Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

[Histeria]

Perhaps it's unfair but I kinda got the impression Lynch jumping in to save the show at the end was to protect TP as an asset which he owned (and perhaps neglected).

The intervention has a "Oh shit they're gonna actually cancel it?" vibe, as if the assumption was TP would continue yielding dividends as a piece of real estate even if he doesn't directly contribute to its upkeep.

Of course, there were (imo) valid reasons for him falling out of love with the show that weren't his fault. But I don't really see the "art over money" angle here. Twin Peaks was doing merchandise and spin off books (kept in the families) from very early days. They were entitled to milk it and they did. But they also "went upstairs" from the start, taking a far more hands off approach than he would for a film (or The Return).

I suspect (perhaps unfairly again) that the bringing on of a co-writer for FWWM was partly to make up for the fact his grasp of the series and its sequence of events wasn't strong enough to write a prequel which references the series so heavily.

I don't think it's outrageous to say Twin Peaks was a commercial venture for him as much as it was an artistic one. The stuff he dissed was a direct result of the way he set up the series in the first place.

[Audrey Horne]

You know how I feel.

The show needed a concrete practical story to hang and work it’s magic around. And it needed the zip and fun of a Leslie Linka Glater and a Harley Peyton to elevate the characters so they don’t always have the heaviness of Lynch (and therefore more effective when he does occasionally come back to them)

Think any of Ben Horne or Catherine’s scenes…. Especially in both season 1 and 2’s sixth episodes.

Audrey’s delicious zinger of, “ya know there’s a real bad accident outside, sounded like a bus or some thin’.”

Cooper’s throwaway about Jacques, “he’s too stupid to lie.”

All winners that when composed with an organized story made the show soar.

[Jerry Horne]

All I have is a map of Tibet and deductive technique.

Seriously though, sorry if people don't want their expectations to burn up. I understand. I've heard good things is what I'll repeat.

But we've been clued in recently have we not? Frost wants more. Sabrina wants more. Lynch told us the writing would take time but there are disturbance$.

I don't have anything specific right now like I did when I announced TP would return on the Showtime network three days before the official announcement. But If I hear anything this time around, this will be the place I'll post since I'm tired of social media.

We all want S4. Even the haters. I think they're looking forward to it the most

From 2018 lol

Edit: Saw this from 2018 on here also

Lynch told an actor who didn't have much screen time to not worry, he'll have more next season. So, unless he was simply placating him, it's nice to know it's at least or was on his radar.

The gang seems keen but I have to wonder if Showtime is willing to throw as much money into the pot this time around. I think anything could happen and Lynch has the ultimate freedom. If an agreement can't be made then at least Lynch/Frost got on full season under their belt done the way they wanted it done.

BTW, that actor was Scott Coffey who played 'Trick'.

[JackwithOneEye]

I think there were other attempts to continue novels/ comics that Lynch put the kibosh on. He really went whole heartedly back to his abstract painting / fine art roots with Inland Empire, and seems he was still in that mindset with Return. Sometimes it feels to me like Lynch has more in common with someone like Bruce Conner or George and Mike Kuchar, than he does with the Coens.

Having said that , it's valuable and iconic IP, and when Lynch/Frost aren't here, the heirs are gonna have property taxes, expensive mortgages, college tuitions to contend with, and maybe some sort of TP style anthology thing with Nicolas Refn or Cary Fukunaga or someone of that ilk directing is a possibility in the coming decades.

[Brad D]

It really would be interesting to see the legal language surrounding the TP property. Who inherits it? Is someone legally entrusted with it in the event of Lynch and/or Frost not owning it? Is there legal language allowing its sale and or continuation? A whole lot of mystery. Another possibility is Lynch and Frost got TP out of their system with The Return and simply are done, especially in regards to talking at all about TP.

I'm guessing Lynch and Frost still own the property itself outright but CBS maintains a whole lot of other rights. They are the ones cracking down on fan-made shirts and tarot cards after all (and then sometimes blatantly ripping those ideas off...)

