Tag Archives: Twilight Zone

So after blogging about Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone revival, I got to thinking about the enduring popularity of Rod Serling’s original. Why is it remembered so well? Why does it keep getting revivals?Well, it’s become a brand name so it’s no surprise CBS wants to keep reviving it. That’s a much safer bet than encouraging people to catch an all-new series — as witness I tuned in to the Peele and I’ve never made any effort to catch Black Mirror (not a reflection on that show, just on the amount of stuff that’s out there to watch). And part of the reason it’s become a brand name is that when it came out there wasn’t anything like it. TV SF was treated as kids’ stuff; TV fantasy was limited to sitcoms such as Topper or Bewitched. Twilight Zone took specfic seriously, as something adults could enjoy and that could be done well. It didn’t hurt that along with Serling, we had Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, both established and excellent writers of contemporary fantasy (among other things). Serling also cast a lot of first-rate actors including Burgess Meredith, Ross Martin, Jack Klugman, Wilfred Hyde-White and others. Running from 1959 to 1964, Serling’s work had an impact I don’t think it could possibly have today.

But not every show that made a big splash back in ye ancient times of a mere three networks has such a devoted following today. The original series holds up well.

Part of that is Serling’s interest in people and human nature, particularly his fondness for the down-and-out and the unlucky losers. The insecure cheap crook in Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room. The anguished bookie in In Praise of Pip, getting one last night with his dead son. Art Carney delivering Christmas cheer on The Night of the Meek. But while people often have crappy lives and don’t get happy endings (case in point, Burgess Meredith’s myopic bank clerk in  All The Time in the World) Serling’s not looking to to shrug and say “life isn’t fair.” He gets that unfairness is something that should be fixed. And in many stories he does, delivering a eucatastrophe, a miraculous (but plausible) happy ending.

Another factor, and I think this is a big one, is the nature of the stories. Twilight Zone had a big range: stories with no specfic element (The Silence), post-apocalypse (Two), space adventure (The Parallel) and time travel (No Time Like the Past), but the “generic” TZ story is intrusion fantasy: a contemporary setting with the supernatural or super-scientific intruding on it. And doing so, in many cases, randomly.

In a few of the episodes, there’s a clear reason for what’s happening, such as Jess-Belle where the protagonist apprentices herself to a witch, or The Trouble With Templeton in which the protagonist’s long-dead wife has arranged events for his benefit. In many more, there’s none: fate or God or Satan has decided to upend someone’s life for no reason at all. The businessman in A World of Difference suddenly finds he’s an actor and his life is the script. He doesn’t do anything to bring it about, it just happens. Ditto the woman haunted by her double in Mirror Image or the rejuvenated seniors in Kick the Can. They don’t cross any lines, tamper with anything forbidden, piss off the dark gods — they’re just shit out of luck. Sure, some of them deserve their doom or their miraculous redemption, such as Dan Duryea’s drunken gunfighter in Mr. Denton on Doomsday. Even so, there’s no reason why Fate should (literally) stop in his town and turn his life around, it just happens.

That, I think, makes it more compelling. Because if things like this can happen at random, then they can happen to us. We don’t have to be chosen ones, or profane an Egyptian tomb to be affected. Any one of us, at any time, could stumble into the impossible.

Into the Twilight Zone.

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I doubt I’d have bothered with CBS’ latest revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE if Jordan Peele hadn’t been the man in the Rod Serling role (including serving as narrator). Given how good Peele’s Get Out and Us were, he seemed like the right guy to deliver Twilight Zone stories tailored for the 21st century. But whether it’s the different requirements for a TV series from a movie or too much network interference, Peele didn’t pull it off.

He’s not unique. The first attempt to remake Serling was the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie which had one memorable story (a remake of  Nightmare at 20,000 Feet) and three “meh” ones. This led to a 1985 CBS series I remember as pretty good, though it’s quite possible I’m erasing the bad stuff. Then there was a completely forgettable UPN revival nearly 20 years ago.

