Twin Peaks, season 1

Laura Palmer, seventeen, homecoming queen, is found dead on the shore of a logging town in Washington state. The FBI sends Dale Cooper, an agent whose methods include tape recordings to an unseen woman named Diane, Tibetan rock-throwing, and total sincerity - and who falls for the town even as he takes it apart.

Everyone was connected to Laura and everyone is lying about how. Her boyfriend was not her only boyfriend. Her best friend knows more than she says. Her psychiatrist saw her the night she died. Her father is coming apart in ways grief alone does not explain, and her mother is seeing things - literally, visions - that the show declines to soften.

Underneath the investigation, the town runs on its own secrets: a sawmill in play, an affair behind the perfume counter, a brothel across the border where a schoolgirl in a mask turns out to be someone Cooper knows. And underneath that, something stranger - a one-armed man, a dream of a red room where a little man speaks backwards and Laura whispers a name Cooper cannot remember on waking.

The season ends with most of the town's ledgers coming due at once - a fire at the mill, a wedding of business interests, and Cooper opening his hotel-room door to a gun.