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There’s plenty of places on TV you wouldn’t want to find yourself: the pre-credit sequence of Law & Order; on a date with any of the characters from Seinfeld; pretty much anywhere in Westeros. But if there’s one setting that should be avoided at all cost, it’s a small town.

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But if you live in the middle of America, mothers-in-law and murderers are the least of your worries. Bates Motel, Smallville, Under The Dome, The Prisoner’s The Village, American Gothic’s Trinity; dude, these places are supernaturally screwed. There was even a short lived show from the early ‘90s called Eerie, Indiana, located in a small town where, of course, nothing was as it seemed (although when your town’s called Eerie you can hardly be blamed for misleading wandering strangers).

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From surreal murder mysteries and quirky small-town sitcoms to 'The X-Files' – these series owe David Lynch's cult show a serious debt

When Twin Peaks signed off on June 10th, 1991, it left behind a lot of unanswered questions, a legion of devoted fans – and a serious impact on the medium. Ever since then, showrunners and writing rooms have looked to David Lynch and Mark Frost's "Peyton Place on acid" series for examples on how to push the boundaries of small-screen serial storytelling. It's cast a long, long shadow, and you could argue that almost every other TV show that's hit the airwaves since then – especially in the premium-cable "Prestige" age – has been influenced by the groundbreaking show. We're not living in the Peak TV era so much as the Peaks TV era.

There have been a handful of mysteries, melodramas and quirky comedies, however, that owe a bigger or more obvious debt to this story of secret lives and curdled small-town Americana than most. We've singled out 20 TV shows – some old, some new, some niche, some network hits – that have borrowed elements of Twin Peaks and run with them. It may be the "Dead Girl" catalyst that's turned into a television trope, or it might be the oddball denizens that populate an out-of-the-way woodsy burg. It could even just be a weird-as-hell vibe that a series shares with Lynch and Frost's lysergic primetime soap. But all of these well-known series have certainly built off the weird, the wonderful and often WTF Peaks foundation.


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Great, now I'm sad all over again that Carnivale got cancelled.
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Many, if not most, of the reviews of the new season of Twin Peaks—David Lynch's surreal, small-town soap-slash-fantasy Americana noir that transformed television 25 years ago and that improbably returns this month to Showtime—will reference Riverdale, the CW show where Archie, the red-headed doofus from Archie Comics, is hot.

Yes, critical conversation will compare this auteur-driven, surreal, monumental television series to a teen drama where Cole Sprouse of The Suite Life fame plays Jughead as a brooding art boy whose dad is a gang member played by Skeet Ulrich. This fact might embarrass the more cinephilic people in the Twin Peaks audience: Riverdale is many things, but one thing it is not is an auteur show, and it definitely is not cinematic.
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Not having a regular living-room TV for the next six months, I started catching up on box sets by streaming them on my phone. This caused a judder of horror among friends, but download time and pixel density is great, and if you wear headphones the viewing experience is much enhanced.

I’d avoided BSBing* until ‘Breaking Bad’ ate part of my life. And yet…even that groundbreaking show trod water in places, with whole episodes failing to move the story on. Then ‘Game of Thrones’ pulled the same trick. I hated the sexplanation** sequences and really don’t like sword ‘n’ sorcery stuff, and of course it’s like a soapier, shagfestier cycle of sub-Shakespearean history plays, but there were enough jaw droppers (the Red Wedding, Hold the Door etc) to keep me hooked.

I then started creeping into the less heralded areas of the New Golden Age of Television, and discovered ‘Wayward Pines’ (actually the ‘hottest show in America’ according to its over-emphatic Amazon book blurb) although it had passed me by, as a great many things do. This had the benefit of being based on a shorter book cycle, so the ten 42-minute episodes played at far greater speed, with all fat trimmed off. I’m a sucker for stories set in isolated towns where there’s something a bit off (cf ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Eerie, Indiana’, ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Banshee’ etc) and ‘Wayward Pines’ knows I am, deliberately playing on those tropes. But it ventures to go where few US series have been before – and to do so on the ad-driven no-sex-or-swearing Fox network seems little short of miraculous. Because what we have here is Subversion 101.

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