Twin Peaks was destination television in 1990 and ‘91. The premiere of Twin Peaks on 8 April 1990 was a seismic event in popular culture. It was a fleeting moment when art infiltrated the mainstream, although Twin Peaks did not start as the cult phenomenon it would become later. Today, different Americans are living in different versions of the same country, and social media makes people double down on their attitudes. But back then, there was a shared experience. That’s where the term “water cooler moment” came from. No such common baseline exists today. Twin Peaks has always been, at its core, an exploration of the duality of good and evil, past and present. The original series embraced nostalgia by contrasting the town’s sinister underbelly with the quaint echoes of the 1950s on its surface, from the retro Double R diner’s cherry pie to the Miss Twin Peaks beauty pageant. The murder of the high school homecoming queen strips the veneer of respectable gentility from the picturesque rural community to expose the seething undercurrents of illicit passion, greed, jealously and intrigue. Twin Peaks, like Lynch's Blue Velvet, is deliberately set in what looks like the "perfect" country town. Everyone is white, the local lawmen are honest and upright males, the economy relies on the local logging industry and everyone knows everyone else. It's a wholesome, stylized version of the past, an artifact from the 1950s. He did this deliberately in order to highlight the debauchery that existed beneath the surface. Lynch has always been fascinated with wholesome ideals and the decidedly unwholesome truths that prop them up. So while Twin Peaks looks like the perfect town, its residents hold dark secrets, sex and crime are just around the corner and a demon-creature is possessing a resident and making them commit murder. “There’s a sort of evil out there,” says Sheriff Truman in an episode of the show. That line gets to the heart of Lynch’s work, which reflects the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture. The nuclear family? At best a cheerful deception, an infinite nightmare at worst. The prom queen is a coke-addicted prostitute and victim of rape; her rapist and eventual murderer is a respectable corporate lawyer, her father. The ghost of Laura Palmer hovers over everything, as does the specter of Bob, the Black Lodge (headquarters of a purgatorial alternative universe), and the omnipresent undertow of “the evil in these woods”. With the breakdown of a shared reality due to a refusal to agree upon facts, and the prospect of parallel or twin realities now upon us, David Lynch's iconic TV series was a chillingly prescient vision of modern America, albeit through a very retro lens.