Twin Peaks is likely a singular event. Lynch appeared before journalists in January at the Television Critics Association press tour, and while he didn't entirely shut the door to more, he seemed fairly certain this would be the end of it: "Well, before I said I wasn’t going to revisit it, and I did. You never say no. But right now there’s no plans for anything more," Lynch said. (That answer counts as decisive for Lynch. When asked at the same press conference how he and Frost divided their work, Lynch said, "Well, in the beginning, many years ago, we were, Mark and I, as if lost in the wilderness, as it always is in the beginning, and then we seemed to find some mountain, and we begin to climb, and when we rounded the mountain, we entered a deep forest, and going through the forest for a time, the trees began to thin." That was only part of the response, which ended with: "This story continues.")

The first incarnation of Twin Peaks changed television as we know it. Though soap operas had created serialized television, Twin Peaks popularized the serial murder mystery, and mystery television in general, from Fringe to Fargo, and so many more. It also served as a cautionary tale about not having a plan, after ABC executives forced Lynch and Frost to resolve the "Who killed Laura Palmer?" mystery, leaving them with nonsensical dreck for the remainder of Season 2, which caused the original show's demise. Twin Peaks also demonstrated that the aesthetics of television could be beautiful and filmic, and not the garishly loud templates provided by network sitcoms and (often) dramas.

It's hard to say definitively what Twin Peaks taught television the most back in the early ’90s. But what it's teaching us now is that television ratings as traditionally quantified are not always what they seem. The splintering of TV viewing is confusing, and sometimes frustrating, but if it affords us television such as Twin Peaks, let us quote Agent Cooper from the show's original run: "I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange."