The revival of The Twilight Zone in the 80’s worked for several reasons already mentioned above, and a couple more.
First, there are the twist endings. There were many episodes with twist endings, but hardly all. My obviously imperfect recollection of those enormously long Memorial Day marathons of a few years ago on SciFi tell me that maybe only a little over half of the original episodes had the twist endings. A relatively small number of episodes has been in regular rotation since, and those contain almost exclusively the twisters. The focus Alfred Hitchcock Presents was twist endings–every episode had to have one–in The Twilight Zone the focus of the stories was the moral character of people in extreme situations. The 80’s revival abandoned completely the idea that a story needs a twist–they just tried to tell good stories.
Second was the length of the stories. The 80’s revival was from the start an hour long show that let each story find it’s own length, and edited and assembled the stories into hour blocks. As someone mentioned before, this could result in stories of wildly differing lengths. I remember an episode with three stories, one about 35 minutes, a second that was at most 5 (and one of my favorites), and a third of about 20. By starting with the premise that the length of the teleplay should grow out of the needs of the story, cutting or padding to make a certain length was kept to a minimum. The more recent revival makes it obvious that the producers care more about making half-hour episodes friendly for the lucrative syndication market than producing good stories. This is a legitimate concern; without a way to make a profit, no show gets made in the first place, and in today’s tv market, a hit show makes more in syndication than first run prime time. But you have to make a show people want to watch first. The first story could have worked better (still not well, but better) had it been ten minutes shorter.
People have picked apart the second story more than the first, so I’ll focus on the first. It’s an obvious ripoff of the great The Stepford Wives, with a little “Make Room, Make Room” (a great story made into the mediocre movie Soylent Green) thrown in for the ‘twist’ at the end.
As for comparisons to the more recent version of The Outer Limits, I actually find the newer version often better than the original.
For example: In one episode, [spoilers] a man is sent back in time to prevent a plague that has wiped out most of the earth. His job is to find patient X–a woman who accidently came into contact with three unrelated people and picked up pathogens from them which interacted in her body and mutated into the deadly plague–and kill her. Once he meets her, he finds she’s a pretty decent person, and decides on a different course of action: he’ll keep her from meeting the other three, even if it means killing one of them instead. There are elements of 12 Monkeys, The City on the Edge of Forever, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and Time Patrol used here, but it works because it takes the time to let us get to know the characters to the point that we care for them.
My favorites from the revival of the 80’s Twilight Zone:
“A Game of Pool”: A remake of the classic original series episode that works because it uses viewers’ knowledge of the original against them with an altered ending that depends as much upon the changed atitude of a character for its impact as it does on the plot.
A man is chosen to be the companion for the first true artificial human intelligence, represented visually by a hologram of a girl. He is at first a parent, then an equal companion, then a willing student as the AI and the hologram age and mature. The two main characters end up having all of the major types of relationships with each other over the relatively short course of the AI’s life.
In the roughly 5 minute episode I mentioned earlier, a man is on a picnic with his girlfriend/wife, having a nice, peaceful afternoon. He wakes up to find himself in a grim, antiseptic future where being hooked up to artificial worlds like this are the only way such things can be experienced. He is warned that he almost stayed in too long and got lost permanently in the fantasy, and the obvious happens, but because it happens so quickly and isn’t padded to make a half-hour for syndication, it works very well.
“The Cold Equations” A leftover segment that was filmed but hadn’t been used when the show was cancelled, it was later reedited for the syndicated version. This episode of The Twilight Zone is simply the most moving thing I’ve ever seen on television, bar none. The movie length remake on SciFi pales by comparison.
