Twin Peaks Is Coming Back to Change Television…Again
Showtime’s just-announced deal to bring Twin Peaks back is everything fans could have hoped for…and more.
Fans of filmmaker David Lynch’s show, which ran for only two seasons, have been in limbo for more than two decades hoping for answers to the cliffhangers that have been lingering since the finale in 1991.
Last year, rumors were circulating that filmmaker Lynch and writer Mark Frost would be returning to the Pacific Northwest to wrap up one of the most surreal stories ever told on network television. When pressed for comment, Lynch was non-committal, stating that Twin Peaks was a world he might like to revisit, but had no current plans to do so.
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Then, on Friday something odd happened. Lynch and Frost both tweeted out the same phrase (a callback to the many, many, many surreal touches from the show): “That gum you like is going to come back in style.”
Fans held their breath. Lynch is a known provocateur and, while the signs were there, viewers were hesitant to get their hopes up. But Lynch and Showtime didn’t disappoint. Not only will the beloved cult show from 1990 and 1991 be returning in 2016 with nine new episodes, but all nine will be directed by Lynch himself (who only directed five of the show’s first-run episodes). The move to Showtime should also placate fans concerned that a return to the (now-Disney owned) ABC would defang what was a surprisingly nasty show for network TV in the early ‘90s.
For Twin Peaks fans, this will be an event 25 years in the making, but for younger viewers and those on the outside it may seem like an odd deal (and with Lynch involved, it almost surely will be).
Those people have two years to get caught up. For the uninitiated, watching Twin Peaks for the first time might be slightly underwhelming, but this is only because we have lived for more than two decades with its legacy. To resort to cliché, the show was so far ahead of its time that we still might not have caught up on it, and nearly every single show currently on television owes it a massive debt. Though many of Lynch and Frost’s touches are still deeply unsettling, some of them have lost their power due to the sheer number of imitators.
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It’s important to remember the entertainment landscape in 1990 when considering how revolutionary the show was. The sort of serialized narrative that we now take for granted was largely absent from television (other than soap operas, which Twin Peaks consciously aped).
The use of Lynch’s trademark surrealism was so entirely absent from network TV that it is impossible to imagine how mind-blowing it was at the time. The idea of small town America not as a hell of frightful conformity but as a rictus-mask smile under which there was an unctuous rot of perversion had been explored by Lynch in his Blue Velvet, but to have it on the same network that was showing Roseanne was truly radical. Stripped of all of its weirdness and supernatural asides, at the end of the day, this was a show about (spoilers!) the repeated rape and eventual brutal murder of a high school girl by her own father.
Put simply, without Twin Peaks we would not have had The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Leftovers, True Detective, or really any of the great genre television of the past few decades. Most significantly, we would not have had Lost (which also ran on ABC), a show that seemed to almost explicitly be an attempt to commodify Lynch’s show with its serialized narrative and surrealist touches.
Not that Twin Peaks was a huge ratings hit throughout its run. It started out that way, drawing 34.6 million viewers for its premiere, but faded in its second season. The fans who stuck with it, though, were passionate. Showtime will be appealing to that rabid fan base, which has been waiting for years for a conclusion to the show’s cliff-hanger final episode, but also to a generation of fans who have been introduced to the show by word of mouth (or blog).
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As with Netflix’s revival of Arrested Development, this isn’t just an attempt to wrangle eyeballs from desperate fan boys. This is Showtime’s stab at putting the network back on the map following a decline in its own original programing. Dexter is long gone. Homeland, following a blockbuster first season, doesn’t seem likely to ever recapture the momentum it once had. With Netflix and Amazon both entering the content game, and Yahoo soon to follow, Showtime needed to do something.
A return to Twin Peaks is by no means a slam dunk. The episodes are more than a year away, and Lynch hasn’t directed anything of note since 2006’s exceptionally messy Inland Empire. Several important cast members have passed away (most notably Frank Silva, who played BOB, and Carol Coulson, who played the Log Lady), but with today’s announcement Showtime has the spotlight and it has ‘90s kids excited in a way they haven’t been since The Pixies reunited.
In typical Lynch fashion, he and creative partner Frost released a statement today that even included a little nod to the director’s fabled refusal to helm Return of the Jedi. “The mysterious and special world of Twin Peaks is pulling us back,” said Frost and Lynch in a prepared statement. “We’re very excited. May the forest be with you.”
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