Netflix's 16-Part Twin Peaks Replacement Is The Best Supernatural Mystery Series Of The Past 10 Years

Published Oct 21, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT

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Nothing will ever be quite like Twin Peaks, but Netflix's two-season supernatural mystery series comes close while still being its own unique story. Despite its cancelation after two seasons, David Lynch's seminal series is still considered one of television's greatest masterpieces over 35 years later (and over nine years after the revival ended), with myriad shows trying to be the next Twin Peaks.

The problem is that many of these series, from Happy Town to Riverdale, appear to be working from a recipe: take an idyllic small town, add in the murder of a resident, and sprinkle in some quirkiness. However, Lynch's storytelling sensibilities transcended formula, so trying to recapture that magic by ticking boxes inevitably fails.

However, the best Twin Peaks replacement avoided this trap, and that series is Netflix's The OA. Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij and premiering in 2016, The OA centers on Marling's Prairie Johnson, a young woman who returns to her small town seven years after vanishing without a trace. Once blind, Prairie can now see, though she's refusing to divulge how her vision returned or where she's been. She also has mysterious scars on her back and calls herself the "original angel" (aka the OA).

Like the murder of Laura Palmer, the answers to The OA's burning questions are almost too weird and surreal to imagine, making the show one mystery box that Twin Peaks ​​​​​​fans will definitely want to open.

Netflix Series The OA Is Streaming’s Ultimate Twin Peaks Replacement

Twin Peaks isn't just a small-town mystery that gets increasingly weird as the story goes on; it's a genre-defying series that plays around with the entire medium of television, bending the rules of what it had previously been allowed to be. The OA does something similar with streaming.

Not beholden to the strict half-hour or one-hour time slots of broadcast TV, The OA's episode runtimes spanned from 31 minutes to 71 minutes. This was more or less unheard of at the time, with The OA one of the first shows to truly think outside the box in terms of streaming's freedoms.

Despite its excellence, Twin Peaks was initially canceled due to declining viewership, as many audience members fell off when the central "Who killed Laura Palmer?" mystery was solved, and the series ratcheted up its surrealist genre fluidity. Similarly, The OA also evolves past its hook.

Those looking for a taut abduction thriller will be sorely disappointed, but The OA certainly rewards viewers looking for Lynchian genre twists. As the series continues, The OA shifts into a sci-fi fantasy series before becoming even weirder, incorporating interpretive dance and some of the most fourth-wall-breaking meta-storytelling television has ever seen. It won't work for everyone, but this is part of the agony and the ecstasy that is The OA.

The OA Deserves A Comeback Season Like Twin Peaks

Image via MovieStillsDB

Unfortunately, the series' agony has to do with the fact that The OA was prematurely canceled after two seasons, just like Twin Peaks. Though the Netflix show had a devoted fandom, the weirder it got, the more viewers it lost, to the point where the streaming platform felt The OA's shrinking audience meant the show couldn't justify its production budget, so they pulled the plug.

What makes this especially painful is that The OA not only ended on a massive cliffhanger, but Marling and Batmangli had a five-season plan. Had the series been able to run its course, it would have resulted in a complete story.

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The silver lining of Twin Peaks' cancelation is that the series was given a revival 26 years later. In 2017, Twin Peaks: The Return premiered, adding an acclaimed, 18-episode third chapter to Lynch's magnum opus, and The OA would surely benefit from something similar.

Whether it's a condensed version of the original five-season plan or something different, The OA deserves to tell a story with its own version of a definitive ending. In a television landscape more concerned with feeding the algorithm than creating original stories, The OA's weirdness would be a welcome balm.