10 TV shows to watch if you love ‘Twin Peaks’

The X-Files

The X-Files creator Chris Carter was influenced by three shows when creating his definitive tale of two FBI agents – one a believer, one a sceptic – investigating supernatural mysteries. The first was the ’70s cult classic Kolchak: The Night Stalker, one of the few previous examples of a true horror TV show. The second was Moonlighting, with Carter basing a lot of Agent Fox Mulder and Agent Dana Scully’s ‘will they, won’t they’ sexual tension on Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd’s character dynamic in that ’80s comedy drama.

The third show, of course, was Twin Peaks, which made it to the air three years before The X-Files. In many ways, Carter’s magnum opus is what you get when you take a more conventional network TV approach to material like Twin Peaks. While Lynch’s vision was barely comprehensible to many viewers and often left its mysteries tantalisingly out of reach, The X-Files wrapped up each monster-of-the-week storyline in 40 minutes or so.

However, The X-Files also told an overarching story that became more and more convoluted as it went along, and that owed a huge debt to Peaks, which showed that serialised storytelling had a place on network TV as well as the tried-and-tested formula. The X-Files’ visual approach and shooting locations in the Pacific Northwest were also undeniably Peaks-y.

Lost

If there is one thing that Lost shares in common with Twin Peaks, it’s the questions it raised in its viewers. Both shows revelled in introducing mysteries for their fans to pore over and theorise about, leading to a myriad of outlandish guesses about what was really going on. These hypotheses were then picked apart and stress-tested by watercoolers and in internet forums for years. In the end, though, neither show ever intended to answer all its mysteries definitively, and many of them were left open-ended for fans to continuously ponder.

Was this frustrating for the people who just wanted to know that the creators knew where they were going at all times, and that they always had answers in mind? Yes, probably. But just as with Twin Peaks, fans of Lost became so attached to the characters and the world of the show that finding out exactly why this disparate group of people crash-landed on this particular island became almost incidental.

Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof was open about the influence Lynch has always had on his work, and he made sure to shout out Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, too. “Twin Peaks had a huge impact on me. I would watch it with my dad, and when the show was over, we would talk for, like, two hours about what the hell just happened,” Lindelof chuckled. “And he said, ‘There are these two guys who write it, David Lynch and Mark Frost, and we should go get some Lynch movies!’”

From

When the MGM+ series From debuted in 2022 to little fanfare, it seemed like any other run-of-the-mill horror show. However, over the course of its first season, the show’s central mystery began to captivate audiences, and its willingness to put some truly terrifying imagery on screen set it apart from lesser shows. Pretty soon, the show was dubbed the new Lost, thanks to its premise of a disparate group of strangers forced to band together in a frightening place they couldn’t leave.

However, just as Lost had Twin Peaks’ fingerprints all over it, From followed suit. Indeed, if you dug how Twin Peaks often felt like nightmare fuel, and loved how it made you question whether pure, concentrated evil was operating in your home town just out of sight, then From will be right up your alley.

The show is full of off-the-wall things that either don’t get explained or take a very long time to reveal themselves, and characters regularly experience horrifying dreams and visions that compel them forward into new mysteries. As with most shows on this list, it’s not quite as opaque as Lynch and Frost’s seminal masterpiece, but it’s not a million miles away, either.

Wayward Pines

Wayward Pines, which aired between 2015 and 2016, is easily the most one-to-one Twin Peaks analogue on this list. It was a sinister, off-kilter mystery show about a government agent who embarks on an investigation in a seemingly idyllic small town in the Pacific Northwest. The town’s occupants all seem friendly on the surface – maybe a little too friendly – and over time, the agent uncovers dark secrets and begins to realise he can’t trust anyone.

Incidentally, Wayward Pines looked and felt so like Twin Peaks that it had to combat accusations of being a Peaks ripoff when it was first aired. Blake Crouch, the author of the book the series was based on, was an admitted Peaks die-hard, and the show at least partially inspired the creation of the mysterious Wayward Pines, Idaho, a town nobody can seem to leave.

However, to its credit, Wayward Pines began to distinguish itself as its own entity midway through its first season, and the comparisons began to fade away. It’s nowhere near as good, and is much more conventional in its mystery, but it’s probably worth watching if you’re jonesing for some eerie small-town weirdness. It also wound up sharing a distinction with Twin Peaks, given that it was also cancelled after its second season.

Desperate Housewives

Desperate Housewives showed that a Twin Peaks-influenced show didn’t have to scare the bejesus out of people, or confuse their fragile minds with knowingly obtuse storytelling. Instead, creator Marc Cherry dug beneath the white picket suburban fences of America in a similar manner, revealing sordid tales of murder, adultery, and abuse beneath that drive to keep up small-town appearances.

Amazingly, despite the show beginning with the suicide of a main character, who subsequently narrates from beyond the grave, Housewives managed to remain blackly funny and soap opera-frothy throughout its run.

Interestingly, there was a pretty significant connection in Housewives, too. Brenda Strong, who played the deceased narrator Mary Alice Young, also appeared in Twin Peaks as Jones, Thomas Eckhardt’s assistant, and the original Mary Alice in the Housewives pilot was Sheryl Lee, who so famously played Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Lynch’s masterpiece.

