Monday brought the news, hinted at last week, that “Twin Peaks,” the phenomenon turned flop turned cult classic show from twenty-five years ago, would be returning, in 2016, for a nine-episode limited engagement on Showtime. A minute-long teaser trailer was enough to remind fans of the show’s odd detail and encompassing power: the terrifying synthesized hum, echoing the wind blowing through the Douglas Firs; the appearance of the murdered homecoming queen Laura Palmer in the famous Red Room; then, the first notes of the composer Angelo Badalamenti’s melodramatic theme, cueing the old opening-sequence shot of the Twin Peaks town welcome sign, with its incongruously large population (fifty-one thousand two hundred and one). The announcement led to an impromptu fan convention online, with people sharing their favorite quotes and swapping bits of trivia. It was a good day for black coffee and cherry pie, and a bad one to have never seen the show. But there is a fair chance that Monday will prove to be the high point of this second ride. Reboots live to disappoint.
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In February of 1991, the director David Lynch, the co-creator of “Twin Peaks” along with Mark Frost, went on Letterman to drum up viewer support for the series, which had just been put on hiatus by its network, ABC. The previous year, the show’s début had drawn more than thirty million viewers, and, although ratings declined for subsequent episodes, the first season was a cultural moment. As John Leonard wrote in New York: “Everybody in the continental United States—including my children, my editors, my enemies—wanted to know about the dwarf.” A year later, Letterman wanted to talk about the dwarf, too, the so-called Man from Another Place, who spoke in a nasal squeal and sometimes talked backward, and who was surely the strangest character ever to have appeared on network television. Lynch discussed the second season’s lousy ratings, which he blamed on the show being aired on Saturday nights. “We feel very strongly that the people who like ‘Twin Peaks’ are party people,” Lynch said, meaning that they liked to go out on the weekends. He gave the audience the address of the president of ABC, asking them to write in. (The campaign may have helped: ABC aired the final episodes of the second season that spring, before cancelling the show.) But, in the interview, Letterman was prescient. “The truth of it is, if you stop and think about it, it might be the kind of show that would kind of have a limited run, and then would become a classic forever, forever,” he said.
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The impending return of “Twin Peaks” reminded me of something I ask fellow fans of the sitcom “Seinfeld.” How much would you pay, personally, to gain access to an episode from, say, 1995, that you had somehow never seen? George at the Yankees, Jerry with big hair, Elaine with bigger hair, Kramer when you could still love him—an episode that had been somehow misplaced at the network, and that would give you thirty new minutes of the show in its prime? I’d pay fifty bucks. This is not the same thing as wanting the show to come back today with all-new episodes. Last year’s Super Bowl ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander doing Jerry and George was a reminder of the practical impossibility of such an undertaking. And even the rather elegant meta-reunion that Larry David staged on his show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” back in 2009, was more upsetting than funny—it mocked the very desire to see our favorite characters, ten years removed from when they were our favorites. Every show, even one that glows for years, has a limited run.
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The giddiness that accompanies news of a beloved show returning from the grave has an edge of desperation to it. The thrill itself is death-haunted. “Twin Peaks” has the kinds of fans that the show “Arrested Development” has—obsessive and tribal and proud, with much of that pride deriving from how the show they loved was too good for this world, misunderstood by the idiot masses, and cancelled before its time by know-nothing bean counters. All of this edge gets spoiled when the bean counters agree to give a show new life. The fourth season of “Arrested Development,” on Netflix, which arrived seven years after the show’s cancellation by Fox, was narratively inventive but still felt oddly airless and flat. It was too steeped in memory and expectation, making it more like an expensive public art project than a television show. The revived “Arrested Development” couldn’t satisfy our nostalgia because it was no longer from the past. Seeing the characters returned to the screen was simply a reminder that they weren’t who they were, and that we couldn’t go back to who we were, either. It wasn’t bad (and there’s word that there may be a fifth season coming), but it couldn’t be good: the laughs were the kinds that old friends share over stories that were funnier the first time.
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When people say they want a third season of “Twin Peaks,” they really mean that they want there to have been a third season, in 1992. But there shouldn’t have been a third season. The show was cancelled fairly: David Lynch and Mark Frost had become much less involved in the production, leaving it in lesser hands. Kyle MacLachlan, who played the show’s hero, the F.B.I. Agent Dale Cooper, reported feeling abandoned. When, shortly after the series was cancelled, Lynch announced plans for a movie, a kind of dual prequel and sequel to the story told on the show, MacLachlan first begged off, before agreeing to play a small role. No one in America watched that movie, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” when it came out, in 1992. As Mark Frost predicted in an interview with John Leonard, in 1990: “The pace of the culture is accelerating all the time in this country. Trends and fads. Too much attention is dangerous. Maybe they’ll digest us too quickly, spit us out.”
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“I'll see you again in twenty-five years,” Laura Palmer said to Agent Cooper, in the mysterious Red Room, in what was then considered the final episode of the series. The year after next will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of that episode, meaning, perhaps, that all of this has been fated. (Of course, when Palmer said that, she might have been referring to an earlier sequence in the Red Room, in which a visibly older Cooper meets her in a dream. Time in “Twin Peaks,” as in Hollywood, is nonlinear.) That final episode ended with a whopper of a cliffhanger; this time, the show’s writer Mark Frost has promised closure. There are reasons for optimism: Frost and Lynch will write each of the nine new episodes, and Lynch will direct; Kyle MacLachlan seems to be under the impression that he’s coming back. And for pessimism: BOB, alas, has been dead for years. But this isn’t about whether the show will be good or bad—that’s far away, and beside the point. Regardless of the qualities of a new “Twin Peaks,” its very existence will be a diminishment.
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Many of the most excited “Twin Peaks” fans were too young to have watched the series when it first aired on television, or else they missed it, and so came to it later (as I did). For me, then, “Twin Peaks” is less a cultural memory than a unique cultural artifact. Streaming it a few years ago, what struck me from the very beginning was just how strange it was that this show, in many ways a decade ahead of its time and in others out of time altogether, was aired on network television during an era when network television really mattered. It was unfathomable that “Twin Peaks” had become a national sensation, but it was remarkable, too, that it had ever run at all. Echoes of the show’s plot—the murder of a young person reveals the evil underpinnings of a seemingly normal town—are, by this point, everywhere on television. Its tone—camp and dread; part crime drama, part soap opera, part horror movie—has never been recreated. But the memories I guard of it aren’t even five years old; they are projections back to an imagined cultural event, when millions of Americans submitted to watching such a strange thing every week.
