If any TV series can claim to have entered the folklore, certainly on an international scale, it is probably The Twilight Zone (of course, it depends on how you define terms like TV series and folklore, and personally I can think of quite a few candidates that could credibly make such a claim). Maybe this is more the case in the US than over here, where the original series has not, to my knowledge, received anything like a complete re-run in well over thirty years, but even so – odd little instances of it keep bubbling up in quiet little corners of the TV spectrum. Once upon a time it was the after-dark small hours where you could find either the original show or the 1980s version, these days it is amongst the high-numbers channels where you are probably going to find a portal to the Zone quietly awaiting you. (On a related topic, Talking Pictures TV has been rerunning The Outer Limits for the last year, nearly, episodes of which have been quietly stockpiling on my tellybox recorder all that time. It’s almost enough to make one hope for a whole succession of rainy days.)
When I went to see the Twilight Zone stage show five years ago, one of the things I mentioned was the fact that a new incarnation of the series had just been announced, the main name attached being that of Jordan Peele (TV comedian turned great new horror director of our time, perhaps). I was, perhaps, just a bit too dismissive of the idea, but then I was hip deep in the Rod Serling version at the time, in all its inconsistency, occasional unsurpassed brilliance, and frequent pulp corniness. The new version of Zone finally turned up free-to-air over here in the summer and I finally got around to watching it recently.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, it can be difficult to explain exactly what The Twilight Zone – in any of its incarnations, all of which are essentially the same anyway – actually is. It’s an anthology series, that’s easy enough, so there are no recurring characters (unless Rod Serling himself counts as a character), no particular locations, no ongoing storylines. But what genre is it? Well, sometimes it’s sci-fi, sometimes it edges towards genuine horror, most commonly it’s fantasy of various different flavours (then again, there’s at least one episode with no fantastical elements at all). People stray out of their ordinary places into somewhere… different, where that which is usually immaterial becomes startlingly concrete. Allegory and metaphor gain flesh and bone and steel and wood. This is The Twilight Zone, always unsettling, occasionally hungry.
Lots of people have done Twilight Zone-style stories down the years, of course, not least Peele himself – Get Out could have been a Zone story, trimmed down quite a bit – and this is probably why he was tapped to get involved with the new show (other familiar names on the production team include Glen Wong (veteran X Files scribe) and Simon Kinberg (long-time influence on the X-Men movie franchise, if overseeing the slow demise of a film series counts as influencing it). The new show sticks quite close to the original format, which is sensible enough – The Twilight Zone is one of the most perfect vehicles for telling a series of stories that anyone has ever come up with, after all.
The new show ran for twenty episodes across two seasons before those involved decided to knock it on the head – a rare example of the network wanting more, but the creative personnel deciding they’d said their piece. The first season is made up of sixty-minute episodes (including adverts, etc); in the second a few forty-five minute instalments crop up, which helps with the sometimes over-stately pacing of many episodes from the first year.
So, is it any good or not? Is it a worthy successor? Well, it’s a tricky question, isn’t it, as the quality of any anthology series tends to be incredibly choppy, no matter who’s making it. Even Rod Serling owned up to the fact that, of the episodes in the original show, the percentage ratio of great/average/awful episodes ran pretty close to 33/33/33%. On a solely aesthetic level, the series is undeniably successful – the production values are excellent, with great sets, cinematography, and special effects.
Dramatically, there seems to me to be a distinct different between the first and second series. It feels like the first planning meeting included a segment where the writers sat down with a whiteboard and made a list of all the topics they wanted to make a pronouncement about: Social Media, Native American Rights, Toxic Masculinity, Gun Control, Donald Trump, and so on. You are certainly seldom in doubt about what any given episode is commenting upon, nor what the position taken by the writers is.
This can get a bit tiresomely didactic regardless of whether you agree with the script’s politics or not. The best of the first season episodes either come at their topic slightly askance, and feel more like genuine pieces of entertainment as a result, or attack their subject with such gusto they’re hard to resist. Amongst the first category is The Blue Scorpion, about a troubled academic (Chris O’Dowd) who inherits a rather strange and temperamental pistol, and Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, a riff on the famous original-series episode with William Shatner and the Gremlin, in which Adam Scott discovers the plane he’s flying on is destined to disappear without a trace – this finds an interesting vein of post-September 11th disquiet and paranoia to mine. Other superior episodes include the opener, in which Kumail Nanjiani plays a struggling stand-up comedian who finds that drawing on his own life for material brings success, but at an alarming cost, while The Wunderkind is a bracingly impudent tale of an amoral political operator who sets out to show the world what he can really do by ensuring a spoilt child is elected to the White House (the satire here is hardly deeply buried). An exception to the didacticism of most of the episodes is the concluding one, Blurryman, a neat piece of metafiction taking place on the set of the series itself – Peele appears as himself, as does Seth Rogen. A passionate young writer on The Twilight Zone finds herself being haunted by the same enigmatic presence which has been turning up in the background of various other episodes. The revelation, when it comes, is winning, in an episode which deconstructs the series, or at least its raison d’etre.
The second year relaxes a bit and seems to be a bit less worried about sending all the right messages – the pacing picks up a bit too, in the shorter episodes at least. This isn’t to say there are no contemporary resonances or social commentary in the second year, it just seems to be growing organically out of the scripts, rather than being imposed on them. The second series as a whole is probably more consistent, but that really just means that while its worst episodes aren’t as cheesy, there are fewer really good ones. Most of them are fairly forgettable – some of them commit the regular Zone error of solely writing towards a twist, which only really works if it’s a really good twist (though this happens in the first year too).
Others have much more of a ‘classic’ Zone feeling to them – The Who of You (struggling-actor-turned-criminal discovers the power to switch bodies with other people) feels like it’s channelling the original episode The Four of Us are Dying, while A Small Town (handyman discovers a replica of his town, and changes to one are reflected in the other) feels like a remake, even though it isn’t. Less ‘classic’ but still striking is 8 (Antarctic expedition encounters a rather unusual octopus), an excursion into outright horror which unfortunately does feel constricted by a too-brief running time.
The best episodes come at the end – Try, Try is about a woman on a trip to the museum which takes a very odd turn, as the apparently-perfect man she befriends turns out to be nothing of the sort. It’s a devastating takedown of Groundhog Day, as it might appear from the Andie McDowell character’s point of view, with strong performances from Kylie Bunbury and Topher Grace. Possibly the best of all is You Might Also Like, a sort of spiritual successor to the original episode To Serve Man. It’s about advertising, and consumerism, and grief, and manages to be funny and poignant and weird and unsettling in a way none of the other episodes manage. You can see why they put it out last of all, though.
So, is the most recent incursion of Twilight Zone worth visiting? Well – much as with the original show, there is a fairly even mixture of good, okay, and bad episodes (perhaps not quite enough genuinely good episodes for comfort, though). If every episode was up to the same standard as Try, Try, The Blue Scorpion, and You Might Also Like this would be an extremely watchable and maybe even significant series. Sieving through the less-successful instalments could make watching this show more of a grind than it’s worth.