Even to read about the original Twilight Zone, the brainchild of Rod Serling that premiered in 1959 and ran for five years, is to be consumed immediately by the need to watch (or re-watch) all 156 episodes. Every premise snags the attention, even if the twist is known. Many have entered into pop cultural consciousness and remained there ever since, so deeply did Serling and his expert team of writers and directors’ barbs embed. It is still impossible to resist the lure.
With such a potent asset in the archives, it would have been foolish to hope that perfection could have remained unsullied for long. It was rebooted once in 1985 and again nearly 20 years ago (for one dismal season) and now, perhaps because anthology series are having a moment, the time has been judged right for a new one. The latest is executive produced by Jordan Peele, a director who is in the middle of his own well-earned moment, built on his critically lauded and commercially successful film debut Get Out in 2017 and buffed by last year’s equally acclaimed horror Us.
The 10 episodes of the new incarnation, airing on SyFy, are a mix of remakes of Serling-era stories and new ones. Of the three released for review, it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to rewatch any of them, let alone for future generations to have their frames of reference still populated by any of the tropes or twists that turn up here. It is also hard to imagine, even though he provides the top-and-tail narration to each instalment, that Peele himself had much to do with the series creatively. It is simply too dull, badly paced and bereft of imagination to suggest there was any more than the lightest touch at any point from the comedy-horror maestro.
Every episode – which run for between 35 and 55 minutes – feels too long. The shortest is a remake of the classic Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. That it is retitled Nightmare at 30,000 Feet is an indication of the level of effort and fresh invention that has gone into the endeavour. Instead of William Shatner spotting gremlins on the wing we have Adam Scott as investigative reporter Justin Sanderson listening to a prophetic true-crime podcast telling the story of the mysterious downing of the very plane he is on and culminating in a twist after the twist that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Instead of the original series’ bleakly measured contemplation of mankind’s capacity for cruelty and evil, the reboot falls into either preachiness or schmaltz. The former dogs a potentially deeply involving, emotive story (Replay), in which an African American mother, Nina (Sanaa Lathan), uses the supernatural properties of her father’s old camcorder to rewind time and try to escape the pursuit of a white cop (Glenn Fleshler) intent on shooting her son, Dorian (Damson Idris). As a bald depiction of race relations between police and those they have supposedly sworn to protect it is fine. As a metaphor for the circumscription of potential in beleaguered communities, it almost works. But the supposedly rousing speech Nina gives when she finally faces Officer Lasky and his buddies down at the gateway to the college, as the other students and their parents raise their phones behind her to record everything in solidarity, is a platitudinous, half-hearted thing that symbolises the lack of inspiration throughout.
There are bright spots, usually confined to individual performances. Every member of each cast is good, but there are stand-outs. Fleshler as Lasky does a terrifying amount of being terrifying with very little and, in the opening episode, The Comedian, Tracy Morgan evokes a powerful sense of the diabolic in little more than a cameo role as he approaches the protagonist Samir (Kumail Nanjiani) with his Faustian bargain. (Morgan is all the more sinister, perhaps, for those of us who know him primarily as the unstoppably comic force Tracy Jordan in 30 Rock.) In the same episode, Diarra Kilpatrick as Didi, Samir’s comedy rival and eventual victim to his increasing corruption, was an invigorating force to be reckoned with. Her presence almost occluded a script that is so heavy on exposition that at one point Samir is required to say, wonderingly: “He’s … disappeared!”
Basically, it’s The Twilight Zone as if written in a twilight sleep. The original episodes are almost all up on YouTube and elsewhere. If you like your sci-fi/horror to dissect humanity’s worse impulses and hint at an abyss of depravities upon whose brink we all teeter, I suggest you head there rather than to 2020’s denatured pabulum. There you will find the fifth dimension.
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