In films like "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr.," Lynch has proven that he's very adept at crafting scripts that ask crazy, compelling, unsettling questions, questions that often don't have easy answers if they do at all. Arguably, what makes questions like "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" so worrying is the fact that the answers are almost impossible to collect. But while viewers were initially fascinated and drawn to Twin Peaks, ratings waned somewhat to the point that ABC executives, including future Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger, asked Lynch and his writing team to come up with the point and actually tell viewers who killed the young woman in the critical episode of the second season that aired in November 1990. Although it still had many devoted fans, the show's ratings never reached the same high levels and Iger (then president of ABC Entertainment) canceled the show after its second season.

However, even at the beginning, "Twin Peaks" served as something of a creative earthquake in Hollywood. Although the ratings never got as high as the premiere, it was clear that a wider audience was ready to enjoy strange, surprising, mysterious material on network television (as well as on the growing cable and pay television). It's often easy to tell how successful a piece of art is these days, especially since it will often inspire potential contenders, copycat shows, and movies that seem too lazy to work. But in the case of Twin Peaks, some of the shows that took key inspiration from its deliberately obfuscating style and blend of genres are among the best of their kind and took years to assemble. Sometimes, the connections are obvious; a show like Fox's The X-Files may have been mostly procedural, but Fox Mulder felt cut from the same cloth as Dale Cooper, especially in his deadpan style and desire to get the truth no matter what. (And like “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files” made the leap from the small to the silver screen, garnering a lot of attention for its long-running mysteries and romantic relationships.) When ABC returned to the genre—bending well in 2004 with its incredible and still divisive show 'Lost', as JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse payment a week-after-week tribute to Lynch's work, especially as the mysterious Dharma Initiative was introduced in season two, one of the many new questions viewers had to unravel.

However, the impact goes even deeper beyond those sci-fi programs. Children of the 2010s could delight in Disney's animated series Gravity Falls, which was a high-octane and fast-paced blend of silly humor, family feuds, and the oddities of the Pacific Northwest that culminated in a battle between good and evil. , the latter symbolized by some strange, chatty, yellow triangle, an image that would feel right at home in the mysterious Black Lodge of Twin Peaks. Series creator Alex Hirsch has never been shy admitting or the reference point. And even the mid-2000s procedural comedy Psych was made by the show's fans, to the point where the season five episode "Dual Spires" was a deliberate homage, featuring many of its cast members as guests. .