David's Rules - The Bonkers New World of Twin Peaks

So after a 26-year wait on television, we return to the world of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Has there ever been a longer wait for a TV series to return? And if you expect to be watching a 45-minute episode every week, cut up with McDonalds and Coke commercials and promos for Roseanne, you've come to the wrong network.

Moving to Showtime doesn't just add the titillation of swearing, nudity, and violence, it's also a network that gave Lynch complete control to do whatever he wanted for the 18-episode run. The Suits knew the audience would be there, waiting for a return to the small Washington town. They just didn't know what that might look like.

If you're expecting "Miss Twin Peaks" or Diane Keaton-directed episodes, you're in for a rude awakening.

The first episode spends most of its time in both New York City and South Dakota with characters we've never met before, with just the Log Lady, Deputy Hawk, and the Horne brothers appearing from the original series.

Kyle McLachlan appears as well, not as Agent Cooper but as a nameless, murderous doppelganger with a penchant for creepy low-life hangers-on, like the always reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The conventions that reined in the original series are now gone. The famous melancholic, almost sentimental score is nearly absent, with long scenes scored by droney machine noise or silence. The familiar ebb and flow of a network crime drama is missing, replaced with a disconnected series of vignettes that have yet to connect their puzzle-piece structure. Don't worry about spoilers, it's hard to explain how one scene relates to another.

As the second, third, and fourth episodes unspool, slow drips of the original Twin Peaks come back. A small sprinkling of characters from the old series appear, one-by-one, and the score returns in small measures. But it's not Lynch's goal to offer cozy nostalgia.

Time portals, astral projection, doppelgangers, catatonic states, anthropomorphic trees, decapitations, other planes of existence, and synthy pop bands like the Chromatics and Au Revoir Simone playing gloomy songs at the local Bang Bang Bar are all here.

Those aren't spoilers, that's just David Lynch being David Lynch.