Carnivàle

“I’ve been calling it Twin Peaks with logic,” Michael Anderson told the world before the debut of his bizarre HBO series Carnivàle. Anderson, of course, is emblazoned in fans’ minds as The Man from Another Place, the red suit-clad dwarf resident of the Black Lodge, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he drew a line between Lynch’s headfuckery and Carnivàle’s ultra-arcane exploration of the lives of carnival ‘freaks’ in Great Depression-era America.

Like all shows that push weird as far as it can go, Carnivàle only lasted two seasons, which is something it shared with Twin Peaks’ original run. If possible, though, it was even less accessible to conventional audiences, because the latter was at least framed around a genre trope that has powered countless stories over the last century: the murdered girl.

In contrast, Carnivàle’s less obvious hook of a young man with healing powers dreaming about a drifter with similar abilities was always unlikely to pull in mass audiences. Still, the similarities in the shows are more than just surface level, and if you loved Twin Peaks’ willingness to get esoteric and absurdist with its storytelling, it might just be for you.

Fringe

Watching JJ Abrams’ Fringe, a supernatural mystery show where every case has a speculative science bent, it’s easy to put a finger on its primary influence: The X-Files. However, dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent that co-creators Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci weren’t only paying tribute to Mulder and Scully; they were worshipping at the altar of Lynch and Twin Peaks.

Fringe took a lot of cues when it came to the FBI aspects of its story, and it delighted in delving into the darkly twisted things happening just under the noses of an unsuspecting populace. Several episodes featured the leading trio of Agent Olivia Dunham, Peter Bishop, and his mad scientist father, Walter, venturing into small, rural towns with dark secrets.

Heck, the creators even explicitly referenced it when Peter ended up in a small village surrounded by forests, eating at a local diner famed for its pies. The episode was titled ‘Northwest Passage,’ the name of Twin Peaks’ working title, which eventually became the title of the pilot episode.

Bates Motel

The idea of a Psycho prequel TV series exploring the relationship between serial killer Norman Bates and his overbearing mother before she became a corpse forever sitting at her bedroom window would likely illicit a lot of eye rolls if announced today. After all, TV networks and film studios have been mining recognised IP for all its worth for easily the last decade, and prequels are now a dime a dozen.

However, in 2013, the concept was novel enough that it was given the chance to prove itself to audiences, and with an acclaimed five-season run, it certainly did that. Interestingly, Bates Motel pretty quickly moved past being indebted to Psycho, mostly because it cast Norman and Norma (Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga) as two characters who seem out of time in the small town they live in.

That town, wouldn’t you know it, was located in a beautiful coastal part of Oregon, but this beauty belied the fact that it contained dark secrets within its confines. Secrets even darker, in fact, than Norman’s burgeoning serial killer tendencies. I’d wager that if you’re a Twin Peaks fan, you’ll find more than enough to compel you about Bates Motel.

True Detective

At its best in seasons one and three, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective began to seem like the natural heir to Twin Peaks. The first, which famously starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, saw two detectives disappear down a foreboding, occult-leaning rabbit hole while investigating the case of a murdered young woman. Then, season three saw two different detectives investigating the macabre, ritualistic murder of two young children. Both seasons inspired countless theories from rabid fans, many of which believed the answer lay in the realm of the supernatural.

Instead of embracing the supernatural and the unexplainable, though, True Detective stuck to its guns both times by revealing that the answer behind the great evil was all too human. Still, the fact that Pizzolatto purposefully led his audience down paths that seemingly ended in cults, ritualistic sacrifice, and a mysterious ancient evil known as ‘The King in Yellow’ is all very, very Twin Peaks.

Ironically, the show’s fourth season, Night Country, wasn’t created by Pizzolatto, and it was the first season to more directly embrace supernatural elements. Ultimately, though, that somehow made the show less like Twin Peaks and more akin to a hybrid of John Carpenter’s The Thing and a more conventional locked room mystery.

The Sopranos

On the surface, it may seem like there are few similarities between David Lynch’s surreal, nightmarish Twin Peaks and David Chase’s mob masterpiece The Sopranos. Fascinatingly, though, Chase has long been open about how much Lynch’s pioneering show influenced his creative approach, as he insisted it was the first television show that pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in the medium.

“As surreal as Twin Peaks could be, and as particular as it could be,” he explained, “it felt more like real life to me than the average hour-long television show. It has always been important to me to feel the geography of a place.” He worked hard to evoke a similar sense of place in his crime epic and took some cues from Lynch’s dream sequences when creating Tony Soprano’s vivid dreams, even if they weren’t quite as surreal.

So, if you thought loving Twin Peaks wasn’t necessarily a guarantee that you’d like The Sopranos, you might be pleasantly surprised. There is more crossover in filmmaking style and thematic preoccupations in Chase’s tale of an organised crime boss going to therapy while trying to run a criminal empire than first meets the eye. Chase also included at least one direct reference: a season six shot that panned slowly across trees, with branches blowing lightly in the wind. “That shot was probably influenced by Twin Peaks,” Chase acknowledged, “because I really did like that image.”