We’ve known for a few months now that David Lynch and Mark Frost are heading to Showtime to mount a new season of Twin Peaks, the seminal weird small town soap opera that was canceled in 1991. The new season is expected to debut sometime next year. Now, thanks to Showtime’s session yesterday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, we also know that Kyle MacLachlan will be rejoining them as Agent Dale Cooper and that the new story will be “close-ended,” meaning the season will tell one, complete story.
We’re getting more Twin Peaks episodes — all thanks to this disturbing painting
Emily St. James was a senior correspondent for Vox, covering American identities. Before she joined Vox in 2014, she was the first TV editor of the A.V. Club.
That’s a pretty big break from the original, which famously frustrated TV viewers of the early ‘90s when it refused to answer who killed homecoming queen Laura Palmer (the mystery that kicks off the whole series). It finally did midway through its second season, but by that point, viewers were checking out. However, the show’s embrace of visual storytelling, serialized mysteries, and off-kilter elements has proved hugely influential on television as a whole.
The open question here has always been why Lynch and Frost would resurrect Twin Peaks, and why they would do it at Showtime. Lynch, in particular, has teased a revival of the show for years, but it’s also seemed like a pipe dream, something the visionary director toyed around with doing between projects that would likely prove too substantial to ever pull off.
And yet the show’s coming back. And not just coming back but in a form where Lynch will direct every episode.
At his press conference, Showtime president David Nevins gave some insight into how the deal was closed, and it’s full of all the mystical weirdness you would want from David Lynch.
I think in David’s mind, 25 years was the magic number. There’s a reference in the original that “I’ll see you in 25 years.” So he pays attention to that kind of numerology in a big way.
I said this before, but he fixated on some of the artwork in my office. That was helpful. I have some very violent, weird imagery. There’s a bookshelf falling on a young girl. It’s unclear whether it’s falling — which direction it’s going. And I think he liked that, and we were off in business.
We don’t know what direction the new season’s story will go in, but the presence of MacLachlan suggests we’ll at least get a resolution to the original show’s enigmatic cliffhanger.
