Twin Peaks: A Genre of its Own

Having just blown through all of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU, my fifteen-year-old self was hungry for a new crime tv show to binge. A quick Google search led me to Twin Peaks, marketed as a crime drama show about an FBI agent who goes to a small town in Washington to investigate the death of a teenage girl. This sounded right up my alley and so I began to watch the show, expecting something similar to the crime shows I was familiar with.

The show starts off with a fairly typical setup; a small, quirky town with more than a few secrets, some standard teenage melodrama, and an odd, but charming lead character. In the first few episodes of the show, you could certainly describe it as a crime drama, as the focus of the show is centered around Laura Palmer’s death, taking a “whodunnit” approach in unraveling the mystery. As the show progresses, it veers heavily from this course. The show takes on a dreamlike, abstract quality, with surreal, oftentimes disturbing visuals.

Trying to fit a show that sheds its aesthetic skin every couple of episodes into one genre is extremely difficult. In Mittel’s “Cultural Approach to TV Genre Theory”, he states that genres are not defined by one specific, uniform aspect of the show, and that it can be defined quite differently depending on the audience, and what criteria it is being judged on. Is Twin Peaks a teen drama, as many of the main characters are teenagers, and much of the plot revolves around their lives? Is it a thriller, with its intense chase scenes and suspenseful moments? Is it a horror show, as many of the later episodes deal with disturbing and uncomfortable imagery? Is it in fact, a crime show, as I once thought, as the show does in fact revolve around the murder of a young girl and the investigation surrounding it?

After viewing this show many times since I was fifteen, I have never been able to come up with a solid answer, and I think that is the point. Twin Peaks was and is unlike anything else on television, and it truly pushes the limits of what a television show can be. It contains elements of a plethora of genres and merges them in truly unpredictable ways. Should a show with themes and imagery as surreal and avant-garde as this be grouped into the same category as Law and Order? Some might object, but I for one, am forever thankful that David Lynch baited me in with a simple murder mystery and then exposed me to some of the most groundbreaking and genre-defying television out there.