This 30-Episode '90s Thriller Masterpiece Is Now A Top 5 Apple TV Hit

Published Oct 1, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT

Angel Shaw is a Lead Writer and Critic on ScreenRant's TV team, covering new-release and classic TV shows across all major streaming platforms. She has been a writer with ScreenRant since 2022 and specializes in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy. 

Angel holds a bachelor's degree in language interpreting and is passionate about all things culture and communication—especially in how it relates to popular media throughout history (from Shakespeare to Friends to Game of Thrones).

A nostalgic title has popped up in the Apple TV Store's top-10 TV VOD purchases, and it's no great mystery why. Now that we have officially entered October, the streaming and video-on-demand landscape is bound to take a rather definitive shift. This is spooky season, and there's no better way to enjoy fall than with some frightening movies and TV shows. Of course, these don't strictly have to be Halloween projects. Anything that inspires a bit of chill will do, and a dose of '90s nostalgia, camp, mystery, and surrealism doesn't hurt either.

It's precisely for this reason that the 1990 TV thriller Twin Peaks has been revived on the Apple TV store. The series sits at #5 on the Top 10 TV Shows chart (via Flix Patrol), under Criminal Minds, Farscape, American Horror Story, and South Park—predominantly newer projects (of course, Farscape is another example of '90s nostalgia). Twin Peaks ran for two seasons and 30 episodes before it was canceled in 1991. Rating unfortunately declined after that first installment, but this is one of those rare TV shows that only grew in popularity after it ended.

Twin Peaks is a surrealist thriller series that incorporates elements of comedy, horror, and soap-like drama. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the story here revolves around the murder of teenager Laura Palmer. Investigating the crime is FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, who comes to the Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks to untangle this mystery throughout the entire first season. This was unique from crime shows of the 1990s, which generally followed an episodic format that covers an isolated mystery per installment. That's just one way that Twin Peaks changed the game.

Lynch and Frost made sure their Showtime series couldn't be easily defined as any one thing. In some ways, this is a tried-and-true detective fiction, like Sherlock Holmes. In other ways, it's an over-the-top, campy comedy. There is plenty of horror and melodrama, all layered with strange supernatural elements and a generally uncanny tone. Twin Peaks is weird, but deliciously so, and this has given it a rather fantastic influence on television overall.

Twin Peaks Continues To Influence Thriller Television Today

The fact that Twin Peaks is performing so well on Apple TV demonstrates just how brilliantly this series has aged. It's another example of something being underappreciated in its own time. Still, despite the unjust cancellation, the entertainment industry shifted around Twin Peaks' various revolutions. That serialized narrative, which turned away from the age's episodic structure, slowly began to catch on, and prestige dramas like The Sopranos similarly embraced wider, season-long arcs. Today, this approach is the norm.

A third season of Twin Peaks, titled Twin Peaks: The Return, premiered in 2017 on Showtime. The project performed very well and holds a 94% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes​​​​​​.

Twin Peaks is also an early example of "Mystery Box" storytelling. Things kick off with a big box of secrets that viewers are desperate to have opened, but the narrative instead expands on lore, pulling details out of the box one by one. Lost is among the significant projects to adopt this style, as well as shows like The X-Files.

Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, the years since Twin Peaks aired have come with a lot of idyllic small-town horrors, thrillers, and black comedies. We've had Riverdale and Fargo, and, even more recently, hits like Apple TV's Widow's Bay and Netflix's Wayward. These last two would immediately bring to mind Twin Peaks for those who had seen it before. Beyond just that small-town horror, these shows weave in outrageous comedy and camp, purposely poking holes at themselves in precisely the way Twin Peaks did.

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While Twin Peaks clearly had an impact on the entertainment industry in the '90s and early 2000s, this particular style is actually quite trendy right now. Widow's Bay was one of the biggest hits of 2026, and with Twin Peaks drawing so much attention on VOD, we have to confirm that this is just the sort of bizarre flavor modern audiences are looking for.