While it would be hard for any mystery series to hit the same historic highs as From and Twin Peaks, it looks like one Prime Video show has the potential to prove a worthy successor to both of these two series. Twin Peaks is one of the most influential TV shows ever made. Creators Mark Frost and David Lynch’s murder mystery masterpiece Twin Peaks enraptured American audiences in the early 1990s, and the show’s unique blend of small-town soap opera, trippy psychological horror, police procedural, and offbeat character comedy reshaped TV in the years that followed.
The very fact that the Disney XD children’s cartoon Gravity Falls, the Netflix mega-hit sci-fi show Stranger Things, the satirical soap opera Desperate Housewives, and the surreal teen drama Riverdale all cited Twin Peaks as an influence proves just how innovative the show was. Dale Cooper’s investigation into the death of Laura Palmer never went where viewers were expecting, and its strange mixture of paranormal tropes and more conventional police procedural plot elements even gave rise to the scariest episodes of The X-Files.
A more recent hit that was unquestionably influenced by Twin Peaks is the infamously unsettling MGM+ show From. With an ensemble cast led by Lost’s Harold Perrineau, From is set in a terrifying mysterious community where no civilians can leave since something shadowy and terrible stalks the forests surrounding the town. Blending mystery box plotting, chilling scares, and involving character drama, From is an improvement on ABC’s classic Lost, and a tough show to replace. However, Prime Video’s upcoming Stillwater might manage this feat.
Stillwater’s Mysterious Blend Of Small-Town Horror Is Reminiscent Of Twin Peaks & From
An adaptation of the Skybound graphic novel of the same name, Stillwater is set to be an eight-episode small-town mystery horror from Prime Video. The story of the series focuses on star Ben Hardy’s character Daniel, a former convict who is drawn to the titular town of Stillwater when a mysterious letter tells him that a “substantial inheritance” awaits him there. What Daniel instead discovers is a seemingly impossible town where no one dies, nothing ages, and there appears to be no way to escape.
Stillwater’s original graphic novel was created by Chip Zdarsky, who previously penned Jughead and Harley Quinn comic runs for Archie and DC respectively, and Ramón K Pérez of 2011’s Tale of Sand fame. Producer Greg Berlanti, known for the dark DC shows Titans and Doom Patrol as well as Netflix’s Lovecraftian horror series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, is set to produce the Prime Video adaptation.
What We Know About Prime Video’s Stillwater TV Series So Far
Stillwater’s premise owes something to the supernatural small town setting of From, while the mysterious inheritance that sets the story in motion calls to mind director James Wan’s underrated 2007 horror movie Dead Silence. However, judging from reviews of the Stillwater graphic novel online, the divisively slow pacing of the series and its ambiguous, dark horror elements will be as reminiscent of Twin Peaks as From.
In particular, Stillwater’s lack of clear and easy answers to its mysteries sounds similar to 2017’s infamously daring Twin Peaks: The Return. Maybe the least nostalgic TV revival of all time, this downbeat, unsettling final chapter to the cult TV show offered no easy answers or comforting character comebacks, but felt entirely true to the unapologetically dark original show as a result.
Stillwater’s unsettling adaptation of the graphic novel can offer an alternative to Prime Video’s lighter, character-driven small-town mysteries like Sterling Point, prioritizing horror and unease over romance and family drama. Only time will tell if Stillwater can reach the heights of genre classics like From and Twin Peaks, but the Prime Video certainly seems to have all the right ingredients to pull this off.
- Release Date
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1990 – 1991-00-00
- Showrunner
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Mark Frost
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
