What if the best film by American filmmaker David Lynch, who died on January 16, was a TV show? Could we reduce this monster work – 48 episodes and 42 hours of images, in other words roughly the equivalent of 28 one-and-a-half-hour movies, more than enough to fill a filmmaker's lifetime – to a single genre?

The story goes that a writers' strike had dried up the pipeline, so ABC had little to lose when Lynch and his co-writer Mark Frost, one of the creators of Hill Street Blues, came to present this improbable project for a detective series mixed with soap opera, knitted around the death of a high-school girl in the US's northwest, a setting close to Lynch's native Montana. Two years later, on April 8, 1990, the launch of the first two episodes of Twin Peaks was a major event for the channel, which had shown a certain flair. A few weeks later, Lynch won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart. The buzz was immense.

Based on the ever-popular provincial whodunnit, Lynch and Frost make the strange even stranger and turn the prototype into a masterpiece. Revolving around a young FBI agent, played by the loyal Kyle MacLachlan, who arrives in Twin Peaks to lead the investigation, the series imagines a community possessed, infiltrated by an evil of esoteric origin which, little by little, corrupts lives that are meant to be normal. The plots are, in reality, almost all sentimental, and the show doesn't lack humor. The series' quirkiness and narrative detours captivated an audience bored to tears by television, and Twin Peaks brought a breath of fresh air.

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