David Lynch once named his favourite TV show of all time: “The only show I really watched”

Posted On February 25, 2025February 25, 2025

David Lynch is quite rightly known as an icon of the movie business. He’s regarded as one of the most influential directors of his generation with movies that not only changed the shape of modern cinema but constantly challenged both its creators and its audiences to think outside the box, let creativity run wild and truly embrace film as an art form. However, even considering this giant swathe of influence, perhaps his most inspirational moments came via a smaller screen.

The impact that David Lynch had on the television medium can hardly be quantified in any way. Twin Peaks revolutionised how television shows were conceptualised, paving the way for other creators who followed in Lynch’s footsteps and contributed to the revitalisation of episodic narratives whose artistic investigations never faltered.

While Lynch had already proven that he was a promising visionary through early masterpieces such as Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, Twin Peaks was a defining moment in Lynch’s career that earned him the title of “the first popular surrealist.” With Twin Peaks, Lynch showed the world that it was possible to achieve the philosophical power of cinema in every episode of a show. But, perhaps his greatest trick, was making such a uniquely positioned, philosophically guided and artistically driven piece of television popular.

To this day, modern shows have been trying to emulate the wonderful surrealism of Twin Peaks and the best example of that is Donald Glover’s Atlanta. Glover himself claimed that he had set out to make a version of Twin Peaks that revolved around rappers but he managed to make a worthy modern spiritual successor of Lynch’s opus.

Lynch is still heavily interested in the television medium, labelling it as the new “arthouse”. That’s exactly why he returned to Twin Peaks in 2017 and was supposed to be working on a Netflix project which had a huge budget of $85million.

When asked about his favourite show of all time, Lynch did not hesitate to cite one of the classics of American television – the 1957 legal drama series Perry Mason. Film historians have noted that Perry Mason was one of the most successful of its kind, with Raymond Burr’s portrayal of the titular character always being highly rated.

Lynch revealed that Perry Mason had a formative influence on him because that was what he grew up with. “We didn’t have a TV until I was in the third grade, and I watched some TV as a child, but not very much,” Lynch said in an interview. Concluding: “The only show I really watched was Perry Mason. Television did what the internet is doing more of now: It homogenised everything.”

Perry Mason remains one of the most iconic legal dramas in television history, a noir-tinged courtroom thriller that set the standard for every legal show that followed. Airing between 1957 and 1966, the series followed the titular defence attorney, played with unshakable cool by Burr, as he dismantled the prosecution’s case with sharp cross-examinations and last-minute revelations.

It was a show built on rhythm—the wrongly accused, the shadowy suspects, the dogged District Attorney Hamilton Burger, and the inevitable moment when Mason would force the real culprit to confess, usually under the weight of their own guilt. It’s the kind of unique set-up and unnerving menace that Lynch would infiltrate mainstream cinema with.

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