Your favorite gum is going to come back in style—and if you don’t know what that means, get busy, because the hit 90s TV series Twin Peaks is coming back after 25 years.
“I’ll see you again in 25 years” we the exact words spoken in the season finale, shortly before the show was taken off the air in 1991. And now, Showtime will make that promise come true. (Yes, May 2017 is a little over 25 years later—but to their credit, the return announcement was made last year.)
Twin Peaks is a bizarre show, and its loyal fan base has only enshrined that bizarre–ness has over time. A sizable portion of that base did not grow up with the show, but became engrossed in David Lynch’s world of cherry pies, damn good coffee, codes and dancing midgets, all captured in shots that fluctuate between subtly nerve–wracking and puzzlingly dreamlike. The story follows Dale Cooper, an agent who arrives to the small town of Twin Peaks in order to solve the mysterious murder of Laura Palmer. Lynch draws no tangible boundary between the real and the supernatural, often resulting in moments that are as gripping as they are simply weird. There’s never been quite been anything like it.
Today, Lynch revisits his finale’s script faithfully, and reviving the show 25 years on. If any more examples of the show’s peculiarity were needed, here’s one of the teasers for the new season:
In case you missed it—that’s 30 seconds of David Lynch eating a donut to the sweet, haunting sound of Angelo Badalamenti’s famous theme music. Only a Twin Peaks fan would appreciate are those very basic elements that get them so inordinately nostalgic and excited about the show in the first place because OMG, David Lynch! OMG, the song! It’s a short, calculated throwback designed to recreate the strange flavor of Twin Peaks mystery for those who remember it best.
While the revival has fan bases buzzing worldwide, there's still skepticism as to how good the show can continue to be, especially in light of how low ratings plummeted in the show’s second (and last) season.
“I’m excited, but honestly I’m worried it’s going to be bad,” admitted Maya Arthur (C’18), a fan of the show.
Greg Olberding (C'17) is more confident that Lynch will be able to revive the show's weird qualities 25 years on. "I'm about as excited as I've ever been for a newish TV show," he said. "I'm excited to see how that world will change now that David Lynch isn't constrained by limits of network television, especially in terms of censorship. Not to mention the difficulties in recreating a town where over two decades have elapsed."
If anything, reviving Twin Peaks will be a test in how well a fondly–remembered show can live up to the very distinct legacy it created. The show’s fan base thrived on decoding every little knot in an episode, and becoming engrossed in figuring out the rules governing the Twin Peaks world. With that, however, there was the problem of how complexly riddled in its own supernatural loopholes and mysteries the show became, sometimes making the audience lose interest in the plot (that Lynch was at times mostly improvising) altogether. Critics mostly agreed that this is where the Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me, failed to make a compelling prequel that would answer questions of any kind, many of which were left agonizingly unanswered when the show was cancelled in the second season.
David Lynch has promised no answers yet. So far the previews have been mostly concerned with a return to the show’s original aesthetics, such as in the following teaser trailer:
In this clip, we see Kyle Maclachlan, who played Dale Cooper in the original series, emerging from the shadows. Though he has aged, his determined, clean–shaven expression is as recognizable as ever, as is Badalamenti’s soundtrack and the style of short, dark shots showing an empty road at night. We don’t know if Dale’s state of mind is the same as it was in the last (unforgettably disturbing) frame we saw him. We don’t know if things will go back to how they were in small Twin Peaks—after all, they rarely do. And yet, the promise of returning to the town is reason enough to get excited.
