Not since the return of Doctor Who has a TV show generated such feverish expectations as the imminent revival of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The darkly surreal murder mystery, which combined soap opera with macabre fantasy, was the most influential show of its generation, the first of a so-called “golden age” of TV that spanned The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
But if Twin Peaks was ahead of its time when it first aired in 1990, FBI special agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, will return to a TV landscape unrecognisable from that of a quarter of a century ago, when most UK viewers still had only four channels to choose from.
Jane Tranter, the head of BBC Worldwide Productions based in Los Angeles, said: “I suspect there are very few people of a certain age working in TV today who weren’t enormously influenced by Twin Peaks. Every decade something comes along that changes the way you think about TV quite radically, and in the 1990s that was Twin Peaks.”
Unlike traditional network TV dramas in the US, said Tranter, Twin Peaks was “not afraid of the dark. It took us to the weirdest, strangest places, often quite extreme forms of sexuality, and allowed you to ‘get your freak out’ as they say over here.”
Tranter added: “As one writer said to me, Twin Peaks really, really fucked with your head.”
Lynch, the director of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, who will oversee all nine episodes of the new series with co-creator Mark Frost, has said television is “way more interesting than cinema now”. Partly that is a consequence of Twin Peaks, which spawned hundreds of imitators and a new era of highly serialised drama, requiring every moment of a viewer’s attention (including Tranter’s latest, Intruders, written by X-Files alumni Glen Morgan and starring John Simm and Mira Sorvino, beginning on BBC2 this month).
Frost has rebuffed suggestions that the show might feel out of time when it returns in 2016 on the US cable network Showtime, telling one interviewer: “I think we’ll be able to effectively translate [the show] into today’s cultural language without too much trouble.”
Cancelled by ABC after two series – the show suffered dwindling returns after network executives insisted on revealing the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer – it ended (spoiler alert) with MacLachlan’s character possessed by the spirit of “killer Bob”.
Bryan Fuller, the screenwriter and producer behind NBC’s acclaimed drama Hannibal, which airs in the UK on Sky Living, said: “There are so many exciting possibilities, so many roads where the show could lead. I still want to explore this world; there is a hope for it, and also a nostalgia.
“At its core it was a story about a madman who molested and murdered his daughter, but David [Lynch] dressed it up in such haute couture and soap opera elements, it was the science fictionalisation of a very real-world family trauma.”
At its peak, 4 million viewers watched the series on BBC2 in the UK, with the log lady and agent Cooper’s fondness for cherry pie and a “damn fine cup of coffee” briefly becoming part of the national conversation. It was a show made for Twitter, where there have been 194,000 mentions in the past seven days.
Fuller said: “With anything that has some pressure points in social media, there is much hope and elation but with that comes great cynicism. But there is no point in cynicism at this state of the game because you simply don’t know [what it’s going to be like]. To automatically presume it’s going to be a travesty kind of makes you an asshole.”
Showtime is tight-lipped about the show, beyond that it will take place “in the present day”, and it remains to be seen whether it will adopt the style of Netflix, the on-demand service that produced House of Cards, by releasing all nine episodes at once
Its closest heir is another US drama, Lost, but Gub Neal, creative director of producer and distributor Artists Studio whose credits include The Fall, Prime Suspect and Cracker, said: “We have had things that have been influenced by it but I still don’t think we have had anything like it – we haven’t had people wandering around talking to logs.
“It’s really hard to redo, it won’t be easy but that’s not an excuse not to try. From my perspective there were a number of things that were untoppable about the original. You have to take the essence of what made it exceptional and recontextualise it for the present day.”
There is something distinctly Lynchian about Sky Atlantic’s new big budget drama, Fortitude, a murder mystery set in the “safest place on earth” in the Arctic circle, which will air on the channel early next year.
“I hope we haven’t copied one element of it but we have definitely been inspired by it,” said its executive producer, Patrick Spence. “David Lynch’s ability to create a world that feels real but is utterly from a different place and sensibility, that is an inspiration to any storyteller. It was the show that kicked off the golden age of television.”
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