And no, I’m not biased by nostalgia for the original series. I love it but even before I started rewatching it the past few years, I had no illusions it was perfect. I remember many crappy episodes (Cavender Is Coming, Mute, Steel) but the good outnumber the bad and every season has some great episodes. After watching six of the ten-episode first season of the new version I found no great, two good and four bad. That’s not a win.

The first episode, The Comedian, runs an hour, which was a mistake: as the original’s  S4 showed, some stories fail simply by being stretched out. The title comic is Samir, who wants to do political humor but flops with it. Then a legendary comic advises Samir to draw on his life for material; the audience loves this approach, but whenever he talks about his dog, his nephew, a coworker, they vanish from existence. In fact, they never existed and only Samir remembers them.

There’s obvious potential here for a metaphor about creative people mining their own lives for material, or how someone with ambition can discard people in their life on the climb to the top. Instead, this tries to fill the hour by going in too many directions; at one point, Samir pulls a Death Note and starts erasing abusers, drunk drivers and other people, but then we’re off in another direction. The story never has the punch it might have.

To give Peele credit, Nightmare at 30,000 Feet doesn’t simply remake the original story about a man seeing a monster destroying the wing of a plane. Instead, nn investigative journalist discovers the Weird Mysteries podcast he’s downloaded to listen to is talking about a mysteriously vanished flight … that’s the exact flight the protagonist is on. Can he figure out what’s happening in time to avert catastrophe? Not a bad concept, but it never built up enough tension for me.

Replay was one of the good ones. Black lawyer Nina (Sanaa Lathan)is driving her son to college when she discovers rewinding her old camcorder can rewind time. This comes in handy when a bigoted cop starts harassing them, but no matter how many times Nina tries changing how she deals with him, nothing can neutralize the threat.I think it’s the best of the ones I watched.

But then comes A Traveler, set in a rural Alaskan police station where Captain Pendleton (Greg Kinnear) shows a suitably Christian compassion by letting one prisoner out of jail; as he doesn’t have anyone this year, Sgt. Mongoyak (Marika Sila) arrests her brother just so Pendleton can free him. But it turns out Mr. A. Traveler (Steven Yuen) is already in jail, claiming that as a YouTuber who covers extreme tourism, he’s there to witness the annual release. Is he telling the truth? Of course not, but the results make it impossible to care.

Wunderkind isn’t good but it was amusing. Failed political consultant Raff (John Cho) spots an 11-year-old, Oliver (Jacob Tremblay), running for president on YouTube. Everyone likes his simplistic proposals so Raff launches a campaign to put Oliver in the White House. Oops: who’d have thought a temperamental, selfish brat running the government was a bad thing? Why yes, I do think this has a point about politics, but it’s not executed well-enough to work. It hand-waves Oliver being too young to get elected and can’t decide if he’s a brat or a child sociopath.

I’d have stopped there but Not All Men sounded too interesting to pass up. Annie (Taissa Farmiga) goes on a date with her coworker Phil but stops short of sleeping with him. Next morning at work, their boss transfers her current project to Phil, telling her she’ll rise farther as his assistant. Coincidence? Then things get really nasty when a meteor shower unleashes the local male population’s worst impulses; can Annie survive? Can she trust that the guy who says he’s not infected is safe?

This is at its best dealing with the little annoyances women have to put up with (“You’d look really cute if you’d smile.”) and the challenge of figuring out what’s really going on (is Phil punishing Annie for not putting out, or is it just their boss favoring the white guy?). The outright violence isn’t as interesting, and I couldn’t buy the reveal the meteors were a placebo, a rationalization for the guys losing control — why would anyone assume the rocks had that effect? Still, it was interesting enough that in another era I might have kept watching. But these days there’s too many alternatives to give this more of a chance.

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I thought after watching this week’s Nancy Drew I’d be included that too, but despite some major reveals that seem to wrap everything up, they have a half-dozen episodes to come.

