Forget ‘Widow’s Bay,’ TV’s Most Influential 2-Season Mystery Thriller Is Streaming Free

Apple TV’s new darling, Widow’s Bay, follows a cursed New England island-town, full of kooky characters and supernatural mysteries. The show cleaned up at the 2026 Emmys, winning a whopping 14 awards. Widow’s Bay is original in its execution and details, but it couldn’t exist without TV’s most influential mystery thriller of all time, Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks first aired over 30 years ago in 1990. Today, it’s streaming on PlutoTV, free with ads. The show follows FBI Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, in his investigation into the death of Laura Palmer, a high-school girl from the small Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks. It’s a simple premise, but the quirky side-characters and expansive exploration of the central events drives Cooper directly into the mysteries of life, death, cruelty, and love.

Twin Peaks was one of the first television series to follow one continuous plot from start to finish (with, admittedly, some dilly-dallying in the middle of Season 2). A series of small-scale plots were more common on TV at the time, meant to be resolvable by the end of an episode (think “monster-of-the-week” episodes on X-Files). The continuous plot and propulsive cliffhangers kept viewers on the edge of their seats, eager to tune in for next week’s episode. This formula is the default now, and almost every successful show streaming is trying to get the viewer to click to the next episode with a cliffhanger or dramatic development. Twin Peaks changed TV forever, and Lynch’s iconic mystery series is still one of the most experimental shows out there.

‘Twin Peaks’ Made Television More Supernatural

Image via ABC

David Lynch is always interested in innocence, dreams, and “a woman in trouble.” That is, he’s interested in the truths that lurk beneath the everyday. Beloved mystery-thriller Twin Peaks is no exception. Twin Peaks has a subtle supernatural bent, which has influenced shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and certainly Widow’s Bay. Rather than taking a “monster-of-the-week” approach, the show doesn’t reset with a new threat every episode. Instead, every new discovery, location, and character is introduced to further explore the mystery of what happened to Laura Palmer.

The supernatural in Twin Peaks is little more than local color for the majority of the show, lending texture and a sense of the unknown to the investigation rather than monsters or ghosts. Agent Cooper brings some of this spookiness with him in the form of belief in the revelatory power of dreams. Dreams are the show’s main entry-point for the supernatural, starting in Episode 2, which ends with one of Cooper’s dreams. In the dream, Bob is introduced, and so is a woman who looks just like Laura Palmer. She tells Cooper a secret—the identity of the killer. In the morning, he forgets who it was. Dreams are the site of revelation, giving Cooper the tools he needs to start piecing the mystery together.

David Lynch uses the Surreal to Explain the Unexplainable

Image via ABC

Advertisement

Halfway through Season 2, Laura’s storyline is concluded, and it’s revealed that her own father, Leland Palmer, was her killer. It’s explained by a demonic possession of some kind: Bob entered Leland’s body to enact Laura’s torture and murder. Those events are explored more fully in the film Fire Walk With Me. Bob is the stand-in for the dark forces that inhabit the souls of men. It’s crucial that Leland met Bob as a child, possibly a metaphor for his own sexual abuse as a boy. That a father could torture and kill his own beloved daughter is no more explicable than dreams or whatever darkness lurks in the woods surrounding Twin Peaks. The mystery turns at that point of discovery from what happened to Laura to more philosophical questions of why and how.

Human cruelty becomes the supernatural force in the show. Through the unnecessary and winding half-plots of the second season emerges the Black Lodge, a real place on another plane of reality. It is where evil is born. In Twin Peaks, like ideas, like dreams, evil is real and it lives somewhere. The scenes in dreams and in the Black Lodge are the most surreal and iconic in the show. They are memorable, not only for their strangeness, but for their emotional resonance, eschewing logic for another kind of truth.

The Black Lodge Influences Filmmakers Today, as Seen in ‘The Backrooms’

Dreams give Cooper what he needs to piece the mystery together, but that doesn’t mean they give it all away: the act of discovery is part of the journey to truth. It’s said that souls must pass through the Black Lodge after death, and must face what they see with bravery or be destroyed. The Black Lodge is the soul’s confrontation with darkness and evil. The challenge is to encounter it without being destroyed. David Lynch goes straight for the spiritual implications of the show’s events, asking how anyone can live in a world where such profound suffering can be caused by another person.

The scenes from the Black Lodge, unsurprisingly, are otherworldly. The red velvet curtains that haunt Lynch’s oeuvre are coupled with a zig-zag black and white floor, and the rooms seem to meander without logic or purpose, out of place and out of time. Agent Cooper confronts Bob and Laura, or someone who looks just like her, in the Black Lodge. They filmed the scenes backwards, giving movement and sound a jerky, unsettling quality. Contemporary directors draw on this visual vocabulary in surreal films like The Backrooms to convey the feeling of displacement, but in Twin Peaks, there’s also an allure, a visual pleasure despite the disturbing material found in that landscape.

‘Twin Peaks’ Leaves Experimentation Unexplained, to Great Effect

Image via ABC

The show’s journey to the otherworld works because it doesn’t try to over-articulate its own meaning. It works because it lingers in the realm of intuition, of mystery, of dreams. Twin Peaks doesn’t end with a treatise on how to confront evil and come out on the other side with goodness in your heart. Still, the viewer leaves the Black Lodge with Cooper feeling that there is evil in the world, and one must witness it but not be destroyed by it. There is wonder and beauty in the mysteries of this world, but mystery has a dark edge too.

Twin Peaks explores some of the worst human acts on network TV, without excessive gore, or too much explicit violence, not by censoring itself but by accessing the horror through surreal, experimental sequences. Laura in the Black Lodge screams and screams, wide eyed, amidst strobing lights while Cooper watches on. That moment isn’t a direct analogue for her suffering in life, but it conveys the powerful emotions and impact that follow. Twin Peaks is, from start to finish, about a community trying desperately to cope with unspeakable loss. The show trusts its viewers enough to not respond to that loss by trying to contain it in language. Instead, characters watch on. They cry. They dance. They try to make meaning, as best as they can.

Advertisement

Release Date

Advertisement

1990 – 2017-00-00

Directors

Lesli Linka Glatter, Caleb Deschanel, Duwayne Dunham, Tim Hunter, Todd Holland, Tina Rathborne, Diane Keaton, Graeme Clifford, James Foley, Jonathan Sanger, Mark Frost, Stephen Gyllenhaal

Advertisement

Writers

Mark Frost, David Lynch, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, Barry Pullman, Scott Frost, Tricia Brock

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement