Gabriel wrote: I wanted backstabbing businessmen and women, mayoral skullduggery, murders, mills, One-Eyed Jacks, cross-border drug smuggling.
I'm not a native of this thread but I saw this and found it difficult not to respond. I too really enjoyed and appreciated all these aspects to and elements of the original series. They feel very much intrinsic and essential to it. By essential I mean that I don't think you could take these away from the original and just leave the FBI, local law enforcement, murder mystery and the lodge elements in as a kind of skeletal narrative. It might work as some kind of story but it wouldn't have been Twin Peaks as we know it.
Where I disagree is in my perspective of hindsight. All of the above was so very fresh and interesting for me in 1990, and I had never imagined such tangled bundles of stories of hope and despair and mystery could sit so well together. I loathed the soap operas of the time because they attempted to dramatise all these things at the same time but did so in a way that ended up diluting every possible ounce of interest and empathy I had as a viewer. Twin Peaks was markedly different (apart from a very few story arcs) in that it absolutely held my attention and left me begging for more each episode. Considering the TV of the time, it was like a bright flame against a very washy background. However, this was the early 90s. Since then the warmth, depth of feeling and quirkiness of the show has become something of a standard against which TV is measured, and it has spurred TV onwards and upwards. Things have improved; there's no longer a dearth of things to watch like there used to be but an overabundance of TV, catering to every possible aesthetic of interest in human relationships. To repeat the same atmosphere and qualities that the original series had now would be to risk losing it like a drop of water in the ocean. To repeat the kind of historic disruptive innovation that the original show had, it was necessary to do something else with the material.
With this in mind, I was not waiting 25 years for 'backstabbing businessmen and women, mayoral skullduggery, murders, mills, One-Eyed Jacks, cross-border drug smuggling' because as far as I could see a large part of those 25 years (especially the last 10-15) have already been dominated by these sorts of storylines and hooks. From where I'm standing, they've been done to death, and it makes no sense repeating them 'in the key of' Twin Peaks because they won't stand out from the background any longer as something discernibly different and culturally significant.
Now I'm not defending every choice Lynch and Frost have made. Many of my posts elsewhere are less than complimentary, and sometimes downright acerbic about S3. But on the whole I do appreciate it a great deal.
What I can't agree with is the idea that we were waiting for something like an uninterrupted continuation of S2. Already by 1992, the tone and stylistics of FWWM, for example, had already shifted everything to a better place for me. I liked what Lynch was doing there -- it felt fresh again, and something was added when re-watching the original season. As time went by and the old episodes started to feel more and more dated, I discovered that I relied on that film more and more to bridge my changing tastes. And in 2017, S3 has made the original show much more watchable again. I'm re-watching it right now, painstakingly poring over it, and loving it for all the different ways it responds to a new context.
I recognise that you never said 'we' were waiting for those stories to continue, but that you were. However, judging from many of the posts I read on this thread (and I read a lot of them) you are far from alone in this. But it certainly wasn't everyone. It wasn't me. I expected nothing less than a slap in the face to contemporary TV and its formulas, and I felt I got it. Obviously, expressing this opinion at any length takes us off topic so I won't labour it. I think the key point I was making here was actually a very simple one: different people had very different expectations. Stating the bleeding obvious really, ain't I? So I'll stop now.