In rebooting Rod Serling’s series, one legend succeeds another. Peele has the perfect opportunity to challenges viewers instead of pandering to them.
Jordan Peele is rebooting The Twilight Zone, and he is definitely the best man for the job.
The news came from Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS Corporation, who announced on Thursday that a Twilight Zone anthology series reboot is in the works. Whether the show has already been picked up for series or is still in the development phase remains unclear, but we do know that Jordan Peele’s production company, Monkeypaw Productions, will produce the script penned by Marco Ramirez.
The Twilight Zone originally aired on CBS from 1959 to 1964, and is often cited as a rare example of sci-fi that has aged well — so well that SyFy channel airs a marathon of the series every New Year’s Day, almost as a ritualistic test of whether the show was able to withstand one more year.
So far, it has not fallen short.
Eschewing simple bump-in-the-night scares and haunted house tropes, The Twilight Zone often grapples with social issues and deeply ingrained societal fears. It capitalized on the profound unease that characterized Cold War America.
What may be more surprising is that the show also periodically explored issues of race, sometimes even to a degree that critics deemed “preachy,” such as in the episode “I am the Night– Color Me Black,” which deals with the execution black man falsely convicted of murder, who was actually defending himself against a bigot.
Whether or not the episode succeeds or oversteps, the point remains: Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone set a firm precedent for exploring social injustice.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out
Not so coincidentally, Variety‘s review of Peele’s Get Out considered it “a queasy African-American version of the Twilight Zone.”
When Get Out hit theaters earlier this year, it took Hollywood by storm. Not only was this horror film about race relations phenomenally successful at the box office, it was also incredibly thoughtful, and changed the game for the horror genre in a lot of ways.
On a superficial level, it demonstrated that a horror film that is explicitly about social issues can play well with audiences (which horror producers seemed to have forgotten some time around the 1980s), and make a whole lot of money — in this case, over $175 million domestically (having made the film with a $4.5 million budget).
More importantly, it perfectly blended biting satire and truly terrifying moments, breaking just enough rules of the genre that the film could serve to redefine it as a whole.
Thus, Peele is skilled at challenging genre convention to make a point, and there is incredible potential in bringing his gifts to science fiction, which, unlike horror, has maintained much of its early capability of weaving social commentary into genuinely interesting stories.
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In rebooting Rod Serling’s classic series, one legend succeeds another. Peele has the perfect canvas for cross-genre exploration, disturbingly on-point satire, and for making a work of art that challenges viewers instead of pandering to them.