'Twin Peaks' May Not Arrive Until 2017, Apparently

We live in an age where every ‘90s TV show you love is getting revived, but a third season of Twin Peaks still manages to feel like something special. After all, the soapy and surreal series laid the groundwork for the golden age of modern television a decade before The Sopranos...and then it ended its run on an unresolved cliffhanger. So the news that the show was returning in 2016 was greeted with waves of internet optimism and excitement. Well, grab yourself a damn fine cup of coffee and get comfortable, because it’s now starting to look like 2017.

That year comes straight from the mouth of series co-creator Mark Frost, who has already completed the scripts for Season 3 with co-creator and director David Lynch (who is returning to helm the series after some intense public negotiations). In true Twin Peaks fashion, the news comes from an unexpected and weird place that has no business providing television news — the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It seems that Frost visited the museum, took a tour, and sat down for a chat that is 85 percent baseball and 15 percent revealing an air date in 2017:

We had 32 hours back in 1991-92, and with my partner David Lynch we kind of blew open that genre of the nighttime soap and took it in a whole other direction. A lot of people always look back at Twin Peaks and say that was the start of this explosion we’ve had in good television drama, but we did it in a time when there were still only three networks. The challenge for us is to try and come back and raise the bar above what we did the last time. We’re coming back with season three of Twin Peaks after a 25-year absence. We’ve finished the scripts, we start production in September, and that will be coming out on Showtime sometime in 2017.

As Welcome to Twin Peaks points out, Frost gets the original air date of Twin Peaks wrong, saying 1991 through 1992 when he means 1990 through 1991. So it’s very possible that 2017 was a slip of the tongue. If filming begins in September, a 2016 air date feels far more realistic. If HBO can turn around a season of Game of Thrones in a year, then Showtime, Frost and Lynch can have more Twin Peaks ready to go in a timely fashion.

Then again, Lynch is a precise and demanding filmmaker. If he’s going to direct every episode this time around, he may have very well requested more time to get things done. Considering the outcry when he temporarily dropped out of the show, we imagine Showtime will bend over backwards to accommodate him.

If the dates have shifted, we should hear something official soon. We’ll keep you posted.