Twin Peaks

Lars von Trier has been open about watching Twin Peaks and wanting to make one. Riget was shot fast on video for Danish television two years after Lynch's series ended, and it is the first serious attempt anywhere to do what Twin Peaks did. What it takes: one institution as a whole world, a soap-opera cast of staff played absolutely straight beside supernatural material, comedy and dread in the same scene, an episode-ending address to camera, and a ghost child. Its own line of descent is visible afterwards. Von Trier's pair of doctors doing commentary, the jaundiced grading and the handheld camera become the Dogme rules a year later, and Stephen King remade Riget for American television in 2004.

Twin Peaks fixed a template modern television keeps returning to: a detective arrives from outside in a small, beautiful, remote place, investigates a crime against a young woman, and finds that the community itself is the thing worth examining. Top of the Lake runs that structure in the New Zealand Southern Alps, with a detective who is from the place and therefore cannot stand outside it, which is the variation. The landscape treated as an active presence, the local institutions that close ranks, and a case that opens onto a wider abuse are all recognisable from Lynch and Frost's series.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have both cited Twin Peaks as the network drama that showed them a mystery could run for seasons. Lost takes its shape from it: a large ensemble, each member keeping a secret that an episode opens, in a place that is itself the central enigma, with the supernatural let in gradually rather than announced.