This article was first published not long after the revival series of Twin Peaks was first announced. Two years later, having just gotten a premiere date, it seems that people are either very excited or the exact opposite of that. 

–

Last week it felt like the entire internet was excited by the news that Twin Peaks is coming back in 2016 as a limited series.

I, however, am not excited, because I’m not a Twin Peaks fan. I’m a TV bystander. As I’ve previously written, being a bystander doesn’t mean actively hating a show. It’s a semi-detached, semi-engaged form of TV spectatorship-via-pop culture. Yeah, yeah, damn fine coffee and cherry pie, wrapped in plastic.

Does anyone know if Twin Peaks is coming back? If so, please post on FB using one of seemingly only two phrases the show is known for.

— Jess McGuire (@jessmcguire) October 7, 2014

Does the excitement reveal that, when we watch TV, we prefer to be comforted with familiarity rather than challenged with novelty? Maybe — but basically nothing is new. Storytelling is an old, old human activity, and its pleasures are intertextual: we appreciate a story in the context of other similar stories, or by comparison to the previous work of the creative team.

I want to leave aside the question of whether it’s worth returning to a show after all this time. In the case of Twin Peaks, it could go either way. My initial reaction was disappointment that David Lynch was returning to a tapped well rather than creating something new. (Lynch recently backed out of the reboot, saying there was “not enough money offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done.”)

I love the world of Twin Peaks and wish things could have worked out differently.

— David Lynch (@DAVID_LYNCH) April 5, 2015

But Twin Peaks is mainly a mood. Its mythos is flexible, encouraging viewers to ‘just go with’ all sorts of weird hairpin turns in plot and character. Perhaps all it needs to work are some nonsequiturs and unsettling synths. And the TV landscape rewards complexity and ambiguity now in a way it didn’t in 1991.

It’s because I’m a bystander that I’m curious about the excitement I don’t feel. Why is the announcement of a returning fan favourite – whether it’s Veronica Mars, Arrested Development or anything else – greeted so rapturously?

The Thrill Of Mystery

Twin Peaks is built on a central mystery: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The shows often cited as Twin Peaks’ TV heirs – The X-Files, Lost, Veronica Mars, The Killing, Pretty Little Liars, Top of the Lake, True Detective – share its preoccupation with mystery, and its air of paranoia, conspiracy and the uncanny.

The paradox of enjoying mystery is that we both urgently want to solve puzzles posed by TV shows, and fretfully guard against stumbling across the answers we seek in case it ‘spoils’ our enjoyment. But Twin Peaks exists outside the realm of logic; it can’t be decoded or understood, only witnessed and felt.

Even David Lynch doesn’t exactly understand the elements of his own show, because so many moments and motifs were improvised, or accidentally incorporated. “Even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to explain their meaning, because intuition is irrational,” he reportedly told a German movie magazine in 1992. “The difference between reality and imagination wasn’t ever clear to me at all.”

Having been pressured by network honchos to ‘solve’ its mystery in episode 14, Twin Peaks entered a tailspin in its second season – but that very plummet has created more mystery. What if Lynch and his co-producer Mark Frost had been able to realise their original creative vision? What if Lynch hadn’t walked away to pursue other projects? What if the show hadn’t been cancelled?

“What if?” is a tantalising question. Or, as Alejandro Jorodowsky puts it in the wonderful documentary about his unrealised attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune, “Could be fantastic, no?”

In my favourite part of Jorodowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky impishly recalls his misery turning to delight as he watched Lynch’s Dune in 1984 and realised how terrible it was. Until recently, what got people excited about Twin Peaks is where Lynch and Frost were going to take it. Would it be a magnificent comeback, or perhaps a glorious folly?

The Fellowship of Appreciation

To a bystander, fandom can seem ridiculous. ‘Could David Lynch’s Cryptic Tweet About ‘Twin Peaks’ On Showtime Hint At A Possible ‘Twin Peaks’ Revival?‘, asks satire website Clickhole, mocking the tendency of Twin Peaks fans to express their excitement using the show’s trademark mysterious rhetoric, and appealing to its enigmatic auteur.

But when you’re into a show, you extend and amplify your excitement by interacting with fellow fans – often through recap culture. The text becomes the raw material for building these relationships, the fuel for the fire of your shared enthusiasm. And because social media now hosts this fellowship of appreciation, it makes sense that we’re drawn to shows that can be easily codified and recirculated online, and that we convey our excitement about them by sharing favourite screencaps, funny soundbites and catchphrases, and cool GIFs.

“When you’re into a show, you extend and amplify your excitement by interacting with fellow fans … But it’s only special if not everyone gets the references.”

But it’s only special if not everyone gets the references. “Let’s be real: Twin Peaks is not an intrinsically-inviting program. A modern viewer has to have made the willful and determined decision to watch it,” writes Leigh Alexander at BoingBoing. “This is unpopular culture, and the choice to participate is almost a political statement in and of itself.”

As Brian Moylan points out at The Guardian, there’s a strong correlation between a show’s dwindling popularity and the insularity of its fans. Moylan singles out Community, whose “rabid and engaged fanbase” is “potentially the smuggest in all of fandom”. If they’re ‘cult shows’, then the showrunner is the cult leader; and Community’s Dan Harmon – notoriously fired from his show, then rehired a season later – basically is a fan avatar. Alex Pappademas, who spent 36 hours on tour with Harmon as he live-recorded his freewheeling Harmontown podcast, notes that while it’s now de rigueur for showrunners to interact with viewers, “Harmon was the first showrunner who seemed like he was creating a TV show in order to have that dialogue.”

A showrunner who can generate intense excitement isn’t really a guru but a lightning rod. “I love [Veronica Mars creator] Rob [Thomas],” fan Stacey Aversing told The New York Times. “But the fans are what made this project happen. The fans are people that love the same thing I do.”

Sharing quotes, reminiscing about moments, speculating about future developments – all are ways in which fans thrill at loving the same thing. As Pappademas observes, after Harmon has just told a confessional anecdote on stage: “All of us in that room were together and alive in that moment, and I swear to you that if we’d tried we could have levitated that comic-book store with our minds.”

Even the promise of such a feeling is surely worth getting excited about.

–

Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic, and author of the book Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at @incrediblemelk