Twin Peaks is still held in such high regard it seems bizarre that, by the time David Lynch and Mark Frost bring their opus back from the dead on 21 May, it will have been away for 26 years. People are still talking about it, breathlessly recommending it and rewatching it to such an extent that it feels like Coop and the gang never really left us. But Laura Palmer did say “I’ll see you in 25 years”, and that time has already been and gone.



This is partly due to the fact its DNA can be seen everywhere: just about every TV drama worth its salt today owes Twin Peaks a debt. This baffling, lysergic rabbit-hole of oddballs in a deeply weird town redefined what television could be – more like a film than TV, more like a novel than a film. There would be no Westworld without Twin Peaks. No Lost. No Killing, Battlestar or Broadchurch. Perhaps none of the shows of the past 15 years whose unravelling mysteries lent themselves to being examined by an online community enthusiastically invested in uncovering them. Which makes 2017 the perfect time to bring it back.



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Westworld was tailor-made for the fan community. Its producers knew this. It practically dared you to come up with theories to explain what was going on, the wilder the better. Some of them even turned out to be correct. The same goes for Game of Thrones, whose viewers fervently deduced the R+L=J clue to Jon Snow’s provenance, not to mention “calling” the fact he’d rise from the grave after being stabbed by virtually every member of the Night’s Watch. Or The OA, fans of which – after the Usual Suspects-esque discovery of Prairie’s books – are debating whether the OA is in fact an OA at all. The Stranger Thing-ers hit the internet en masse to bicker about whether Eleven is alive, eking out a drab existence in the dank slime of The Upside Down. And, most recently, Sherlock’s divisive latest season either sees comment threads discussing its labyrinthine fakeouts and resurrections, or saying that, in no uncertain terms, Sherlock is smug, nonsensical guff. Either way, people are talking about it. These programmes understand the importance of the internet – and, crucially, the millions of potential fans tapping away on it – in pushing a show over from modest hit into global, hashtaggable phenomenon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest If its first series debuted today, #TeamLogLady would be in a state of perpetual trend. Photograph: Alamy

Twin Peaks existed before a time in which it was possible to have an online row with a perfect stranger who is an egg. Imagine the same level of fan interaction above, only applied to an enigma as abstract as Twin Peaks. If its first series debuted today, #TeamLogLady would be in a state of perpetual trend. Media servers would groan under the bulk of a million thinkpieces about what the hell “How’s Annie?” means. Discussions entitled “Who killed Laura Palmer?” would comprise around 80% of Reddit. The internet would explode. And, come May, it probably will.

You can’t imagine any of the mysteries offered by Twin Peaks will ever be as simple as “are they dead?”, “who’s his dad?” or “are they a robot?”. But audiences are savvy now, and ready for a challenge. If Lynch and Frost can deliver a narrative riddle for the internet to really get its teeth stuck into – one as dense, strange and open to interpretation as the original – surely its success, aided by the might of social media, is a done deal.

Twin Peaks was ahead of its time in many ways. But if the water cooler-dependent success of high-concept modern dramas is anything to go by it was, more than anything, an internet-age show before the internet age. The prospect of a new Twin Peaks to pore over in 2017 is exciting indeed. It feels like the world is finally ready for logs, one-armed men, red rooms and lots of damn good coffee.