10 TV Shows That Make You Question Your Own Reality
2. Twin Peaks
David Lynch has an incredible mind’s eye for the conception and delivery of the early 90s sensation Twin Peaks. It’s hard to fathom 30 years on from its premiere just how massive this show was as a global smash hit, even with all the heavy promotion that came with its 2017 revival. By 1990, Lynch had become a master of translating disturbing and eerie imagery into cinemas, with films such as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet all delivering on weird moments that were as creepy as they were impenetrable to comprehend (Eraserhead in particular is nightmarish with a subtext that is pretty difficult to completely lay a finger on).
Making the move to television, Lynch’s incomparable style transitioned along with him, along with its opaque and challenging cinematic language intact. A murder mystery with a rafter of potential suspects full of bizarre idiosyncrasies, the show takes a number of sharp turns with baffling character dialogue that leaves viewers questioning all concepts of understanding what exactly is going on.
That’s without mentioning the fact that this show contains some of the most iconic scenes in American television history. Kyle McLachlan’s turn as the lead Dale Cooper is madcap and frenetic in such a memorable way, and when his sleep is interrupted by a 7 foot tall giant or he finds himself in a red-curtained room being approached by a dancing, backwards-speaking little man in a red suit, it opened up a lot of minds to television as a means of surreal expression that had never been seen before, and asked a lot of questions of viewers’ own mortality that would make it pretty hard to get to sleep after.