"In a roundabout way, Twin Peaks may be the most influential show in today’s teen TV," says Daniel D'Addario. "It’s roundabout because it’s not actually Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s brilliant, flawed soap opera about trauma, Americana, and, ultimately, itself that’s doing the influencing. The CW’s Riverdale, loosely based on the Archie Comics series, cracked the code that what people wanted was a show that had Twin Peaks flavor — small-town quirk, winking awareness of its own outsizedness, affected nostalgia existing right next door to cynical contemporaneity — even if it wasn’t interested in, and couldn’t achieve, actual Lynch. In borrowing from Riverdale, the new CW series Nancy Drew is borrowing from this imaginary Twin Peaks. Like its network-mate, it is leveraging an intellectual property known for its squareness and pumping it with raunch and an overstated air of enigma. Which wouldn’t matter if it were interesting. But Nancy Drew isn’t just dull, it has the misfortune of following another dull show that is much like it."
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TOPICS: Nancy Drew, The CW, Kennedy McMann