The Twilight Zone review: When Black Mirror exists, there’s no need for this star-studded reboot
Nearly a year after it aired in the US, the latest reboot of The Twilight Zone has a British home at last, albeit in the twilight zone of the schedules, on Sky’s Syfy channel. It’s not entirely surprising that it took so long to come over here. The series has never had the same reputation this side of the Atlantic. In America, its original run in the 1960s was unifying, gather-round-everyone TV, culturally familiar even to those who didn’t watch it, so much so that it has already been remade twice, in the 1980s and 2000s, with varying success.
The format is a kind of sci-fi Jackanory, discrete episodes opened and closed by a presenter clutching a book and speaking to camera. In the most recent version the man in the chair is Jordan Peele, the executive producer and driving force behind the latest revamp. As the director of Get Out and Us, Peele has proven himself a master of fantasy-comedy-horror with contemporary bite, so it was a promising choice. He’s able to draw a good cast, too: the series features Seth Rogen, Chris O’Dowd, Greg Kinnear and Zazie Beetz, among others.
The first episode starts brightly enough. Kumail Nanjiani, star of The Big Sick and Silicon Valley, more recently known for getting absolutely shredded for his upcoming Marvel film, plays struggling stand-up Samir. One night at a comedy club, when his lame material about gun control once again fails to land, he meets JC Wheeler (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan), a legendary comic who offers him a pact.
Samir will get the fame and success he craves, but only if he makes his act more personal, rather than simply droning on about the second amendment. He also has to “want it all”. Samir eagerly clinks on the offer.
At his next performance, he riffs on his dog. The audience laps it up. When Samir gets home, elated by his good night, his girlfriend Rena (Amara Karan) tells him they have never had a dog. The next time, he does the same thing with his nephew, who promptly vanishes in front of his eyes. You can see where all this is going.
Kumail is a likeable performer, but the script is at its best in the minutiae between comedians, rather than in the predictable and well-worn overall structure.
The spectre haunting the 2019 edition of The Twilight Zone is not its own previous incarnations, but our home-grown, British-engineered rival, Black Mirror. Charlie Brooker’s dystopian drama, which began on Channel 4 before moving to Netflix, is driven more by technology, without The Twilight Zone’s supernatural element, but it provides many of the same thrills, with standalone stories, twist endings and bleak morals.
Compared to Black Mirror’s spiky nihilism, The Twilight Zone feels tame, partly because its legacy as family-friendly 1960s entertainment means it can’t go to the same dark corners. Brooker’s skill is in identifying the uncanny that lies all around us, in dating apps and virtual reality and drones and surveillance, and teasing it to nightmarish conclusions. When the real world is so scary, who needs the fantastical?
