Twin Peaks, the quirky small American town wrenched from the imagination of acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch, has made a successful landing in the south of France.
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One of the show's stars, actor Kyle MacLachlan, who plays FBI special agent Dale Cooper, flew into the Riviera convention capital to spruik the series to international television buyers.
"There is an excitement that is palpable and it's nice to have something that resonates." MacLachlan told Fairfax Media.
The reboot of Twin Peaks is still under wraps, and MacLachlan is under orders from the show's creator David Lynch to say as little as possible about what lies in store for fans.
But there was noticeable buzz in the bustling TV market Mipcom – a sort of Royal Easter Show of screen content – as MacLachlan arrived on the CBS Studios stand in Cannes' Palais des Festivals to help spruik the series.
The original Twin Peaks ran for two years in 1990 and told the story of a small town whose inner world was ripped open after the murder of seemingly beloved homecoming queen Laura Palmer.
The reboot picks up the story 25 years later.
MacLachlan's character, Agent Dale Cooper, was an outsider who arrives in the sleepy Pacific Northwest town to investigate Laura Palmer's murder, and has an appetite for good coffee, donuts and sending notes to his unseen assistant, Diane, via dictaphone.
MacLachlan appeared in the original series and its film spin-off, 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
"There are certainly characters that I really enjoyed playing and characters that I would want to return to for whatever reason, they were well written or rich in potential, and Dale Cooper is certainly one of those," MacLachlan said.
"Perhaps the richest, and certainly the most complex," the 57-year-old actor added.
Returning to the series was, he says, both thrilling and unexpected.
"David and I are friends so over the years we would get together, talk, reminisce and hang out, and it would come up occasionally, but it was always so vague that I had kind of put it to bed," he says.
"When he called me and said he and [co-creator] Mark Frost had been working on something, that they had found a way back in, and found a story that made sense, I was incredibly excited.
"But I had to temper that excitement, many things had to happen before that became a reality."
In addition to Twin Peaks and its spin-off film, MacLachlan worked with Lynch on two of his most significant productions, the 1984 film adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune and 1986's Blue Velvet.
Returning to the series after more than two decades, what is noticeably different, MacLachlan says, is the noise on social media which did not exist when the original series was produced.
"The enthusiasm has been extraordinary, everything from cannot wait, to love letters to the idea that Twin Peaks is coming back again."
The series will launch in the US in 2017; the streaming platform Stan, co-owned by Fairfax Media, has the Australian rights to the series.
