It is happening again. Twin Peaks is the winner of The 2021 Recommend If You Like Rewatch Tournament – Not Funny TV Show. After defeating The Shield in round 1, taking out round 1 favorite Bojack Horseman in round 2, eking out a win over Neon Genesis Evangelion and finally running away with the win after soundly defeating Deadwood, Twin Peaks is what we’ve collectively decided is the most rewatchable not funny TV show.

At the start of this tournament we made it clear each writer determined what category each film and TV show was seeded. Some people think Twin Peaks is more of a funny TV show than not funny TV show.

Throughout the voting process, a colleague repeatedly pointed out that Twin Peaks is, in fact, a funny show. And I’m happy to admit that it is very funny, as far as shows about the repeated victimization and murder of small-town teen girls go.

Twin Peaks is a show full of GIF-able visual gags, like Leo’s birthday party and llamas in the police station, and quotable witticisms and observations (it’s true, there is nothing quite like the taste sensation when maple syrup collides with ham). You have eyepatch-adorned Nadine and her silent drape runners, Gordon Cole’s one-man shouting match with the world, and James and The Giant Forehead. It has a lot of weird and funny moments, between the horrific revelations about the underground drug and sex industries running through Twin Peaks, WA.

Twin Peaks introduces you to a lot of characters (it is a send-up of soap opera melodrama, after all) and despite the fact that the entire reason you’re dropped into their weird little world (or worlds?) is the brutalization of one of the most popular girls at school, you can’t help but fall in love with them. “Who’s the lady with the log?” FBI Special Agent Dale Bartholomew “aka D.B.” Cooper asks. “They call her the Log Lady,” Sheriff Harry S. Truman responds. She flickers with the lights in a way that’s only significant in the mind of David Lynch himself. It’s some cleverly absurd stuff, especially for a “parody” show built around an Epstein-esque international trafficking operation.

Twin Peaks likes to meander. And even though the show’s slogan/central question — “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” — looms large throughout the series, we get more questions and mysteries with each new answer. “If this guy isn’t the killer, then what in the hell was he doing?” is a well that Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost draw from regularly in the show. There’s no thread they don’t mind pulling, at least for a little bit. But they also don’t mind leaving the watcher unsatisfied.

Perhaps there’s meaning to be found in their not wrapping up every thread in a nice little bow. Twin Peaks explores the broader universe of small-town, flyover America: a place where the kind of “you can’t make this up” day-to-day quirks and oddities just bubble and bop along the surface, obscuring the addiction, disability, mental illness, domestic conflict and violence, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, murder, incest, and repercussions of a massive previously invisible crime network coming to light in their Inland Northwest hamlet.

But yeah, Twin Peaks is funny!  

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