The “other thing” had one or two aspects in common with Goddess, not least a doomed blonde fated to die at the hands of duplicitous characters. But even though its central figure Special Agent Dale Cooper would exclaim early on, “What was really going on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, and who pulled the trigger on JFK?”, Twin Peaks’ web of conspiracies and mysteries had a strange pull all of its own.

Twenty years ago this spring, Twin Peaks made its debut and changed the rhythm of television forever. Its odd tempo, black humour, brutal violence, pastoral beauty and nightmarish imagery inspired an adventurous new kind of TV serial – from The X Files, to The Sopranos, to Lost – and even recalibrated the way Hollywood nurtured and marketed indie films like Donnie Darko or Memento. Twin Peaks was both a cult obsession and, for a season and a half at least, a mainstream success, spawning pie and coffee parties and riveting tens of millions of viewers each week by asking, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

“It was the first time I’d had the experience of being totally speechless while watching a television show,” says writer/director Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood. “That really influenced me. There’d be no Six Feet Under or True Blood without it, I would say. And the fact that they got it onto major network – it’s still an amazing feat.”

Initially, though, Lynch and Frost had few expectations of “the other thing”, a pilot script entitled Northwest Passage. “Mark printed out a copy and I drove home with it,” Lynch says. “I sat down and read it and said, ‘Jeez, this is kind of good.’ It seemed to hold a promise. It was a world that I felt real good about.”