Unloved and Forgotten - Is Twilight Zone .3 worth a second go?

Have you ever heard of that show, The Twilight Zone?

That was a stupid question, because of course you have. It is one of the television programmes of the twentieth century. Influential, challenging, subversive and any other number of sycophantic adjectives can be directed towards the 156 episodes it produced. Its infamous twist endings and intelligent concepts have remained in our collective consciousness for decades after broadcast, with people born years after still having a vague idea of the one where all the nurses look like pigs.

The original Twilight Zone began on October 2^nd 1959 and ended its run almost five years later on June 19^th 1964. This version of the show is widely considered the best and most influential, with many tales becoming televison classics. Think of the little boy with terrifying powers, the aliens causing paranoia in the suburbs or even Captain Kirk seeing gremlins through a plane window. This is the definitive Twilight Zone, and its monochrome tones and contained sets add to the claustrophobic and eerie atmosphere it so successfully created. The series is also largely remembered due to its iconic narrator, smooth-talking, smart-suited smoker Rod Serling. His sharp delivery, dark observations and oblique introductions are as much part of the show as the stories themselves, and his gravitas is enhanced with the knowledge that he also scripted a number of the stories, as well as serving as an executive producer.

The Twilight Zone was hugely influential, but like all good things had to come to its natural conclusion. After a mediocre film in the eighties, it resurfaced as a television show and ran for three seasons. Critical opinion on this seems to be mixed, with most agreeing that it doesn’t hold a light to the original but still has some merits of its own. It would be fourteen years before another revival was attempted, and it is this incarnation of the show that I’ll be looking at in this blog.

In 2002, broadcaster UPN resurrected The Twilight Zone for another throw of the dice. Critical and audience reaction was pretty negative, with many viewing it as a thoroughly pointless remake of a classic show. It’s telling that internet searching throws up very little critical opinion, implying it was greeted with indifference rather than hatred. It’s likely to be forgotten from the annals of television history, judged as an embarrassing blip on The Twilight Zone’s previous record of excellence. It is largely unloved by fans, and appears to have very few championing it.

So wouldn’t it just be a marvellous subject for a blog? Yes, yes I think it would.

I’ll be re-watching all forty four episodes of the 2002 Twilight Zone, and deciding whether it deserves its pretty appalling reputation. Is it worthy of its unloved status or are there some episodes worthy of merit and discussion? Can any of the episodes match up to the classics of the first incarnation and can Forest Whittaker ever replace the legendary Rod Serling as narrator?

You may have made your mind up about this already. And I say you for no particular reason, as I cannot see this blog having many readers. Unfortunately, I think it is doomed to be as unloved as its subject matter and will go largely unnoticed on the world wide interweb. Regardless of who’s reading, this is my attempt to watch every single episode, wiping the dust from my boxset and watching even those episodes that you can gather are awful simply by reading the synopsis.

Everything from pop culture to politics will get a look in as I attempt to analyse the episode, perhaps sometimes finding that there’s nothing worth analysing at all. I’ll be following the order the episodes aired rather than their production order, so starting with Evergreen, rather than The Lineman.

So, this is it.. We're about to journey into a wondrous blog whose boundaries are only that of the imagination. A blog, only found…in The Twilight Zone.