Twin Peaks’ Co-Creator on Laura Palmer’s Killer, The Return, and… More?

Everyone knows David Lynch as the big name behind Twin Peaks, but his co-creator Mark Frost knows just as many secrets about the town that’s both wonderful and strange. In a new interview, he talked about the pressure he and Lynch felt about resolving the show’s central mystery—as well as its Showtime revival and what (might be?) next.

Speaking to Variety in a piece that’s essential reading for Twin Peaks fans, Frost revealed that the timeline of revealing Laura Palmer’s killer—the question that gripped fans week after week—was bumped up at the insistence of ABC, which was not yet owned by Disney in those days.

“We literally had a gun to our head from the network. As I recall, they were just going to stop sending us money if we didn’t deliver this. They wanted it right off the bat at the start of the second season,” Frost said. “But David always said, ‘We should never solve the mystery — this should go on forever.’ And there’s a part of me that thinks he may have well have been right … but it was still 1992, and it was still network television, and they just put their foot down.”

Though Twin Peaks originally ran only two seasons, Lynch and Frost did make a pitch—to then-ABC exec Bob Iger, now famously the CEO of Disney—for a third season at the time. Though Frost recalls Iger as being “a real champion of the show,” the network “wanted to move on.” Years later, when Frost and Lynch started planning The Return, they went back to their basic idea for season three (“the bad Cooper’s loose in the world and the good Cooper’s trapped”) but knew they didn’t want to make a network series this time around. Calling it “an 18-hour movie,” Frost recalled that “We just wanted to go so far beyond the old Twin Peaks that it would be something entirely new.”

Variety is careful not to come right out and ask, but there was no way of ending the interview without asking about the finale of The Return—and the possibility of a fourth season. “I think we were happy with where it ended up … it in a way revealed Cooper’s tragic flaw, which is that he can’t leave well enough alone. He thinks there’s always a wrong to be righted and somebody to be saved. And the truth is, life isn’t as simple as that. And meddling with those forces can have unforeseen consequences,” he said. As for more? Back in 2020, Lynch said “there’s nothing happening in that regard.” In 2024, Frost said, “You never say never, but we haven’t talked about anything going forward at this point.”

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