicated. It is filled with a cast of at least 20 characters. Thankfully, the show was also filled with some unique and entertaining characters, ranging from the heroic Agent Cooper and Sherif Harry Truman to the wild and bizarre teenage Bobby Briggs to Laura's mysterious lookalike cousin Maddy to the indescribable Log Lady. Far from taking away from the plot, this show juggles its characters so well that the large cast becomes an asset to the show. The viewer gets a full view of the sorts of characters who might live in a small town.
So Twin Peaks was a smart, fun, mysterious, complex and very entertaining show. I always really enjoyed it.