David Lynch Is Back on ‘Twin Peaks’: The Visionary Filmmaker Returns to Showtime’s Cult Series
Rejoice! After a very vocal online campaign by cast members and the Twitterati, David Lynch has announced he’ll be returning to the 2016 Twin Peaks miniseries.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Crank up the Badalamenti because David Lynch will actually be returning to helm Showtime’s revival of his cult classic TV show Twin Peaks.
Lynch tweeted the exciting news Friday evening to his army of devoted followers:
When it was announced last October that Showtime had green-lit a 9-episode miniseries of Twin Peaks, with series creators Lynch and Mark Frost penning all the scripts and directing all the episodes, it inspired gleeful Proustian flashbacks of Killer BOB and a cross-dressing David Duchovny. The revival, set in the present day and continuing storylines from Season 2, was set to premiere in early 2016 in order to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the show’s abrupt end after two weirdness-packed seasons on ABC.
“For those followers of the show who felt bereft when the show ended where it did all those years ago are going to like where it goes from here,” Frost said. “And we hope that a lot of people who haven’t been to Twin Peaks yet are going to be equally interested in where the story goes from where we left off.”
Then in March, Lynch made some headline-grabbing comments suggesting his involvement with the show was “up in the air” and that “there are complications.” In April, Lynch confirmed that he would not be directing the 9 revamped Twin Peaks episodes due to the cable network’s alleged budgetary constraints:
This sad news prompted the show’s original cast, led by Mädchen E. Amick (a.k.a. waitress Shelly Johnson), many of whom will be returning for the miniseries, to launch an aggressive social media campaign to recruit Lynch back onto the show (as many fans will recall, the show’s quality took a steep dive when Lynch left the show during its second season).
Amick and fellow cast members Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer), Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne), Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), Al Strobel (MIKE), Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), and a host of others appeared in a #SaveTwinPeaks campaign video expressing how Twin Peaks just isn’t the same without their fearless leader. Even Lynch’s own daughter, Jennifer Chambers Lynch, made a cameo in it. The video was posted to a Facebook page run by the show’s former cast and garnered thousands of likes, while a separate Change.org petition rallying behind Lynch racked up close to 30,000 e-signatures.
Well, the efforts seem to have worked as Lynch is back in.
No word yet on whether Duchovny, who will also star in an X-Files miniseries revival next year, is set to return as his cross-dressing DEA agent, however.