[Histeria]

It really would be interesting to see the legal language surrounding the TP property. Who inherits it? Is someone legally entrusted with it in the event of Lynch and/or Frost not owning it? Is there legal language allowing its sale and or continuation? A whole lot of mystery. Another possibility is Lynch and Frost got TP out of their system with The Return and simply are done, especially in regards to talking at all about TP.

I'm guessing Lynch and Frost still own the property itself outright but CBS maintains a whole lot of other rights. They are the ones cracking down on fan-made shirts and tarot cards after all (and then sometimes blatantly ripping those ideas off...)

It would be odd if anyone other than CBS purchased it because as you say, CBS own the merch rights and their different subsidiaries each own some of the distribution rights to yhe series. They also have the rights to phsycial distribution of most of the existing entries.

Why would HBO buy it when they'd have to pay ViacomCBS whenever they want to use footage from Season 1. If you're just ordering a single season then it's manageable. But if you're paying hundreds of millions for the IP then you'd want access to the previous seasons, surely? Unless the plan is to reboot it.

But in the end, it's an asset and it will fall somewhere or another. I suspect that in the end, if it's sold then it'll be to ViacomCBS. Frost and Lynch had been trying to consolidate everything before The Return and it's now a lot neater plotting out who owns what where.

If it isn't sold, then how the two seperate estates manage the IP as equal partners is a whole can of worms by itself. Outside of merchandise and seasons already aired, it would have free reign to do whatever it likes. Unless they give consent, no one can make any narrative entry into the TP universe without them.

[Brad D]

Yeah, this is such an atypical franchise in the sense it's co-creators still (assumedly) own the IP. Typically someone pitches the idea and a network or studio owns it from the jump, at least from what I'm led to believe how it all works. Maybe after Lynch was burned by DeLaurentiis, and then the mess with One Saliva Bubble, both he and Frost wanted to be in control. Questions in a world of blue.

[Histeria]

Yup, Frost talks about it in his Bushman interviews. They were very insistent that they retained ownership of the IP when negotiating with ABC. That interview was released after the pandemic started I think, and he confirms he and Lynch own it as of that interview. He was also adamant no one would ever make Twin Peaks without them being on board with it.

Interestingly, he also revealed that he lobbies for fans to be left alone unless they're profiting on an industrial scale and that they were a lot more hardline about unofficial merch before Frost intervened.

[Jonah]

Wow, this thread has blown up again hasn't it? Just to respond to some of the earlier comments. Worth pointing out here - I've only mentioned this before in the thread on that episode itself, but Lynch publicly praised the Diane Keaton episode. He seemed to really love it. Now that might have just been saving face and promoting the show but the quote seemed genuine. So he seemed to sort of get a kick out of others playing in his world a little at times too. Yet that episode is considered one of the worst by fans.

Lynch also directly requested one of the sequences many fans seem to have an issue with - Josie in the doorknob. No doubt people would have loved that sequence had Lynch himself directed it. Yes, I'm sure he would have made it better, but I sometimes wonder is there a bias we have when we know Lynch directed an episode vs when he did not? For myself, whatever my feelings on The Return, I think the Lynch-directed episodes are by far the best ones of the original run, but I liked the rareness of them - how you'd kind of chug along with the original series (and yes, I agree, many of the other episodes before the S2 slump were great), then you'd get a Lynch one like a special wonderful gift. I think that would have been a fine way to revive the series, if he and Frost handpicked a team of writers and hired a competent showrunner and still wielded creative control. I never understood why they needed to do it all themselves - maybe yes initially, The Return, fair enough, it was their vision. But they could have still had further seasons planned out then that they'd take a backseat to. I just feel it was too much for them to write and direct every single episode themselves and would've been fun to let them play in a sandbox but let others contribute also. I don't know why that would be such a bad thing to some fans, but I worry now that every episode of The Return was written by both and directed by Lynch it's set a precedent that a significant portion of the fanbase won't accept anything less now, which is a very high bar and might be expecting too much of them, which is why I said a Lynch film following on in whatever dimension The Return ended up in, like a dark mirror to FWWM, plus a new series with some input from him but not total input would be the best and the most realistic way for him to get to do a bit of both rather than trying to launch another 18 episode season by himself again.

