The Atlantic Report: Why Showtime Is Reviving Twin Peaks

A light piece from Jason Lynch (presumably no relation):

[Showtime] is reviving Twin Peaks, the hit 1990 ABC show about the search for the murderer of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, as a nine-episode “limited series,” airing in 2016. That will mark the 25th anniversary of its series finale, in which Palmer tells Agent Dale Cooper, as both are seated in the extra-dimensional Red Room: “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”

 This is theoretically exciting. Twin Peaks was definitely a historic show, although what it represented is up for debate.

"In some ways, Twin Peaks was the precursor to all of the high-quality, provocative serialized drama that we all do now,” Gary Levine, Showtime’s executive vice president of original programming, told Quartz.

The show was a precursor of jerk-you-around shows like Lost, I think. I'm speaking as a fan; its 1990 first season got me as excited as any television I'd ever watched. By the second season, the spell was broken and David Lynch proved himself to me as a director who couldn't be trusted.

That is to say that Lynch, for all his ethereal visuals and dream-logic, didn't know or care where the story was going. His style works better in features, which usually follow the course of a protagonist entering a world more bizarre than that in which he started and emerging disturbed and changed.

That style worked well in the first season as the viewer delved into the weirdness of the town (take a look at the first regular season episode--it's standard prime-time soap opera stuff). I understand that ABC demanded that the show become more linear and solve the Laura Palmer mystery during the second season, which took the air out of the ambiguity, but I imagine that the tension would have dissipated anyway.

I'm more interested in the direction Showtime is trying to take with its original programming. President David Nevins says that Twin Peaks' limited run is atypical of the vision: "I still fundamentally believe in shows I can bring back year after year and get people hooked."

I call Showtime "the amoral network," because its flagship shows, Dexter, Californication, and Weeds, were all about rotten people trying to get away with something, people who looked good only because they were surrounded by worse people. (I call Weeds "The Woman Who Didn't Want to Get a Job.")

The Twin Peaks revival seems to be a headline-grabber. It's hard to imagine that a sizable fanbase still exists. Then again, if anyone cares at all, it's going to be among the chattering class that fill up the mainstream web.