“are you familiar with project Blue Book?”. Ripensare la serialità (fantascientifica) attraverso twin Peaks

This essay locates the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2 seasons; 2017, 1 season) within the developments underwent by Television studies in the last three decades, with particular regard to the changes the genre system of fictional narrative on the small screen has experienced during this period. It then delves into the issue of the series relationship with the science fiction genre and its problematic positioning with respect to the canon of science fiction seriality. At a time of exceptional vitality of the serialised fictional narrative in audio-visual media, Twin Peaks polarises a multitude of issues in the sociology of culture, media aesthetics and the television storytelling. With its authorial chrisms and its use of feuilleton devices that made the fortune of a new kind of television, its skilful mixing of realism and fantastic-esoteric themes, the involvement of a lively fandom and the interest it catalysed in academic studies, the series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch in 1990 has masterfully epitomised a coeval golden age of US television seriality and, with the 2017 revival, a new creative and productive season. The critical discourses that Twin Peaks has been able to raise around it make it an emblematic product of the narrative hybridism that has increasingly characterised high-end television since the 1990s, and how this has been received in academia over decades in which television studies, screen studies and sociology of the media have seen the emergence of a new popularity of serial television narratives as objects of study. Within this context, the series which passed from ABC to Showtime offers itself as a vantage point for observing the crucial reconfigurations which have affected the system of genres, understood both as productive categories and distribution labels, and as indicators used to activate conventional horizons of expectation. More than the discussions on the degree of science-fictionality of Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch’s series has favoured complex (and critically productive) reflections on the porosity of the science fiction repertoire, on its dissolution within new forms of hybridism, and the presence and liveliness in narratives of high productive range and whose aura of authorship is connected precisely with a self-conscious disruption of existing viewing protocols.