YMMV / The Twilight Zone (2019) S1 E1 "The Comedian"

• He Really Can Act:
  • Coming off of The Big Sick, Kumail Nanjiani proves he can just as dramatic as he is funny, earning an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.
  • Tracy Morgan as J.C. Wheeler manages to be utterly terrifying by being a truly sinister figure while also having some strange charisma.
• Older Than They Think: Cosmic Retconning oneself out of existence as a solution to piled-up Butterflies of Doom previously appeared, albeit accidentally, in the Star Trek: Voyager two-parter "Year of Hell".
• Slow-Paced Beginning: It takes ten minutes just to get to Peele's opening narration.
• So Okay, It's Average: Just about everyone had this reaction to the episode, saying at most that it might have made a decent half-hour story and really suffers from being stretched out to the full hour. And it really doesn’t help that of the two episodes released at the start of the series, CBS chose this rather than the much-better-regarded "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet" to make free to view.
• Tear Jerker: Every second of Samir Wassan's final stand-up routine.
  Samir: I'm a comedian, which is a job like any other. Except instead of climbing into the gears of an enormous machine to chase a hat like I assume all of you do, I come up here and I try and make people laugh. Why? Because I wanna spread joy? Because I want the world to be a better place? Nope! It's because I'm a garbage can who needs lots of love and validation emptied right into me! I want people to come up to me on the street and ask for selfies! I don't even care if they know who I am! I just want them to think I'm somebody! And I wanted to have it so much that I wanna be sick of it! I want them to come up to me and I wanna be like, "Don't you know I'm just a garbage can who wants to live my own life?!" Why do I want that?! ...I don't know. But it doesn't matter. I am a bully. People are just material to me. I throw them away. I'm a country with one export, and there's really only ONE THING LEFT FOR ME TO GIVE! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I'VE BEEN SAMIR WASSAN!
  Samir's mic hits the stage, backed by the sound of uproarious laughter and applause.
• The Woobie: Samir Wassan. All he really wanted was to make people laugh, but thanks to a close encounter with a fellow forgotten comedian, this soon leads to him making many people disappear in a huge desperate desire to be famous. In the end, his own reward for his behavior is being erased from history.

---