The premiere installment, available for CBS All Access subscribers, is titled “The Comedian,” and stars Kumail Nanjiani as a stand-up, Samir, whose politically charged routine keeps bombing with audiences. I attempted to decipher the messages that the first four episodes might be trying to convey, but only ended up stumped. With the exception of one superior episode, “Replay,” it’s hard to conceive that an artist as prodigiously talented and thoughtful as Peele is creatively involved at all. This isn’t really a reboot it doesn’t even qualify as fan fiction. Serling’s The Twilight Zone is defined by its twists, but not a single thing happens in the new series that you won’t be able to predict, at least from the four episodes made available for review. So is the element of grim justice that both The Twilight Zone and its modern heir, Black Mirror, have always held at their core-the kind of karmic inevitability that sees an SS captain subjected to the same torture he meted out to prisoners, or a woman sentenced to endure the fear and violence of an angry mob after committing a horrendous crime herself. Oddly enough, these morals are missing from the new series, which features an on-camera Peele in Serling’s role. ![]() In “The Obsolete Man” (1961), a fable about a librarian in a futuristic state that has outlawed books, Serling observes how the “iron rule” of dictatorships is that “logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.” In “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (1964), a story about a factory owner who replaces all his employees with technology, only to suffer the same fate, Serling notes that “there are many bromides applicable here: ‘too much of a good thing,’ ‘tiger by the tail,’ ‘as you sow so shall you reap.’” The Twilight Zone is essentially Aesop with a 20th-century imagination. ![]() Each episode of The Twilight Zone had a distinct message enunciated in Serling’s narration, making the moral of the story clear for even the most careless viewer. By wrapping his ideas in allegory, Serling could scotch the censors and say exactly what he wanted about totalitarianism, mass hysteria, prejudice, selfishness, conspiracy theorists, hate. On television in 1956, Serling later wrote in his book Patterns, “to say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited.” ![]() Rod Serling devised the concept for the show precisely because 1950s network producers were so skittish about overt political messages in the wake of McCarthyism. Versions of this scenario did actually happen recently, as disgruntled viewers responding to new episodes of The Twilight Zone found themselves given short shrift for expressing dismay that the update, produced by Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg, is too “political.” The Twilight Zone, of course, has always had something to say about the state of the world-not since the time of Jesus himself have center-left parables with clear moral lessons been so efficiently disseminated. ![]() He’s dragged so mercilessly, in fact, that the individual eventually has to set his profile to private-depriving himself of the one outlet he had for communicating with the world. Finally, his wish has come true: He goes viral, and is subsequently roasted by journalists and internet celebrities and comedians with millions of followers. But then the hapless individual complains on Twitter that the new CBS All Access reboot of The Twilight Zone is yet another beloved cultural property that’s been ruined by leftist cultural warriors. Imagine a Twilight Zone episode that goes something like this: An individual regularly takes to the internet in the hopes of making himself heard, railing against everything from the “hatefulness” of Democrats to the degradation of modern society.
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