The twenty-first-century media landscape is governed by transmedia franchises: massive entertainment juggernauts that expand across media platforms, encourage audience participation, and are owned and operated by massive transnational media conglomerates. In this context, the parallel rise of media convergence and corporate consolidation has resulted in a growing variety of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006: 97–8). But before transmedia franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe took over our entertainment ecosystem, David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks pioneered the productive use of transmedia, creatively interweaving multiple media platforms to construct a single coherent storyworld.

By supplementing the original series’ television episodes with meaningful expansions in other media, Twin Peaks in the early 1990s prefigured a trend that would come to dominate the convergence culture industry in the twenty-first century (Scott 2019: 12). Over the years, the series has repeatedly adopted transmedia forms for serialised storytelling and worldbuilding in ways that further develop the franchise's own cultural legacy while also embracing contemporary media-industrial practices. Though relatively limited in terms of the number of media texts, these practices illustrate the rich potential for the transmedia expansion of franchises that exist primarily within a single medium. This indicated how media properties can use transmedia forms for the layered construction of complex storyworlds, while at the same time demonstrating the inherently collaborative nature of these complexly networked franchises.

In this chapter, I will describe the ways in which Twin Peaks employed transmedia storytelling forms to enhance its narrative world and foster active and long-term participation amongst the series’ fans. This chapter will show how transmedia expansions combined contemporary forms of merchandising with innovative forms of storytelling. As the only major serialised storyworld in David Lynch's career, these media-industrial experiments also shed light on the work of an artist and cinematic ‘auteur’ figure who has inspired tremendous speculation amongst fans, especially in the connections between different works and across different media. Finally, by contrasting the original series with the expansions that accompanied the return of Twin Peaks a quarter century later, the chapter will shed light on changing possibilities and limitations within specific media-industrial periods.