Beware, you are about to step into the spoiler zone.
Jordan Peele’s new rendition of the classic, “The Twilight Zone” was met with a lot of anticipation as well as skepticism from fans of the old show.
However, with as good a reputation as Peele’s, people could expect it to be great. There are some differences, the most obvious being that the show is in color and the episodes are much longer than the original 20-minute long episodes.
Much like the previous show, each episode is an anthology, meaning there is a different cast and story each time.
Peele takes the place of Rod Serling, the host of the 1960’s show. He makes appearances throughout the episodes to connect ideas and add some clarity to the story.
The first two episodes premiered on March 31 on CBS All Access, and the first episode, “The Comedian” is available for free on YouTube.
This first episode stars Kumail Nanjiani as struggling comedian Samir Wassan as he climbs his way to the top of the stand-up ranks. He soon learns that success comes with a price, and that getting personal means sacrificing things and people he knows to the Twilight Zone.
When Wassan meets one of his idols after a particularly bad set, everything changes as it’s revealed that making jokes about his personal life causes the subjects of his jokes to disappear completely, as if they never existed.
It started with his dog, then his nephew, and eventually led to others that turned out to impact the world around him in drastic ways.
Nanjiani’s character keeps a notebook of names of people that wronged him, in a Deathnote-esque way where he chose to focus his jokes on them in order to send them to the Twilight Zone.
Tonally, this episode was more similar to “Black Mirror” than its classic counterpart. The underlying creepiness of Wassan slowly slipping into lunacy with every sacrifice didn’t feel like the Twilight Zone I used to know.
But that’s not a bad thing.
The new take on the theme was simple, but effective. With passing times comes evolving tastes and stories. Peele and the new team have done a great job remastering the old subject matter and making it fresh and something that is their own.