This essay was originally published and is still cross-posted at Wonders in the Dark as the #2 entry in their Top 80 Greatest Television Shows countdown (later expanded to 165). It is spoiler-free until noted within the text itself. Readers unfamiliar with Twin Peaks are encouraged to continue up to that point, marked by "***", to build interest.
Fair warning: this is also a very long discussion of a complex series, so you may want to read in installments.
"Twin Peaks is not a TV show." You've probably heard this refrain before, perhaps moderated to "Twin Peaks is not normal television," or, more generously to the medium, "Twin Peaks changed TV forever." However phrased, the essence remains the same: Twin Peaks still stands out boldly from the rest of the televisual landscape, twenty-seven years after its debut on the ABC network immediately following America's Funniest Home Videos. As if to cement this iconic status, when the series returned for an eighteen-hour limited run this summer (dubbed by Showtime's marketing department as Twin Peaks: The Return although filmmaker David Lynch, co-creator with author/TV writer Mark Frost, simply calls it the third season) this transgressive reputation persisted. Even against the tighter competition of "Prestige TV," critics were dazzled by its revolutionary nature, especially the (literal and figurative) atomic blast of Part 8, which could almost have been a program of standalone avant-garde Lynch shorts. Yet the story of Twin Peaks is - like everything else in Twin Peaks - a dual narrative, embedded at once in the world of surrealist cinema (and Lynch's own private universe) as well as TV conventions it embraced, wrestled with, and frequently overthrew.