Move over Black Mirror, Channel Zero, American Horror Story, and all the other pretenders to the throne. The king of anthology TV series, and one of the greatest of all time, is on its way back!
The Twilight Zone quickly became a cultural icon when it first hit the small screen in 1959, and I’ll bet good money that even if you’ve never watched an episode in your life you’ll recognise its theme. Created by Rod Sterling, the original series ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964, racking up a Golden Globe, three Emmys, and three Hugo Awards along the way. While Sterling wrote the bulk of the show’s 156 episodes, it also featured work by notable authors such as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont amongst others.
The series tackled a number of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and suspense, with many of them having a psychological component as well. Most episodes would also end with a surprising twist, and the narrator (Sterling himself) delivering an often bleak moral lesson on what you’d just witnessed.
The Twilight Zone has been revived twice before – first for three seasons between 1985 and 1989, 15 years after Sterling’s death in 1970, and again for a single season in 2002 that featured Forest Whitaker as the narrator.
There have been rumours of a potential reboot for the last few years, but now Variety are reporting that it’s official. The Twilight Zone has officially been ordered to series at CBS All-Access, the streaming service that falls under the banner of the series’ original home CBS. Jordan Peele (half of comedy duo Key and Peele, and fresh off the success of his psychological horror movie Get Out), Simon Kinberg (X-Men franchise, Star Wars Rebels), and Marco Ramirez (Da Vinci’s Demons, Daredevil) will head up the new reboot for the network. That’s a pretty powerful team right there.
The series was never shy with tackling the contemporary issues of the times during any of its runs, Sterling was notorious for butting heads with studio executives around such issues, and that’s a legacy Peele hopes to continue, saying at the announcement:
“Too many times this year it’s felt we were living in a twilight zone, and I can’t think of a better moment to reintroduce it to modern audiences.”
I can only imagine the fertile ground the new series has to work with. And given that the series will air on CBS All-Access would it be too much to hope that, similar to Star Trek: Discovery, it’ll be released on Netflix outside of the US… or if it’ll have any sparkly vampires?
Last Updated: December 8, 2017
