The Twilight Zone review round-up: Critics rave about Jordan Peele’s rebooted sci-fi anthology series
Taking inspiration from Rod Serling’s original creation, the ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ filmmaker oversees and hosts a brand new anthology series
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Your support makes all the difference.Jordan Peele‘s new take on the classic sci-fi TV series The Twilight Zone has proven to be a hit with critics.
Taking inspiration from Rod Serling’s original creation, the Get Out and Us filmmaker oversees and hosts a brand new anthology series, with each episode delivering a self-contained story that bends the rules of time and space, while delivering a thoughtful message about the world around us.
The show boasts an impressive cast, with performances from Taissa Farmiga, Adam Scott, John Cho, Kumail Nanjiani, Allison Tolman, Jacob Tremblay, Steven Yeun, DeWanda Wise, Ginnifer Goodwin, Sanaa Lathan, Tracy Morgan, Greg Kinnear, Zazie Beetz, Seth Rogen, Chris O’Dowd, and Damson Idris.
Peele’s The Twilight Zone will also feature a remake of one of the original show’s most memorable episodes, ”Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.
Here’s what the critics thought of the new series, set to premiere on CBS All Access.
Peele’s update is fresh, smart, entertaining and inspired. It’s just a shame to see it relegated to such a tiny corner of the cultural conversation.
Rogertebert.com – Brian Tallerico
Peele’s riff on The Twilight Zone is mesmerising and unforgettable. Just as Serling brought voices he liked to the program, Jordan Peele collaborates with talents like Ana Lily Amirpour, Glen Morgan, and a great ensemble of actors to produce a show that’s so good you’ll want to get that subscription to CBS All Access.
Peele makes an unnerving host, simultaneously channeling Serling and creating something new. He’s carefully adjusted his speech to mirror Serling’s famous cadence, but when he stares straight into the camera, there’s a cruel blankness in his eyes. The actor’s physical stillness only makes you feel more uneasy. Peele comes across as less of a narrator, and more like a bored god, playing with people as though they were toys.
The Daily Dot – Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
Even amid recent sci-fi anthologies like Black Mirror and Electric Dreams, the Twilight Zone brand remains strong. These introductory episodes are unmistakably Twilight Zone stories, built on simple, character-driven ideas with minimal world-building. They’re still speculative fiction, but they’re more along the lines of Groundhog Day or It’s A Wonderful Life – stories that many viewers wouldn’t automatically identify as sci-fi or fantasy.
The Twilight Zone isn’t a filtered down version of the original, nor of its narrator’s own work. Peele’s stamp is all over it, but so are the many welcome imprints of various writers, directors, and stars. It’s an inclusive space as much as a creative one, making the 2019 Twilight Zone a new machine built to last.
Rebooting The Twilight Zone doesn’t only mean relating to and understanding its original thesis. It takes a voice like Peele’s, one acutely aware of what that metaphorical dimension would look like in today’s era and how it would, for instance, exact justice on the morally bankrupt.
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.
The Twilight Zone premieres on CBS All Access on 1 April.
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