10 TV Shows Probably Made Out Of Spite
2. Twin Peaks: The Return
When it was announced that David Lynch would finally be producing a third series of his hit mystery series Twin Peaks, the general assumption was that it would both rectify 1991's intensely divisive second season finale and finally tie off all the overarching mysteries.
But Lynch being Lynch, he delivered anything but a conventional follow-up, and seemingly went about testing how far he could push the bounds of episodic TV.
For starters, fans were expecting the possessed protagonist, FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), to return to his normal self within a couple of episodes at most, but Lynch made fans wait for sixteen of the show's eighteen episodes - more than three months after the series premiered.
Beyond that, this season ended on yet another, albeit far less divisive, cliffhanger, and throughout its episodes offered up enough intentionally stilted drama, wonky VFX, and surreal asides to make many believe it was all just an elaborate, expensive troll on Lynch's part.
That isn't to say that The Return isn't brilliant, because it frequently is, but that it also felt like Lynch sticking his fingers up at conventionally episodic, cliffhanger-dependent, "water cooler" TV shows and challenging everyone to consider the medium's true experimental potential.