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‘Twin Peaks’ gets a damn fine release date of May 21 – Metro US

‘Twin Peaks’ gets a damn fine release date of May 21

Twin Peaks
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Find yourself a great slice of cherry pie and put the fish in the percolator, because the new season of “Twin Peaks” now has a premiere date. Today it was revealed the show returns on May 21. It will run a total of 18 hours, including a two-hour first episode, all on Showtime.

Beyond that — and its endless cast list, which sometimes feels like Twin Peaks Mad Libs — that’s all anyone knows right now. The cast and crew have been sworn to secrecy about details, including why Michael “Harry S. Truman” Ontkean is not returning and how the world will be able to handle a single show that boasts Monica Belluci, Laura Dern and Trent Reznor.

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We’ll speculate about this, though: It might be weird. Super weird. Weird in a way that will shock and confuse all but die hard David Lynch-heads. The show’s co-creator, who directed each new episode, hasn’t made a “proper” film since 2001’s “Mulholland Dr.,” and his last one — 2006’s three hour “Inland Empire” — may be a stone cold brilliant avant-garde epic with career peak work from Dern, but it’s also few casual binge-watchers’ idea of tweetable entertainment.

The original show, which bowed in 1990 and was unceremoniously snuffed out the next year just as it was coming back from a long bad patch, was fascinating in part because it was a true visionary forced to conform to the sanitized mores of network television. In devising PG-rated ways to freak us out, he found freedom in slavery. Now that he’s been out of the game for so long — and doing a show on anything-goes premium cable — who knows what wackadoodle business lies in wait.

Anyway, that’s almost four months to revisit the original two seasons, which you might dread when you hit that rough patch in the second when Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost went off to make movies and their replacements spent 10 episodes all but driving it into the ground. You might want to skip past all the business involving James getting it on with a rich older woman, which might be a worse nightmare than anything Lynch has ever put on screen — even the giant brain fish from his movie of “Dune” whose vaginal mouth secretes gas in horrifyingly graphic close-ups.

Follow Matt Prigge on Twitter @mattprigge