I thought this show was supposed to be of the horror-genre...

I thought this show was supposed to be of the horror-genre? I'm up to episode 5 right now and all its been is half-comedy, and half-crime.

Watch S1 and S2. The new shit is just Lynch jumping the shark.

>Watch S1 and S2

That's what I'm watching right now. So I should just stop at S2 and not even bother with the new season? Isn't most of S2 really shit though?

It's a genre crossover, not even close to pure horror.

You should watch every episode and the movie despite any idiots who say otherwise.

It's not really horror at all. One or two shocking things perhaps, but that's it.
I presume when it's described as horror it is within context of when it was released (early 90's). I mean The X Files came out a few years later, and obviously put Twin Peaks in its place when it came to horror.

>I thought this show was supposed to be of the horror-genre?

What? No. Who told you that?

the show is a little bit of everything. When it does do scary it does it better than most.

If you don't find Twin Peaks a disturbing, horrifying, bleak look into evil and the chaotic violence that lies beneath the veneer of civilization, something is the matter with you.

>Twin Peaks a disturbing, horrifying, bleak look into evil and the chaotic violence that lies beneath the veneer of civilization
But it doesn't really do a good job of that, does it?
Blue Velvet is a perfect example of how to do it better. You see the bright campy side, and then you see the grim violence. The difference is, that it actually affects the main character. He acts morally questionable to begin with, and then has to fight to not get consumed by his desires. The audience is left wondering just how "good" the main character really is.
This is not the case in Twin Peaks. It is mostly a humorous show with wacky characters, even when the dark side is present. The truly bleak stuff is barely even present in the last half of the show. And on top, the main character is "good" right until the end. Not as strong as one may have thought, but without a doubt "good".

The finale is what is so devastating about the show. One of the only characters to seem fully moral is ultimately shown to be corruptible by the end. I mean of course the second half of season 2 is disposable for the most part because it's when Lynch backed away but up to that point the show is about the violence and abuse inflicted on women, the corruption that seems to be universal, and the difficulty of being moral no matter where you live.

The majority of the characters use one another for their own gain, have affairs behind each other's backs, etc etc. It's an extremely bleak view of human existence.

Even look at something as small as the Horne family's obsession with making money by negotiating backdoor deals and regularly considering murder as the next step forward. The whole irony is of course that the Hornes basically own the whole town and there's no logical need to make more money in such circumstances, they're in the middle of nowhere. The point is that the human capacity for voracious greed is found anywhere and ultimately rots one's morals from within. See Horne admitting to his daughter that he fucked her high school peers and also see the sequence where he almost ends up fucking his own daughter.

Do people watch this show and seriously not look past the surface? It is profoundly dark.

You could literally say that about half the shit that's on TV.

Great.

Twin Peaks came out in 1990 and has been hugely influential.

seriously. The show has a pretty cheery surface that is undercut by a serious evil and darkness that pervades the whole town. Between the murder, the sexual abuse/rape, back-stabbing, to say nothing of the whole show's lynch-pin being the brutal murder of a high-school girl, there's a lot of fucked up stuff going on in Twin Peaks.

Given that the show was airing in 1990, on prime-time television makes me think the OP is not giving it enough credit.

Influential =/= good

Pulp Fiction is influential

I love that you have already changed the conversation. My first comment was that the show is a disturbing look into very ugly notions just as this other person succinctly pointed out. You said that most shows are like that, I said Twin Peaks is influential, you're now changing it to say it's not good. Are you seriously this incapable of carrying on a conversation past one initial comment?

And Pulp Fiction is good.

The fucking irony of this comment, wow

No, not really

What's amazing is that people don't seem to understand what a shock the show must have been to people first encountering it. They don't get the first season's repeated insistence on the soap opera that it seems every character in the town is watching, often seeing their own lives reflected in the laughably histrionic nonsense of the soap opera they're watching. Lynch was trying to deliver a wake up call by emulating soap opera fluff while letting the true horror cut through the superficiality. It was a way of insisting upon the real violence and terror that exists in the world that most tv shows weren't bold enough to depict. He was trying to change the idea of television as an escape from reality by making something that feels familiar yet is ultimately disorienting and often shocking.

>The finale is what is so devastating about the show. One of the only characters to seem fully moral is ultimately shown to be corruptible by the end.
He's not corrupted though? He didn't have the courage to face what was in the RR, but he wasn't corrupted. I even addressed that in my post.
I didn't deny that Twin Peaks was dark at times, I was saying it really doesn't do as good of job at taking a bleak look at evil in society as it could've. Did the Horne brothers do some dark stuff? Of course, even Jerry talked about pretty much taking ownership of the woman that owns the whorehouse by getting her addicted to heroine. But there are very few moments in the show where you go "damn, that was really dark, they're really messed up." Do you know why? Because the brothers are presented as being entertaining ,funny, and likeable, and they have a relationship that is intriguing to watch. Their dark deeds take a back seat as we enjoy watching them eat a sandwich or show off their chemistry. And the less said about the Horne brothers in the second half of the show for your 'bleak outlook' the better.

You act like Twin Peaks is a deep show that many people don't understand - but that's really not the case at all, is it? Who doesn't know it's showing the 'darkness beneath the surface'? Who doesn't think that elements of the show don't blatantly contrast with each other? All I said was that it really doesn't do as good of job of it as it could have, so it ends up being rather more lighthearted than it is dark.

Technically Cooper's morals were in question when they revealed that he fucked Windom's wife.

I think the doppelganger meant that everyone could have a bit of a dark side to them that can manifest into something bigger.

I suppose, but it is barely brought up and doesn't really have much impact on his character. That may be because Windom was a trainwreck of an antagonist - but we have to talk about what Twin Peaks is, not what it could've been.