ShowtimePut on a pot of coffee and prepare yourselves: Twin Peaks is finally almost here.
Showtime's revival of the 1990 ABC series has often felt like a far-off dream, unlikely to ever actually appear on screens in front of us, but now it's looking like we're actually going to get to watch it, and relatively soon!
The network announced during today's TV Critics' Association press tour that the new season will debut on Sunday, May 21 at 9 p.m., with a two hour premiere, meaning we're just five months away from that cherry pie we've been craving.
The season will consist of 18 hours total, and Showtime subscribers will be able to watch the third and fourth hours immediately after the first two. That means you're going to need some of that damn fine coffee to stay up that night to watch four hours of Twin Peaks, but we're sure it will be worth it.
Showtime exec Gary Levine promised that "the Twin Peaks you're going to see is the pure heroin version of David Lynch," which is an odd but appropriate comment about the odd series. The revival picks up 25 years after the shocking murder of teen homecoming queen Laura Palmer rocked a quaint northwestern town (and about 25 years after the dead Laura Palmer promised she'd see us in 25 years, funnily enough!).
When Lynch himself was confronted with the remark as he made a surprise appearance during the day's final panel, he offered up an appropriately Lynchian response. "I hear heroin is a very popular drug these days," he said with a wry smile.
And then Lynch fielded questions from the journalists in the room for a riveting 15 minutes, wherein he revealed all. Just kidding! Despite the crowd's best efforts, getting any information out of the iconic auteur was like getting blood from a stone. A very humorous stone, but a stone nonetheless. Case in point, this reply when asked how much story in the Showtime revival was leftover from the original run and how much was freshly created: "In the beginning, we—I'm not really at liberty to talk about that."
The cast members on hand—returning stars Kyle MacLachlan, Madchen Amick and Kimmy Robertson, as well as first timers Laura Dern and Robert Forster—were similarly tight-lipped. In fact, watching them twist their tongues into pretzels trying to turn non-answers into answers would've been comical if we weren't so hungry for plot details!
They were able to talk about the joys of returning to work with Lynch (who directed all 18 hours of the revival), however, and Robertson's words about the experience perhaps best drive home how special it truly was.
"For me, doing any other job with any other director was definitely not as cool and not as fun and not as magic and not as happy and not as natural, so I missed that for 25 years," she said. "So getting to be on the set doing whatever it was I was doing was really fun. My knees got weak and they had to hold me up on the set of wherever I was."
Twin Peaks debuts Sunday, May 21 at 9 p.m. on Showtime.