: Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone Is Timeless Modern, and Fittingly Political

 

"So we get plenty of references to classic Zone episodes (the original gremlin from “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” appears in the form of a child’s toy), plus some deep-dish film-and-TV-history name-drops (a single episode includes characters named after pioneering filmmaker Ida Lupino, horror master Jacques Tourneur, and Twilight Zone theme composer Marius Constant).

But this Zone (which lists seven executive producers, including Carol Serling, Rod’s widow) never entombs itself in nostalgia or fan service and makes a point of pulling Serling into 2019. This incarnation is as of-the-moment as Serling’s original, from the more varied filmmaking styles on display to the use of profanity and frank sexual language. Most striking of all, however, is the show’s political vantage point: The new Zone looks at paranoia, class disparity, artistic anxiety, xenophobia, racism, and other hot-button topics from the perspective of an outsider who had to fight for his piece of American pie, in contrast to the more abstract, theoretical diagnoses and warnings of Serling, who was as woke as a rich white guy could be in the middle of the 20th century but was nevertheless incapable of taking a ground-level view of the problems his series identified, even in the imaginative safe space of The Twilight Zone."

read review by Matt Zoller Seitz​]]TV Review: Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone Is Timeless: Modern, and Fittingly Political