Best Ever
Drama?

Who killed Laura Palmer?

The question drove Twin Peaks for its first season and a half, pulled thirty-five million viewers to a Thursday night in 1990, and ultimately destroyed the show when ABC demanded Lynch and Frost answer it. The network thought they were giving audiences what they wanted. They were closing the only door that mattered.

The answer was never the point. The question was a way in.

The pilot is a miracle of tonal control. A girl’s body washes up on a beach, wrapped in plastic, and the town of Twin Peaks begins to unravel. So far, so procedural. But Lynch shoots the grief like opera—Sarah Palmer’s scream when she learns her daughter is dead, the reaction shots of students collapsing in classrooms—and then interrupts the tragedy with scenes of almost parodic absurdity. A woman carries a log and claims it has messages. A man weeps about his broken heart at a crime scene. FBI Agent Dale Cooper rhapsodizes about Douglas firs and cherry pie.

You have no idea what register you’re in. That disorientation is the point.

Kyle MacLachlan’s Cooper is the show’s secret weapon. He’s earnest without being naive, strange without being alienating, and he takes everything—Tibetan rock-throwing and forensic investigation, coffee and supernatural visions—with the same calm enthusiasm. Cooper believes in goodness in a world Lynch has rigged to punish believers. The tension between his optimism and the show’s darkness generates much of its power.

The ensemble is preposterously deep. Shelly Johnson’s quiet desperation. Bobby Briggs’ smirking damage. Audrey Horne’s dangerous innocence. The Log Lady’s gnomic pronouncements. Every character feels like they have a secret life the camera hasn’t shown yet. Lynch and Frost plotted soap opera storylines they never planned to resolve, generating inexhaustible mystery. The town was the destination. The murder was just the excuse to visit.

Laura Palmer herself remains the gravitational center even in death. Sheryl Lee plays her only in flashbacks, videos, and dreams, but her presence saturates every frame. The pilot devastates because Lynch makes you understand that this town loved her—prom queen, Meals on Wheels volunteer, tutor, friend—before slowly revealing the horrors underneath. Laura Palmer wasn’t just a victim. She was a person who contained multitudes, and her death cracked open a town that preferred not to see.

The Red Room dream sequence remains some of the strangest television ever broadcast. The backward-talking dwarf, the curtains, Laura whispering the killer’s name—Lynch aired this on network TV in 1990, and somehow America watched. The dream logic colonized the show’s waking scenes: characters make decisions that feel emotionally true but resist rational explanation. Why does Cooper throw rocks at bottles to narrow suspects? Because it works. Because this is how Twin Peaks operates.

When ABC forced the reveal in season two, the show lost its engine. The remaining episodes struggle to find new mysteries worth caring about. But that finale—Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge, BOB grinning from his reflection—remains one of television’s great cliffhangers, even if resolution took twenty-five years.

The owls are not what they seem. Neither was the show. Lynch built a door disguised as a murder mystery, and thirty-five million people walked through it expecting answers. What they found instead was a world—strange, sad, funny, terrifying, and inexhaustible.

The door is still open. The question still matters more than any answer could.

David Lynch & Mark Frost: The Best Ever is dream logic on network television. Is Twin Peaks the Best Ever Mystery Drama? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Television Collection Blu-ray includes both seasons with the Log Lady introductions restored.
• For the obsessive, the Z to A Box Set is the collector’s grail—all eras, extensive extras, and a limited run.