The (New) Twilight Zone - Surprise: Its shit

Secret Asshole

Secret Asshole

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The new Twilight Zone is a series headed up by Jordan Peele of 'Get Out' and 'Us' fame. The guy who recently said he didn't see himself casting a white guy as a lead. Which I (kind of) get. Black protagonists in horror films are pretty rare. But still, its not being done for any story purpose or demographic purpose (IE: Tyler Perry) so I don't know what the deal is. He's also half-white, so that has to bring up some issues.

Anyway, that's not about that. This is about the new show. And here are some choice quotes:

“I sat down with Simon a couple years ago, and we did the whole, ‘OK, well, this is too big a show to reboot, but if we were going to do it, how would we do it?’ And one of the things that we kept coming back to was that the timing felt right. Because one of the sentences you hear often, like once a week for the past couple of years, is it feels like we’re living in the fucking Twilight Zone,” Peele said.
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Kinberg agreed. “I think the world, all of a sudden, was in desperate need of The Twilight Zone. If I told you three or four years ago that a reality star would be the president with access to the nuclear codes, you would’ve been like, ‘That is a crazy episode of The Twilight Zone.'”
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Ike Barinholtz noted that his entry into the series focuses on something that he sees as a very real threat. “It definitely dealt with the overall theme of toxic masculinity, which I will say we’re definitely being strangled with.”
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Yeun added that the fact the show was trying to “do something” was part of what drew him to it. “It was really one of those things where it was like, cool, people are really trying to say something, really trying to do something. Not just caught up in this fog, this plethora of riches that we have in this world to consume. Instead, we’re taking the time to make something that says something.”
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So....yeah. There's a teensy weensy problem. The Twilight Zone's morality and morale lessons were basically biblical in a sense that you could tell right from wrong and the protagonist basically earns the fate he's given. You can see it coming. It details basic human foibles. Politically, at the time, it was decidedly anti-communist. Also the thing about the President, we already got one where a guy wished to be the leader of a great and strong nation and it turned out to be Hitler in the bunker. (Sorry, I'm not spoilering 60 year old episodes).

The first two episodes dropped. Unlike the old Twilight Zone, which sometimes had you guessing what the fuck was going on, this is 100% showing its hand. In the first episode, "The Comedian" this guy is making shitty second amendment jokes. Tracy Morgan comments that shit isn't funny and you have to make it about inconsequential shit. And our protagonist gives this fake shit about 'the human condition' (as if self-deprecation or relating to other people wasn't the human condition, but talking about how we should ban assault rifles is). There's some dumb shit about how 'he'd give this comedian his dog' and they toast and what do you know, he makes jokes about his dog, gets laughs but SURPRISE! His dog vanishes. This is basically in the first ten minutes. Obviously anything he jokes about disappears.

It honestly feels like Jordan Pelee is admonishing other comedians that their acts aren't political enough and not doing enough so that the things they care about will 'disappear' as a consequence. It was actually rather fucking patronizing, until he gets to the fact that he can make anything disappear, but that seemed more to try and bury this point for plausible deniability. Its not so much as a moral lesson as some dude's opinion. If you disagree, the episode fails. This is the problem with making the show about politics. If you disagree with the message and feel that the protagonist is doing something innocent or basically an opinion, not a moral right and wrong, the show completely falls apart.

I mean, at that point, I turned the show off because I knew exactly what was going to happen. A nephew is introduced, he starts making jokes about him, and its obvious the nephew is going to poof out of existence. The moral is obviously stick to your principles or you'll lose everything you love or some shit. But I cannot get over the political nature of it.

Old school Twilight Zone would throw in some twist to fuck with you like, "Yeah, the nephew's gonna disappear, I know what's going on." Then they'd hit you with that this guy's dead and in hell and his hubris and hunting for fame causes all the things he loved to actually disappear.

I don't know how to describe it, but the original Twilight Zone felt it had rules. Tracy Morgan just shows up out of nowhere and gives this guy superpowers to make people disappear. That's it. That's the whole premise. I think a huge part of the problem is that these episodes are an hour, so shit's going to drag and you're eventually going to figure things out. In the original, they had 25-30 minutes so the pace was quick enough to keep you on your feet. With an hour, you need to be a lot more clever and fucking lol, they are not doing it.
 
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"I'm not imagining it. He's out there! Don't look, he's not out there now. He jumps away whenever anyone might see him... except me."
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I'm sure this newer woke version will feature scenes on a par with those powerful little moments that Serling's TZ had. Like Jack Klugman as a washed-up, alcoholic horn player in A Passage for Trumpet, where Klugman's character is confronted by a former employer as to why he's tossed a once promising career away, why he keeps getting liquored up even though it's what keeps him from being regularly employed and helps get him booed offstage.

 
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You missed the best one:

www.npr.org

Jordan Peele Puts His Spin On TV's Classic: 'The Twilight Zone'

Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele has created a new version of TV's classic anthology series — The Twilight Zone — for the streaming service CBS All Access. The show debuts April 1.
www.npr.org www.npr.org

One episode, "Replay," features Sanaa Lathan as a woman who rewinds time by pressing buttons on her dead father's camcorder. She's driving her son to a historically black college and uses the camcorder to evade a bigoted sheriff determined to arrest him.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE TWILIGHT ZONE")

SANAA LATHAN: (As Nina Harrison) You've been profiling us, targeting us, following us - shooting us, killing us. Not anymore. Now we crossed the line. My son will cross that gate.

DEGGANS: This speech comes as white cops with drawn guns face a group of mostly black students recording on their cellphones. It's a powerful image, part Black Lives Matter movement, part nod to the Underground Railroad. But much of the plot is fractured and makes little sense, even in the topsy-turvy universe of "The Twilight Zone." This happens often. Powerful scenes are linked together by weak storytelling and too many holes in the narrative.
 
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