CBS All Access’ reboot of The Twilight Zone is one the year’s most anticipated tv series. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show is executive produced and hosted by Oscar-winner Jordan Peele (Get Out) and its multicultural cast includes: Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation), Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Taissa Farmiga (American Horror Story), DeWanda Wise (She’s Gotta Have It) and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead). Even though the reboot had been in the works for some time, according to Simon Kinberg and Jordan Peele “it was all about timing.” “Because one of the sentences you hear often, like once a week for the past couple of years, is it feels like we’re living in the fucking Twilight Zone,” Peele said. According to Kinberg, “the world all of a sudden, was in desperate need of The Twilight Zone.”
For the showrunners, the “political undertones” of Rod Serling’s classical anthology was essential, Peele explained. In fact, Serling is a master of parable and allegory and he is able to speak to society through his stories, which are “powerful weapons that we as people have against violence and hatred and all the awful things that the world can bring,” Peele added. Even though, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the cast could not reveal the content of the episodes, Ike Barinholtz (The Mindy Project), believes that his entry into the series focuses on the “theme of toxic masculinity,” a real threat.
For Peele, it is important to create entertainment that “speaks to the audience” and “if you are able to talk to them on the level of laughter and cheers and tears and scares, they react emotionally.” The need to connect to the audience inspired Kinberg and Peele to “reimagine” The Twilight Zone series’ values. When you look past the fun, “they have this underlying message of acceptance, of love, of coming together, and that fear is our enemy.” Yeun, who leads the story known as “The Traveler,” was really glad that people were trying to do something and not just “caught up in this fog, this plethora of riches that we have in this world to consume. Instead, we’re taking the time to make something that says something.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series will debut the first two episodes on April 1 and the third 10 days later. Even though, we do not have all the details about which themes the reboot will be exploring, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “it will take inspiration from a classic episode for the Scott-led episode ‘Terror at 30,000 Ft.’ ” On Sunday, at PaleyFest, the cast and the creators spoke about rebooting the original Twilight Zone and why it is still relevant today.