Why Twin Peaks is a bad mystery but a great soap opera

Let's talk about Laura Palmer, the hardest-working dead girl in TV history

Twin Peaks.
(Image credit: Patrick Wymore/SHOWTIME)

"A dead girl. This is what got us going, me and Mark," says David Lynch of co-creating Twin Peaks with Mark Frost. The show — which went up against Cheers in 1990 and which, like Cheers, had an uncannily perfect pilot — caught fire. Everyone wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer. The show produced delicious strings of questions that proliferated and rambled as amiably as Agent Dale Cooper. Why was Josie sad? Who is Diane? Why is it so hard to get cherry pie these days? And most importantly, what is this show?

In a cagey interview this week in which he manages to say nothing about the upcoming revival, premiering Sunday on Showtime, Lynch told Rolling Stone: "I like a film that holds different genres. Just like life." Twin Peaks bears out that maximalism: The show has been hailed as a police procedural, a mystery, a cult classic, a dark comedy, and the mother of all Dead Girl Shows. But its track record with all the various genres it juggles is mixed. As a mystery, it's unforgivably bad. But as a soap opera? It's truly transcendent.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.