I am eagerly anticipating this. I think Jordan Peele will be a great host.
So anyone have any ideas for what they would want out of a modern Twilight Zone series?
I know there's been a couple of revivals already, but none are considered to quite live up to the (admittedly groundbreaking and genre defining) original.
Edited by megaeliz on Sep 25th 2018 at 7:05:10 AM
So some of the cast has been announced
Twilight Zone fans will recognize that title from the 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” which starred William Shatner as a nervous airline passenger haunted by a vision of a creature outside the aircraft on the wing. (Also: planes fly higher now).
Why do they feel the need to remake the best episodes in revivals? Like no matter how good it is, the original is going to win out every time.
If you have to do episode remakes, why not do a second try on episodes that didn’t quite live up to their original concept instead?
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 27th 2018 at 10:50:36 AM
*"Stewardess, there's a monster on the wing!" "That's crazy, sir." "No, seriously, look at this video I just took." "Holy shit, we need to land this plane right now."
Edited by alliterator on Oct 27th 2018 at 8:18:07 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
. Still I’d just rather see original stories or even remakes of episodes that didn’t quite live up to an interesting premise. It keeps things more interesting, I think.
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 28th 2018 at 2:30:33 PM
I do hope not every episode is a remake from the classic show. One or two is fine.
So what kind of stories would you guys like to see anyway?
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 28th 2018 at 1:58:55 PM
I mean, if there are remakes of episodes at all, I wouldn't mind them doing a new take on... God, I can't remember the name of the episode. Its on the tip of my tongue. The one with Robert Redford and there was the woman who kept seeing death before he took someone and confines herself to her apartment because she's terrified of dying, only to meet death as a young man who befriends her and takes her peacefully into the next life.
I always loved that episode.
I'd love to see some adaptations of stories that haven't been adapted before.
Wasn't that in 2003 revival?
How do you think they are going to handle the political and satirical aspects of the show I wonder?
"Nothing in the Dark" was the episode. I don't think it was in the 2003 because I only ever see the original mentioned as far as Wikipedia goes.
They just announced a premier date for the first two episodes on CBS All Access.
And, of course, there was a new trailer. I bet this freaked some folks at home out.
Edited by ProfessorDetective on Feb 5th 2019 at 7:02:21 AM
You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror. These are just examples; it could also be something much better. Prepare to enter: The Scary Door.
Something really spooky about the Super Bowl commercial, the music at the 0:51 - 0:58 mark is the classic Twilight Zone theme slowed down.
That theme was already creepy and they somehow made it even creepier.
I'm curious to see what type of themes and topics this show will explore. I wonder if one of the overarching themes of the series has anything to do with "When Truth is not the Truth, what dimension are you even in?"
Edited by megaeliz on Feb 8th 2019 at 8:24:18 AM
Your next stop...
Right off the bat, I recognize:
- Steve Yuen
- Daniel Brul
- Tracy Morgan
- Kumail Nanjiani
- Greg Kinnear
Always 3:00am in the Filth
Hoping it's good. The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite shows ever made. They reboot it every now and then and it never holds a candle to the original.
One problem they'll probably never overcome is that the original was a little hokey. Rocket ships and traveling peddlers and other weird, often silly concepts and visuals. Stuff that we're just too "smart" and "sophisticated" for nowadays. It was a product of its time and it's often pretty quaint, even to somebody who grew up watching reruns whose parents saw it live.
One problem I hope they finally solve is remembering that the show wasn't all horror and TwistEndings. There were dark episodes with downer endings, there were twists and surprises, and then there just tons of other episodes about the strange and weird with no big reveals. There were happy endings with smiling kids.
Edited by Rotpar on Feb 22nd 2019 at 11:02:54 AM
"But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." - O'Brien, 1984
The ending of Pitch For The Angels is still one of my favorite things ever.
For bonus points, it’s both a negative karma twist and a positive karma twist, plus a ton of warm fuzzies, all at the same time.
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
Raven Wilder
One thing that I think makes replicating The Twilight Zone difficult is how so many of those episodes had a stage play quality, in terms of staging, story structure, and especially in dialogue.
