There is a difference between unique and influential products. While unique works tend to keep their edge and traits for years after release, influential works are strongly related to the time they were created. What was felt as fresh and innovative back then tends to become stale and trivial over time as it gets endlessly imitated by later products. "Twin Peaks" has a little bit of both. I got a chance to rewatch the series after decades and could feel both its unique and influential elements. It felt a bit old and trite at times, but after getting back into the mood I thought the show still holds pretty well. The exaggerated soap opera elements are hilarious, but are well-balanced by the crime fiction storyline and uncanny, surreal elements. The first season has very little action and takes its time to introduce Twin Peaks and its inhabitants. Quality is not so uniform as different directors and writers took part in the project, but overall everything is well-balanced and, despite the slow pace, hooky enough. Attention lowers a bit towards the end, but the intense and over-the-top season finale manages to effectively bring us back on board. Donna and James' story was the only thing that felt a bit tired, sometimes even painful to watch though. Did anyone really care about them?

The second season starts strong and offers some of the best episodes ever ("Lonely Souls", above all), but it gets completely lost after Laura's killer is revealed. The cheap soap opera elements are the only things left and it doesn't even feel like a parody anymore. Characters have completely different personalities and do silly things all the time. Ben Horne's descent into senile dementia and James new cringe-worthy love interest could be counted among the worst moments in television history. Windom Earle had some potential as the new threat, but he ends up just fooling around and acting like a weirdo with no real consequences. The last episode "Beyond Life and Death" makes little sense but is at least visually interesting. It might be what David Lynch's wanted to do but made me feel the previous 10 episodes even more useless.

Almost thirty years later, Lynch finally gets a chance to revamp the show and have full creative control. For the first time, he co-wrote and directed all episodes himself. However, the final product is closer to "Fire Walk With Me" than it is to the original series. As the characters also keep saying, it doesn't even feel like the same place anymore. America changed, television changed, we changed. A lot of the events do not even happen in Twin Peaks, and most of the historical characters just got minor roles. While the original series was fairly linear and self-explicative, there is no-one helping us figure out what is going on. There will be some challenges even if you are familiar with Lynch's recurrent themes and symbolism, especially in the ending. It's one hell of self-indulgent, purely Lynchian 20+ hour movie, but I personally enjoyed it. Despite some cheap-ass CGI here and there (God, that Bob ball and glove dude scene), there are a lot of visually and atmospherically striking shots and a lot of cult moments. I would recommend it to hardcore fans only though.