I also think it's interesting how Lynch now dismisses ALL of Season 2 (not just the bad slump) given how much of it was crafted by him (even from behind the scenes, when he wasn't actively writing/directing). I wonder if this is a bit of the case of like Kimmy Robertson saying "Season 2 basically sucked", people forgetting that the first half of Season 2 is actually great. Yes, the middle 5 or 6 episodes do indeed mostly suck, but the last 6 are decent, and the first 8-9 are as good as if not better than Season 1 imo. I think over time this "Season 2 is crap" narrative crept in when only a very small portion of it was poor, like at most 1/3 of it (even if you count the entire second half of the season, it's still 1/2 a season of brilliance right up to a wonderful reveal) - and if those involved haven't rewatched and just remember the difficulties behind the scenes, the cancellation, etc. then perhaps all they remember are the negatives. Nevertheless, I was also surprised how much of Season 2-like stuff crept into The Return. Sure, Lynch kept Annie and Windom Earle out, but he brought back David Duchovny and other elements of Season 2 and I found a lot of the humour and moments of silliness were weirdly very reminiscent of the mid Season 2 slump - just the same type of humour and over the top moments, to a point that it really, truly surprised me. (I'd expected The Return to be much darker and a mediation on aging and loss and the passage of time based on early clips we saw. And some of it was quite dark and intriguing, but a lot of it was a lot more ... slapstick than I would have expected given I thought Lynch and others disliked so much of those elements creeping into Season 2. I know Season 1 had that kind of humour at times too, but the silly stuff in TR felt more like S2 than S1 to me.)

As for the IP itself and it's possibilities, I was just chatting to someone about this recently and I'm not sure how much is really there. The soap opera stuff might not work as well now as someone else said. A Fargo-style series could work. Maybe another murder mystery to pull in a general audience again? What is the actual IP though, once you leave aside the original characters (the actors are getting much older) and the Laura Palmer mystery - a small town with quirky stuff happening and the mythology of the lodges, the red room and spirit world in the woods outside the town, and the two worlds colliding/converging? It's not really as cut and dry an IP like Star Wars or something, it's much more esoteric and individulastic, made up by a small handful of creatives - Lynch, Frost, Badalamenti, the cast and characters. And it would be hard to find replacements for characters like Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper, who were so unique. Or the Log Lady. Or ... many more. Would be interesting to see a carefully selected group of people try their hand at it, though, although I agree with others here that I can't see Lynch/Frost giving up control - unless maybe at a push they decide they don't want to make it anymore and there's a significant lucrative (not just financial, but perhaps an offer of other projects too, etc.) deal being offered. (Didn't we learn Frost's name has been removed from some documents?) I don't really see it happening, but would be for it if there were certain stipulations in place.

[Brad D]

More a general thought - the amount of absurdist humor in On the Air eclipses any point of Twin Peaks season 2. Like it or not, Lynch and Frost had rubber stamped outrageous shenanigans many a time during this era. It wasn't prevalent in s1 so much, but still, I do wonder what they found humorous at the time, and might now wince at. Again, selective memories at play

[Jonah]

Yeah, true - I love the idea of On the Air and I really want to like it but, alas, found it borderline unwatchable. It's charming and I sort of like it but I don't really like watching it - I like more the idea of it.

