Review: A ‘Twilight Zone’ Trying to Find Its Dimension

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/arts/television/twilight-zone-review.html

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When Rod Serling opened “The Twilight Zone” for business in 1959, it was a single, specific location. He defined it, in his signature Professor Spooky voice-over, as a place between light and shadow, science and superstition — you know the drill.

But the twilight zone was also a safe space, an underground meeting place to talk about things you couldn’t talk about on TV. Serling, a playwright harried by network censors in the 1950s, saw that he could tell unsettling stories — about prejudice, conformity, human frailty — if he dressed them in monster masks and alien goo. The show’s title came to define anything uncanny, any situation in which our sublimated nightmares became manifest.

So anyone remaking the series in 2019 has to answer, not just what is “The Twilight Zone” 60 years later, but where is it? In an age when there’s little you can’t show on TV, where are the forbidden zones? What is it people can’t say — or, at least, won’t say?

The new “Twilight Zone,” which arrives Monday on CBS All Access, does not lack for talent, big names or production resources. But as for finding its own distinctive place, it’s still looking.

If there’s one person I’d trust to channel our culture’s furtive whispers, it’s Jordan Peele, whose symbolic chiller “Us” is now in theaters and whose “Get Out” used horror to tell a complex story of racial appropriation. (His “sunken place” immediately became as vivid a metaphorical otherworld as, well, the twilight zone.)

[Read our guide to the enduring legacy of the original “Twilight Zone.”]

Peele produces and hosts the new series, as Serling did. (The episodes playfully deposit him in the midst of the set — at a diner, on an airplane’s video monitors — giving a dead-sober read on Serling’s much-parodied introductions.) But except for a shared “story by” credit on one episode, he didn’t write. And the new series misses having a unifying sensibility or voice.

The show launches, unfortunately, with the two least-successful installments of the four previewed for critics.

“The Comedian” stars Kumail Nanjiani as Samir, an ambitious comic who bores crowds into silence with his high-minded riffs on gun control. His idol, J.C. Wheeler (Tracy Morgan), tells Samir he needs to make his act more personal. The catch (of course): When Samir shares stories about the people in his life, he’ll lose them, more literally than he first expects.

“Modern-day Faust” is about as classic a “Twilight Zone” setup as there is. In “The Comedian,” it plays out for nearly an hour with no real suspense, surprise or tragedy. It is, I suppose, a parable for the power of words and the selfish impulse of art, though I’m not sure it can qualify as parable when the characters tell you that repeatedly and overtly.

The second episode, “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” reprises “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the classic in which William Shatner plays a man recovering from a nervous breakdown who is the only one on his airplane to see a hideous gremlin on the wing.

The new version improves only on the altitude. This time the woeful passenger is Justin (Adam Scott), a journalist with PTSD, who listens to a podcast that describes the disappearance of the very flight he’s on. This “Black Mirror”-flavored tale of fate is a more entertaining yarn than “The Comedian,” but it charts a course early for a twist ending that I suspect viewers will pick up on radar well before arrival.

With “Replay,” airing April 11, the series finally feels fully charged. Nina (Sanaa Lathan) is on a road trip taking her son (Damson Idris) to college when they have a driving-while-black encounter with a menacing state trooper (Glenn Fleshler). Nina discovers that her old camcorder has the power to rewind time — leaving her to try, desperately, to find a sequence of events that does not end tragically.

It is not subtle; it would probably be more effective with a little less speaking-the-subtext-aloud. (Honestly, that was also true of some original-series episodes, like “I Am the Night — Color Me Black,” in which the hatred in a small town manifests literally as a darkness obliterating daylight.).

But “Replay” has a fresh, visceral horror, thanks to Lathan’s anguished performance. Nina is the only one who retains the memory of each do-over, bearing and hiding the burden from her son, wishing she could give him a new start free of her terrors.

The writer, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, uses the premise as a metaphor for black Americans’ being stuck in history and unstuck in time, living in both the present and the inescapable past. (Fleshler’s highway trooper could have driven in from the Jim Crow South.) When Nina wonders, “Did we go backwards in time?” she’s not just speaking for herself and her son.

The last episode previewed, “A Traveler,” is a step sideways, a wry, spooky Christmas tale about a charming mystery man (Steven Yeun) who sows paranoia and havoc at a remote Alaskan police station run by an egotistic captain (Greg Kinnear). It’s written by the “X-Files” veteran Glen Morgan. It’s a very good “X-Files” episode.

That comparison brings up an issue that is out of this series’s control but hard to put out of mind. This is not the first time “The Twilight Zone” has been revived; CBS and the late UPN took forgettable stabs in 1985 and 2002. But really the show has been remade in spirit many times: in “The X-Files” and “Black Mirror” and boutique anthologies like HBO’s “Room 104” and various other creepshows.

The best of these series know why they exist and what they exist to say. So in 2019, a “Twilight Zone” without a specific perspective on the nightmares of its time is just a collection of creepy stories, an exercise in nostalgia. (The episodes are laced with playful nods to the past: Keep an eye peeled for William Shatner’s gremlin buddy.)

This new series shows signs of developing that distinctive voice, and certainly Peele is capable of it. For now, “The Twilight Zone” is an anthology of anthologies, a signpost that’s not up ahead but, for the most part, in the rearview mirror.