The New Twilight Zone: Craptastic!

Cafe Society
1

Okay, now, before I get into this, you really ought to know that I am an ENORMOUS fan of The Twilight Zone. That really shouldn’t make me that unique, though, at least in my age group (40-coughcoughcough) – we ALL grew up watching the thing, and in many ways it’s immaterial whether we’re big fans, like me, or casual viewers… it’s soaked into our collective pop-culture consciousness, and everyone of a certain age has their own “Do you remember the one where…?”

I tuned in to UPN’s revival last night. For those who don’t know (and do care), this is actually the second time someone has tried to bring Zone back – not counting the dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL movie rehash. CBS tried it back in 1984, and I thought it was a very valiant effort. They managed to turn out some of the best short fantasy I’ve ever seen on American television (along with, of course, some absolute dogs, but, hey, it’s TV, you know?), mainly due to having a group of very smart, very talented writer-producers (including Harlan Ellison as the in-house creative consultant).

Unfortunately, this latest revival is executive-produced by a fellow named Pen Densham, whose best known credits are the barfable Kevin Costner Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the cable-tv revival of another beloved TV fantasy series, The Outer Limits. As for the latter, the most charitable thing I can say about it is, it played a lot like it had been produced by people who had had the original series described to them.

The new Zone is the same thing: to call it Rod Serling Light is to gift it with praise it hardly deserves. (And if you don’t know who Rod Serling WAS, what the hell are you reading this for?)

Witness if you will (sorry) the fact that 75 percent of the mainstream TV critic reviews complained that they could see the “twist endings” coming from a mile away. This is mainly the fault of weak writing – the scripts foreshadowed the endings so heavily that one could not help but expect them.

But there’s another problem too, and it has to do, I think, with the fact that the original series is such an enduring classic: the snap of a twist ending, the moral-allegorical tone of the stories, in fact everything about the original Zone has soaked into our collective consciousness to such a point that it’s very difficult, I would think, to make it fresh. (Also, of course, a good half-hour fantasy script with a good twist ending is just one of the most hellaciously difficult to write. Even the original series had its share of clinkers because it is so hard to do.) I mean, we’re talking about a show that is so much a part of American culture that Felicity did an episode-long pastiche of it last season – no doubt to the confusion of a lot of younger viewers who didn’t have the faintest idea why that week’s show was in black and white.

Other observations: they reproduced the famous “You’re travelling through another dimension” opening narration – and ran smack into the same problem they had with the Outer Limits revival: without the original voices of Vic Perrin (the OL Control Voice) or Rod Serling, it just isn’t the same – and against the simple, stark visuals of the original sequences, the flashy computer-generated graphics are utterly charmless.

Finally, as for Forest Whitaker in the narrator role… Will someone PLEASE tell
me what they were thinking?

I’ll give them a couple more weeks, assuming they last that long… but I ain’t hopeful.

Rod Serling, please come back to Earth. We miss you.

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“The new Twilight Zone sucks” isn’t exactly a surprise ending, know what I mean?

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Sat through the first of the two 1/2-hour installments. B-A-D. I liked the 80s TV remake because they also had some interesting casting choices and some real (i.e. movie) directors helming segments. Also, they didn’t have the on-screen narrator (since they knew nobody could replace Serling) and they would mix up the shows a bit–one would be 45 minutes and the other 15, or some would be designed strictly for humor or have much more ambiguous endings.

You would figure that they would open the series with, say, one of their stronger episodes to hook people, but that first one was so bad that it seemed to be a very grave sign indeed.

And I think Whitaker is a terrific actor, but I feel really bad he’s saddled with this sorry show.

4

Maybe they picked Forest Whitaker because of his weird eyes.

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I agree with the comments above, but I reassure myself by saying that it was only one episode, and it might get better. For all that I liked the original Twilight Zone, there were some bad episodes there too.

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I agree with you about F.W. There’s not much any actor could do with the awful crap they gave him to say. Serling’s opening and closing narrations were little gems, evocative and sharply written. This stuff boiled down to: “Submitted for your approval, a one-line synopsis of the episode you’re about to see or the one you just saw… in the Twilight Zone.”

Lest we forget, here’s an example: my single favorite thing Serling ever wrote for the series, the closing narration for The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

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Ach.

I taped this, and was just about to pop it into the machine. I’ll still do so, of course, (I mean, I trust y’all, but I makes me own mind up, y’know?) but the sense of dread I’ve got…

Feels like I’m about to watch a video equivalent of the Portrait of Dorian Grey now.

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I also like both the opening and closing narration for “The Obsolete Man”

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements , technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace… This is Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He’s a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he’s built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in the Twilight Zone.

The Chancellor - the late Chancellor - was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under ‘M’ for mankind… in the Twilight Zone.

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Arrgh. I left my Twilight Zone DVDs at my mother’s house, and now I’m in the mood to watch one!

Arrgh! Arrgh! In the Twilight Zone, aargh!

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I also like the closing to “He’s Alive”, which is about a resurrected Adolf Hitler who gives advice to a young neo-nazi.

Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.

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I’m still going to wait to see on the new TZ. The problem I had with Forrest Whitaker is that, to me, it sounded like he was trying to do a Rod Serling impression. He doesn’t quite have the voice for it. Where is James Earl Jones when you need him? :slight_smile:

And thank you all for sharing Rod’s marvelous prose!

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The second half looked as though it was written by a 12-year-old. The main character is in his late twenties and he’s never realized that death is a necessary part of the universe?