A lot of the humour in mid-Season 2 seems to have put people off but I rarely see The Return receiving criticisms for it. Things like Jerry talking to his foot (which talks back) and Chantal and Hutch (ugh) and numerous other examples, had they appeared in mid-Season 2 or indeed perhaps anywhere outside of a Lynch-directed episode, would have been criticized very strongly indeed, I think. But I don't want this thread to devolve into a heated discussion on The Return. Suffice it to say, the amount of that type of humour in The Return just surprised me a lot, along with other silly plotting - and it surprised me because Lynch said openly how much he disliked Season 2 and how the revival was meant to be so different from it. I just found it to be very surprisingly similar - to a point I wonder why we blame the quality of TP going downhill so much on Lynch/Frost wandering away from the show and the other writers being overloaded. That kind of humour and silly plotting was, as you pointed out, present before any of that - and The Return showed it was present after it as well. So, what exactly was Lynch's issue with Season 2? What did he find so bad about it? Why did he praise the Diane Keaton episode? The only criticism that I could see being valid are ABC forcing them to reveal the murderer so soon, which no doubt left an understandable bitter taste. And there's certainly plenty of other things to criticize - Windom Earle prancing about in Batman disguises, the awfulness of the Lana plot, the James and Evelyn stuff - but so much of that is similar to elements of The Return that I just don't understand how Lynch can hate a season for having that stuff in it, yet also replicate it in the revival. It's just surprising to me. And this is not in any way meant to bash The Return - it's just I was surprised to see so much of that in it. Those early trailers showing clips of the Log Lady, Hawk, Andy made me think this would be a much darker, edgier show. I expected it to be more like a season of what was only glimpsed - in scenes like Hawk at Sarah's door or him speaking to the Log Lady, then seeing the red curtains in the woods - but instead we got all the goons in Vegas and even the Dougie storyline (like it or love it - it had its moments) was played very broad, that old silly humour rushing to the surface again.

These criticisms are not just confined to The Return. I point out the Season 2 elements of the original series, On the Air, and another good example is Mulholland Drive. There's some genuinely humourous moments but a lot of the side storylines in that film with the bumbling goons is not only very reminiscent of The Return but long before it even aired, I felt it brought MD down, distracting away from the deeper and darker storyline of the two women. Some of that was probably due to the fact it was originally a pilot - which just goes to show what that movie would have looked like had it become a series, a lot of that bizarre often unfunny humour and weird for weirdness sake storylines pulling focus away from the primary mystery. Sometimes this stuff really works - the bank vault scenes in Episode 29, Senor Droolcup in Episode 8, some of the Dougie stuff in The Return, the paint scene in MD - but more often than not it doesn't imo and is just painfully unfunny.

I'm just wondering what it was Lynch hated so much about Season 2 that he didn't think was present in The Return. It wasn't all that kind of stuff. I just can't believe so much of it came back with the show. Even the Denise stuff (and I love Denise) surprised me at being included. Really - I don't think Windom Earle or Annie would have been out of place. Seeing Norma going to visit Annie who was repeating the same phrase over and over surely would have worked better than the 119 lady as just one example.

Anyway, I still hope we see more TP. I'd really love another FWWM-style movie.The more I think about this the more I think a movie is the best medium for Lynch to use. Sure, FWWM is darker and less cozy than the original series and I get why some dislike it, I don't like it as much as the series myself but I actually thought the darkness was appropriate and the humour in it was done really well - much much better than in The Return or mid-Season 2, I found it complimented the darkness really well. Also, maybe a movie-length or double movie-length (FWWM + The Missing Pieces) work would have less filler, less Chantal/Hutch stuff and just work better for Lynch's storytelling while still also being part of an ongoing story, which I know he likes. Then maybe a pilot for a relaunch scripted by Lynch/Frost, cautiously turning the show over to others they get to pick - and see what happens. I'm not sure how much left there is to explore anyway. It seems there's at least three compelling characters still left (Laura and Dale or rather Carrie and Richard - and Audrey). But a lot of the townspeople's stories either feel done or just like they weren't explored all that much in the first place. And I'm not sure how likely it is we'd ever get Josie, Annie, Catherine back - but if we did it could make an intriguing Season 4 too. (Or movie and new series.)

