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Jordan Peele brings The Twilight Zone into the 21st century

THE TWILIGHT ZONE (Jordan Peele). Two-hour premiere Thursday (April 4) at 9 pm on CityTV, subsequent episodes airing Thursdays at 10 pm and streaming at CityTV.com. Rating: NNNN


There’s a lot of goodwill behind The Twilight Zone – and in front of it, as well. Writer, director and acknowledged genre nerd Jordan Peele is producing a new edition of Rod Serling’s classic 60s series for the CBS All Access streaming service, and even taking over hosting duties. It seems like the perfect marriage of fusty old concept and wild-talent creative: if anyone could shake this property out of its torpor, it’d be Peele. I was certainly rooting for it to work.

And it does work – with a few caveats. Peele’s Twilight Zone may not revitalize the form but it nicely recaptures the mood of Serling’s series, which used the limitations of TV production to craft stories of the inexplicable invading a recognizably mundane world.

With a few notable exceptions, Serling’s stories take place in homes, offices, diners, commuter trains, small towns, carnivals and so on. The ordinariness of the settings – and the way Serling’s protagonists desperately cling to the idea that things are still normal, even when they’re clearly not – makes it easier to imagine ourselves in whatever situation is unfolding.

Peele’s show has the same Everyperson quality, presenting the characters with moral choices and asking us to wonder what we’d do in their place. The supernatural manifests itself in subtle ways – a conversation at a bar, a mysterious MP3 player, a camcorder with the ability to roll back time – which honour Serling’s low-key conceit while nudging its machinery into the present day.

The first episode, The Comedian – written by Alex Rubens and directed by Owen Harris – stars The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani as Samir, a stand-up comic struggling to break out. (Audiences don’t like his didactic political material, and they kinda have a point.) But a chance encounter with a retired stand-up (Tracy Morgan) changes everything: all Samir has to do is talk about something personal – maybe someone who’s annoying him? – and he’ll kill every time. But once he does, that thing is gone forever.

Premise established, The Comedian goes on to do exactly what you expect it to do it doesn’t have a twist as much as an epiphany, and one we have plenty of time to understand before Samir does, since the episode runs 55 minutes. (CBS All Access doesn’t believe in fixed episode lengths, something people who’ve attempted to PVR Star Trek: Discovery know all too well.)

This story would definitely have been more effective as a half-hour piece, but I found myself digging the clear allegory for performers who scour their own lives for material, and really appreciating the subtle 50s and 60s design elements in the production design: The Comedian takes place in the here and now, but there’s a dislocation to Samir’s world that calls back to Serling’s show. Sure, the new series is in colour and the lighting is considerably better, but it feels like original-formula Twilight Zone in a way the 80s and 00s iterations never did.

That quality is also in place in the second episode, Nightmare At 30,000 Feet, a new riff on the classic episode with William Shatner as a nervous flyer who can’t get anyone to believe there’s a weird creature ripping apart the wing of their plane. (It was remade with merciless intensity by George Miller in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, with John Lithgow in the Shatner role.)

This version – written by Peele, executive producer Simon Kinberg and Marco Ramirez and directed by Greg Yaitanes – casts Adam Scott as an investigative journalist listening to a mysterious podcast about the disappearance of the flight he’s currently on. It’s an ingenious new hook that completely changes the story while keeping the same paranoid energy, and it also prevents us from predicting what happens from moment to moment. It’s also a tight 35 minutes – and should have been even tighter, since the epilogue is entirely unnecessary.

With the third episode, airing April 11, the show finally finds its sweet spot. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to discuss Replay in any detail (thanks, embargoes!). I’ll just say that Peele and his collaborators have found a story and a metaphor that’s completely of the moment, updating a concept from the 00s reboot episode Rewind to find real, relatable horror at its core. And Sanaa Lathan is riveting as a mother desperate to save her son. (I think it’s safe to say that much.)

If there are two or three more episodes like this one, the whole project will have been worth it. I’ll be watching.

@normwilner

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