At the time, this was incredibly common for television, but (outside of the handful of four-camera sitcoms still kicking around) isn't how anyone makes TV today. But if you tried making Twilight Zone episodes with more cinematic staging and more naturalistic dialogue, I'm not sure how many of them would still work.
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
bivalve
I say the 80's revival had its moments. The 2000-ish attempt, not so much.
http://www.mansionofe.com
The inventive and often gorgeous black and white cinematography and staging also helped with the distinctly stage play like atmosphere as well, I think. x
This surreal quality of television theater, like that of a shadow box within which images are played, is also most dramatically evident in “Eye of The Beholder,” a classic Serling script capped by perhaps Twilight Zone’s most unforgettable shock ending.
The chiaroscuro lighting designs by director of photography George T. Clemens and the stylized, carefully cropped and choreographic direction by Douglas Heyes demonstrate that, as the surrealist artists, painters, and photographers gave plastic form to the visions of the surrealist poets and writers, the visual architects of The Twilight Zone—its directors, set designers, and makeup artists—provided a perfect stage for Serling’s literary netherworld....
George T. Clemens had come out of retirement in 1959 from a background in cinematography (including the creation of the lighting and makeup transformation of Frederic March in the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde) to become Twilight Zone’s director of photography throughout its network run (131 out of 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964).
A classic Hollywood craftsman, Clemens was painstakingly devoted to the series. “Everything has got to be just right,” he told Variety after winning an Emmy in 1961 for his Twilight Zone work. “We shoot 15,000 to 20,000 feet an episode to get 1,800 feet of what we want for the twenty-three minutes on the air.” When early in its production there was pressure on Serling to switch Twilight Zone to the new color photography, Clemens objected vehemently. He remembered telling Serling, “I can’t give you what we feel is the Twilight Zone feeling in color as I could in black and white.”
Edited by megaeliz on Mar 23rd 2019 at 10:53:32 AM
The 80’s reboot gave us “Dealer’s Choice” and “I of Newton”, so it’s alright in my book.
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
New Trailer
What's the chances that we'll get a bunch of people complaining about how they should keep politics out of Twilight Zone?
Edited by megaeliz on Mar 27th 2019 at 3:24:10 PM
I just checked and didn't see any threads for this, so here we go. CBS just released a teaser for a revival of the Twilight Zone, with Jordan Peele as Producer and Host (making him the first since Rod Sterling himself)
Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot is coming to CBS All Access next year [1]
The Twilight Zone is one of television’s most renowned shows. It was an anthology series that ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964. In that short span of time, it managed to rewrite America’s idea of what surrealism in television could be. Its DNA is in everything from The X-Files to Black Mirror. Rebooting it is, to say the least, a daunting project.
“I was terrified,” Peele told Variety in a profile published earlier this year. “Why would I ever jump into the most established, pristine shoes in all of the genre? I could rip Twilight Zone off and call it something different and not be compared to Rod Serling. So I stepped away from it. And then several months later I got another call.” That call was from co-executive producer Simon Kinberg (Logan). They spoke again and realized their enthusiasm for the project could make it work. “If we approach it without ego and sort of bow to Serling, that will hopefully suffice for our fellow Twilight Zone fans, but also bring back a show that I think is needed right now,” he continued. “Because it’s a show that has always helped us look at ourselves, hold a mirror up to society.”
That “mirror to society” theme runs through Peele’s other projects, too, most notably the Oscar-winning Get Out and, more recently, Spike Lee’s Blac Kk Klansman, which Peele produced. He’s currently working on a horror series about the Jim Crow era in American history and a show for Amazon about hunting Nazis.
This isn’t the first time CBS has tried to reboot The Twilight Zone. As my colleague Andrew Liptak noted last year, the studio’s first effort in 1985 fizzled out after three seasons, and the network UPN produced its own one-season reboot in 2002. Peele seems to be the right person for the job, though. Get Out shares the kind of moralizing weirdness that made the original Twilight Zone tick. If anyone can pull this off, it’s him.
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 9th 2018 at 1:07:18 PM