I had a mixed review of BLACK LIGHTNING‘s second season, but this season more than made up for it. Freeland spends most of the season caught between the American Security Agency and agents from Markovia, both of which want control of Freeland’s metas; the ASA’s conniving, cold-blooded Odell (Bill Duke) insists he’s acting for the community’s own protection, but while Jeff tries to be moderate, Anissa and Inspector Henderson both join the Resistance, helping to get metas out of town past both sides. Jennifer, meanwhile, discovers how powerful she really is and lets Odell manipulate her before she discovers during the Crisis how far she’s crossing the line. Plus Odell gets Lynn hooked on greenlight to boost her IQ while she’s working with the metas, and turns Jen’s boyfriend Khalil into a brainwashed killer. If ever anyone had He Needed Killing plastered to his forehead …

Into this mess, we then bring Tyson “Gravedigger” Sykes (Wayne Brady), the world’s first metahuman, the result of WW II experiments (his story reminded me a lot of the MU’s Isaiah Bradley). Bradley has nothing but contempt for the way the U.S. has treated his people and so after working on the Markovian meta-research program (the U.S. set it up in Markovia to avoid scrutiny, and because that put its metas in striking distance of the USSR) he co-opted it to attack his own country (the tendency of metas to die or go comatose delayed the plan). There’s a great bit where he tells Jennifer Martin Luther King was a coward who couldn’t do what needed doing; she reminds him that nonviolence was a calculated, and successful tactic.

The ending episode this week has Gravedigger and his Markovian allies making an all-out attack on Freeland and the ASA meta-research lab, while Odell prepares to withdraw, then have the city nuked so the Markovians don’t get what they want. Its Gravedigger against the Pierces in all-out action with a surprisingly high body count (even given some of the deaths could be easily reversed); not knowing it was the season ender, I really was surprised.

If I have any complainst, it’s that the show doesn’t at all acknowledge that it’s now on the same Earth as Flash and post-Crisis always has been. The dark-matter Central City metas are stable and someone should at least have mentioned it. And that while they avoided turning Anissa’s lover Grace into a Dead Lesbian Trope, I’m not sure Comatose Lesbian is an improvement (okay, it’s an improvement, but not much of one).

THE TWILIGHT ZONE‘s fourth season switched from thirty minutes to an hour (I think there’s a meta-joke about that in the episode The Bard) and most fans dismiss it as a failure. Although a slight majority of episodes are indeed flops, I don’t know how much is due to expanded length and how much due to the show just running out of steam, which was happening even in S3. It’s true that some episodes, such as The Thirty-Fathom Grave, might have worked at an hour’s length, but most of the bad ones would be bad at any length. Particular un-favorites are Mute, a story about a telepathic kid getting integrated into society that comes off unpleasantly abusive, and The Bard, in which a hack writer summons up Shakespeare’s spirit to write a TV movie only to see it hacked to death by sponsor and network requirements. It’s one The Twilight Zone Companion cites as a classic, but I find it predictable and just ridiculous, like nobody noticing the script’s Shakespearian language. Some good roles (Burt Reynolds as a Brando knockoff, John McGiver as a clueless sponsor) but I hated it.

And the good stuff is very good, despite the hour length. Astronauts Jack Klugman and Ross Martin trying to understand how they found their crashed Death Ship on an alien world with their bodies inside; space-colony leader James Whitmore reluctant to release his grip on the colony when he learns they can return to Earth (On Thursday We Leave For Home); Miniature; the rural fantasy Jess-Belle; and the gentle romantic fantasy Passage on the Lady Anne. There are also a few middling ones. Printer’s Devil is poor, but Burgess Meredith makes a great villain; I Dream of Genie is uneven but it still won me over, especially the ending.

IIRC the fifth and final season of the original had a lot of flops too. As it was 36 episodes long, it’ll be a while before you get a review though.

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