Taking A Moment to Thank Twin Peaks for True Detective
By Josh Hill
We are sitting in a void that has us without any new episodes of True Detective and it’s something that has been making this summer especially hard to get through.
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But while we all bum around waiting for the show to come back, it’s the perfect time to acknowledge a series that came well before any of the shows we love today that helped pioneer the gritty age of high quality television we live in today.
As James Orbesen from Salon.com points out, we may applaud the quality of shows like Breaking Bad and True Detective today, but we can’t go another second without giving a rousing round of applause to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks for paving the way over 20 years ago.
"Many of the defining aspects of “Twin Peaks” can seem clichéd today: Its narrative intricacy, its darkness, its reliance on antiheroes. But that’s just because we are by now so used to the show’s sensibility in our televised diet. What set this show apart has so thoroughly been assimilated that talking about it is like pointing to the sky and calling it blue. But this engaging, surreal and occasionally frustrating, 30-episode series about the hunt for a prom queen’s killer was ahead of its time. Many of today’s modern classics owe it a debt audiences might not be aware of."
It’s amazing to look back at something like Twin Peaks nowadays and realize just how ahead of its time it really was, but as we sit without any True Detective in our lives we can dig into the old episodes of Twin Peaks to trace the roots of the show we love.