Animals can’t die anymore either? I’d like to see what was happening at the slaughterhouses while Death was taking his little vacation. (How would one cook a steak that was still alive? :eek: )

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I can’t believe I sat through it either. It really seemed to me to be more like “The Outer Limits” than “The Twilight Zone,” where every story is about the horrors possible with modern technology. For that matter, can anyone who’s seen more than two episodes of “TOL” explain what the fundamental difference is?

Speaking of the second story, Neidhart, the same concept was used in a “Night Court” Halloween episode 15 years ago. Stephen Root (of “Newsradio” & “King of the Hill” fame) was a much more convincing Death than George Costanza was.

I’m such a TV geek… :wink:

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The first segment was so intensely lame I wondered if I was hallucinating. I saw the whole plot after the first ten minutes, but hoped they really weren’t going to slide down that cliche-encrusted chute. Waste of time.

The second segment was simply yet another version of Death Takes a Holiday. Did somebody actually think this was an original idea?

Forrest Whitaker is a fine actor, but – picture this: Dennis Leary. He’d start doing the narration, and develop it into twenty-minute profane rant that would probably be more entertaining than the actual story…

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Oh, boy… tall order, but I’ll try, and I’ll try to keep it short.

The basic template for a Zone story seems to be this: place a protagonist, preferably someone the audience can identify as an everyday, ordinary person, into a situation that has one completely odd, otherworldly, supernatural or science-fictional element, in a way that illustrates some point about the human condition, then, at the end, add that little twist. There are exceptions, of course, but the best TZ episodes followed this.

Limits is harder to describe. While much more openly a science-fiction show than TZ (I’d lump all episodes of TZ squarely in the “fantasy” genre), TOL was really, at its best, a gothic horror show told in science fiction terms. Whereas TZ’s most characteristic touch was the twist ending, TOL’s was “the bear” – the monster, alien, creature, what have you, that was the central focus of the mayhem. Again, at its best, TOL managed to tell stories in this framework that were marvelous morality plays. There is much less of a recognizable “typical TOL” than there is a “typical TZ”… but I’ll wager that if I showed you an episode of each back to back with no identifying marks, you’d be able to tell which was which.

I said I’d try to keep it short. I didn’t say I’d succeed…

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And while I’m here, may I suggest we play a new game, to be called, Prejudging The New Twilight Zone. Courtesy of a marvelous TZ website called The Fifth Dimension (www.thetzsite.com), here are the synopses for the next several episodes, followed by my own wholly from-the-hip prejudgments of what they’ll be like:

"Shades of Guilt" - A man ignores the predicament of an innocent victim because of the color of that person’s skin, then is forced to change his way of thinking when something incredible happens to him. Written by Ira Steven Behr. Directed by Perry Lang. Starring Vincent Ventresca.

Ira Steven Behr is a certified maniac, a very good writer, and one of the men largely responsible for making Deep Space Nine the best of the Star Trek series (and no, I don’t wanna fight about that statement, ok?)

But… if the twist in this episode isn’t, “Oh, look! I was mean to a black/white person, and now I’M the same color as he is!”, I’ll eat my DVD of I Am The Night – Color Me Black.

"Dream Lover" - A writer conjures his dream woman to life in order to alleviate his writer’s block but soon begins to lose track of reality. Written by Frederick Rappaport. Directed by Peter O’Fallon. Starring Adrian Pasdar and Shannon Elizabeth.

Promising.

"Cradle of Darkness" - A woman goes into the past in an attempt to murder Hitler before he rises to power. Starring Katherine Heigl.

Oh, jesus, are you kidding me? Does anyone think these “go-back-in-time-to-change-the past” stories ever work? It sure as hell didn’t work on the original TZ. They’d better have a pretty bloody new way to do this one…

"Night Route" - A woman finds herself stalked by a phantom bus. Starring Ione Skye.

Woo. The Greyhound is after me. Every molecule’s quiverin’…

I liked this when Steven Spielberg did it with a truck and called it Duel…

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pixellent, thanks for clearing things up. I’ve read & seen a number of the original TZ episodes, but few of TOL. They all seemed pretty much the same to me. Guess I need to watch more.

“Dream Lover” sounds like a re-telling of Weird Science, with Shannon Elizabeth instead of Kelly LeBrock.

“Night Route”? Steven King did it as well, with a bunch of trucks, Emilio Estevez, and AC/DC, and called it Maximum Overdrive.

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av8rmike, I can dig it. TOL used to seem to me like an endless parade of guys in really bad rubber monster suits, until I rediscovered it. There were, true, an impressive parade of stinkbombs (especially in the second season), and in fact most of the rubber monster suits were really bad – but if you can get past that, allow me to suggest some episodes that were TOL at its best, in case you get the chance to catch them. (The entire first season was recently released on DVD, and many of the shows are still available on VHS.) I have other favorites, but these are the cream of the crop:

The Architects of Fear
The Sixth Finger
Nightmare
The Zanti Misfits
Controlled Experiment
The Bellero Shield
Fun And Games
A Feasibility Study
The Forms Of Things Unknown
Demon With A Glass Hand
Soldier
The Inheritors

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There was an episode of the original TZ that was very similar to this. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name. It was the ONLY episode where one of the characters actually interacts with Rod Serling.

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There was an episode of the original TZ that was very similar to this. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name. It was the ONLY episode where one of the characters actually interacts with Rod Serling.