When Jordan Peele describes the once-in-a-lifetime chance to revive The Twilight Zone brand by following in the footsteps of producer-host-writer Rod Serling, he makes it sound like a dream come true. That’s not to say it was always a good dream – sometimes it felt like it was chasing him instead of vice versa.
Talking at the Paleyfest panel spotlighting the upcoming launch of a new iteration of The Twilight Zone, Peele added that the prospect of taking on Serling’s accomplishments on- and off-screen feels like an out-of-body experience at times. “It feels like,” he said, “I’m living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.” If so, hopefully, it’s not an end-of-the-world episode (like the optometry crisis tale of “Time Enough At Last“) or a scary kid episode (like the cornfield horrors of “It’s a Good Life”.)
Few shows plant a flag in the public imagination the way The Twilight Zone did. It’s name, its theme music, and many of its characters (including monotone narrator Serling) became part of the American lexicon. In 2013, the WGA named it the third-best written show in television history (behind The Sopranos and Seinfeld) while TV Guide ranked it as the fifth best television series in broadcast history. Peele admitted the sheer magnitude of the original show’s success, stature, and legacy, made him question whether the series should even be revived for the 21st Century in the first place.
Peele, the auteur behind horror film hitsGet Out and Us, said he finally got past his trepidations when he realized there was an “underlying positivity” in the original series and a sense of fun that is often excluded from the retrospective tributes that dwell on its edgier aspects. The humor of the show was a foothold for Peele, who has plenty of comedic experience after five years on a very different anthology series with Mad TV as well as a sketch comedy series Key & Peele on Comedy Central.
“One of the things that opened this up for me is realizing he’s a humorist,” Peele said. “We think of him as a horror, science-fiction master but he has a perfect pitch tone of comedy…in thinking about his tone we got to this thing we called the Serling wink. One of the greatest episodes, “To Serve Man”, is basically a long-winded dad pun, expertly crafted into this terrifying story that develops in front of you and at the end you are there with it. Only years later did I realize that kind of a silly, fun, joke, bit of satire. That was a big thing that kind of opened up what the energy of the show was. Don’t forget, The Twilight Zone is a place where anything can happen.”
The April Fool’s Day launch of the series and the casting of Seth Rogen in one of the launch episodes seems to hint that one of the first episodes might veer into humor. The original series did have comedic shadings in some episodes, among them the 1960 episode called “A World of His Own,” starring Keenan Wynn, and the 1963 episode “Cavender is Coming,” which featured a young Carol Burnett (as well as a laugh track).