Hopefully you are sitting down with some coffee that’s black as midnight on a moonless night. You’ll need it to process the information we are about to share with you. Twin Peaks is officially returning back to television. New episodes of the drama are headed to Showtime in 2016. To celebrate the return of the cult favorite, Showtime released a brand new teaser for Twin Peaks 2.0, which should get you into an early 90s frame of mind.
The teaser gives us a glimpse at Laura Palmer, whose murder was the catalyst that kicked off Twin Peaks back in 1990. We also learn that Twin Peaks won’t be a reboot. Instead, we’ll be returning to the Washington town 25 years later. This morning, Showtime also announced that Twin Peaks will be a limited event series, and that David Lynch and Mark Frost are bringing the show back to the small screen together. Lynch is set to direct every episode of the event series, and Lynch and Frost will also write the episodes together.
Nine episodes will be produced for the limited engagement series, which doesn’t seem like a ton of episodes. Honestly, though, it’s probably a good thing, as we all know what happened to Twin Peaks when ABC gave the show a full 22-episode order during Season 2. In addition to the new episodes, Showtime has also landed the rights to air all 30 episodes of Twin Peaks that were produced in the early nineties. Those will air before the new event series hits the schedule. Today's announcement follows CBS’ (which also owns Showtime) Blu-ray release of Twin Peaks: The Full Mystery, which came out this summer. It also comes just after Frost and Lynch took to social media over the weekend to release a set of mysterious tweets alluding to more Twin Peaks.
After Lynch and Frost both mentioned, “that gum you like is going to come back in style,” I think many Twin Peaks fans expected some sort of announcement related to the series, but I, for one, certainly didn’t expect brand new episodes set 25 years later. Rumors related to new episodes of the series have popped up before and never panned out. That’s why Showtime’s official pick-up is such a huge deal for fans.
The year 2016 is quite some time away, still. It’s entirely possibly we could see two more seasons of Game of Thrones, for instance, before Twin Peaks becomes a reality, once more. We also don’t know if the new version of Twin Peaks will feature many of the same cast members. It’s definitely true that not everyone will be able to return to the series. Jack Nance, Don S. Davis and many other actors who were a part of the original series have passed away, and others have moved on to different projects. We don’t even know if Twin Peaks will remotely resemble the town we knew and were a bit frightened of in the nineties. There are a lot of details that still need to be fleshed out, but due to Frost and Lynch’s excellent coordination, it seems like there is already a plan in motion. We just have to wait patiently for that plan to pan out into new episodes of the series.
We’ll keep you posted as new details related to Showtime’s Twin Peaks project emerge.
