CBS All Access just dropped the first trailer for season 2 of The Twilight Zone. The reboot, helmed by Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg, garnered plenty of buzz when it premiered last year. But reviews were mixed, and despite his involvement as executive producer and Rod Serling stand-in, Peele didn’t write or direct any of the episodes.
Granted, living up to the original series is a tall order. The iconic anthology show was a brilliant mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and social allegory. The reboot is similarly inspired, but mostly blunt in its deployment of these allegories and lessons. A nearly hour-long runtime (compared to the original’s 30 minutes) gave many episodes a sluggish pace. The twists were less twisty, and the turns were more predictable.
Still, the series returns, looking just as stylish and featuring a host of familiar faces. In the trailer, we glimpsed Billy Porter, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Joel McHale, Morena Baccarin, Tony Hale, Christopher Meloni, and more. And we catch several references to classic episodes, such as “Time Enough at Last,” “The Invaders,” and “To Serve Man”.
We also get a brief sense of what some episodes have in store: Morena Baccarin finds herself unfrozen in a world put on pause. Billy Porter is some sort of psychic? We hear a voice say, ‘It’s like a twist. They’re not the monsters. We’re the monsters,” which alludes to the famous episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
But season two of The Twilight Zone comes at a very strange time in our history, where every day feels like we’re living in a never-ending episode. A pandemic is sweeping the world. We’re all going stir-crazy in our own homes. The president wants us to drink bleach. Oh, and there are murder hornets. In light of the dumpster fire that is 2020, many are not in the mood, like Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker.
Brooker said in an interview recently, “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those. I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
It’s hard to say how many people share Brooker’s feelings. While science fiction and horror are welcome escapes from the every day, audiences might be too frazzled and burned out from the horror story we’re all living. Will audiences still have a taste for shows like The Twilight Zone or darker dystopian narratives like The Walking Dead or The Handmaid’s Tale?
So far, the major pop culture event of COVID-19 has been Netflix’s Tiger King, a truly bonkers larger than life story that must be seen to be believed. The absolute absurdity of the series and its inhabitants made it a phenomenon, but few other programs have captured our imagination so completely.
Will viewers want to tune into The Twilight Zone or will they seek something lighter and more uplifting?
The Twilight Zone returns June 25 on CBS All Access.
(image: CBS All Access)
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