[AXX°N N.]

More a general thought - the amount of absurdist humor in On the Air eclipses any point of Twin Peaks season 2. Like it or not, Lynch and Frost had rubber stamped outrageous shenanigans many a time during this era. It wasn't prevalent in s1 so much, but still, I do wonder what they found humorous at the time, and might now wince at. Again, selective memories at play

I'd actually be willing to bet that a good chunk of people who pin S2's characteristics overwhelmingly onto staff writers haven't seen On the Air.

[JackwithOneEye]

Both Lynch and Frost have children, and under US Copyright law, I believe things go to your heirs. Your lifetime + 90 years I think is current copyright law. You can express the wish not to make anymore of something once you're gone, and maybe draw up some papers, but who knows how enforceable that is. This country is becoming unaffordable. A college education at a prestige school is costing like $200,000 + these days. If a CBS exec calls up Lynch's and Frost's kids in 2040 and says how about a few mill licensing fee for a sequel or re-launch... who knows.

[Mr. Reindeer]

More a general thought - the amount of absurdist humor in On the Air eclipses any point of Twin Peaks season 2. Like it or not, Lynch and Frost had rubber stamped outrageous shenanigans many a time during this era. It wasn't prevalent in s1 so much, but still, I do wonder what they found humorous at the time, and might now wince at. Again, selective memories at play

In Chris Rodley's book 'Lynch on Lynch,' Lynch says that 'On the Air' was intended to be "stupid" humor but that he likes it. He says the same abut the 'Dream of the Bovine' series he was working on with Bob Engels, which never materialized. I don't think they were under any illusions that they were making high art on OtA, but L/F definitely enjoy that style of humor.

[Mordeen]

It's so funny to me how territorial and possessive and critical Lynch is towards other people's input on Twin Peaks, esp with season 2, and esp when he had more to do with it than he would ever like to admit (or remember). It's a very selective buffet.

TP began as a TV show where the literal plan was to create a series, get it going, and let other writers and directors do the lion share of the work. For me, it kept everything fresh until when it was time for Lynch to come in, shake it all up, and then come back down the road. Some dont like to admit this, but other people outside of Lynch and Frost did some pretty amazing work on the page and behind the camera before.

I dont see the crime in having other people do their takes on Twin Peaks, especially (hot take coming in, brace yourselves) when it seemed like Lynch really didn't want to do Twin Peaks proper again in the first place. It's strictly my opinion that most TV viewers dont care if a particular episode is directed by whomever. I honestly dont pay attention in 90% of the series I currently watch. What I'm getting at, is I think its pretty unlikely, but pretty appetizing if Lynch and Frost sold off the property and TP continued in a way Fargo has. The moods, motifs, and universe are at play, but the characters and the stories are all different each season.

The question is, would anyone offer up enough money to Lynch and Frost where they would hand it off like George Lucas did Star Wars? As Ted DiBiase said, "Everyone has a price." But I'm not so sure anyone is willing to pay it. I feel like TP had its populist appeal sucked out of the franchise with The Return, and that may have been the end goal of the creators. Who knows. I still say s4 is likely never happening, at least with Lynch and Frost doing it.

The factual points you make in your first couple of paragraphs speak volumes for what I see as selective memory on behalf not only of Lynch, but Legacy and even new fans.

Twin Peaks was not Just Lymch/Frost.

It's a sum of its parts, as I've said many times and perhaps to the chagrin of folks on here. Were Lynch/Frost's parts the best?

Arguably, yes.

Would many of them have even been possible without the contributions of the Not Lynch/Frost's?

Nope.

Twin Peaks OG was a collaboration of lightning in many bottles. I would argue that while excellent, The Return was a good example of how a lack of collaboration can make something go off the rails.

- ???????