Something a bit more PG-13-rated would probably have been ideal: a bit of edge, but not enough to send a good chunk of your potential audience packing. The original Zone isn’t that, and neither should any current incarnation. That doesn’t mean the episodes had to be G-rated. For my money, though, The Twilight Zone isn’t one of them. I certainly wish there were more PG-rated options for adults, it’s true, but there is absolutely a time and a place for “edgier” entertainment.
#Jordan peele twilight zone movie
No, I’m not someone who thinks every last movie and TV show has to be squeaky clean. The episodes shouldn’t have been R-rated. A run time of that today is nothing, but in 1959, one of the most famous directors in the world had to fight to keep one of his biggest hits intact. To show you how much times have changed, consider the fact that MGM tried to pressure Alfred Hitchcock into cutting his legendary “North by Northwest,” which clocks in at two hours and 16 minutes. Years ago, most movies had shorter running times (even many dramas were closer to 90 or 100 minutes, tops).
Bloat is a problem with many shows and movies these days. In this case, I believe, less would have been more. But many of his episodes got close to or exceeded the length of the original TZ’s 50-minute episodes. I’m not saying that Peele’s TZ had to hit the 25-minute mark. How lucky he - and the rest of us - were that it worked out that way! But CBS was only willing to give him a half-hour slot, so he decided to make the best of it. Ready for some irony? Serling wanted TZ to be an hour-long show from the start. That’s why the 25-minute length was so ideal for TZ. And the longer the road to get there, the bigger that reveal has to be, or we’re disappointed. We’re always anticipating the Big Reveal.
But with a show like TZ, that’s not the case. No one’s waiting for some big surprise at the end of a drama, so their expectations are different. A straight drama doesn’t have to worry about that sort of thing.
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Mind you, that’s when it comes to the kind of fantasy/sci-fi series that TZ was. According to Buck Houghton, the man who helped Rod Serling produce the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, by the 40th minute you have to be practically walking on water to keep an audience interested. It’s impossible to tell the kind of short, snappy, twist-ending stories the Zone was so famous for when you make it too long. So the idea of having as much or as little time as you need to tell a story sounds good to me.īut there’s a reason the original Twilight Zone went back to the half-hour length after one season as an hour-long show. Some of the half-hour TZs feel a bit rushed, frankly, and most fans agree that many of the hour-long episodes (50 minutes minus ad time) - even ones that I like quite a bit - could use some trims. No, there’s nothing sacrosanct about the 30-minute length of all but 18 of the original Twilight Zone episodes (25 minutes, if you subtract time for ads). So what went wrong? Let’s mention a couple of things that have come up previously, then get into some other factors we haven’t discussed before. I’d be surprised if that sort of negativity had no effect whatsoever. It may be that Peele and his collaborators were able to shrug this off, but hey, we’re human. As you might imagine, I followed fan response pretty closely on social media, and every time the latest reboot came up, the opinions ran at least 80/20 against it. I can’t help but wonder, though, if negative reaction to the series played a part in the decision. Or it could be that we should take their statement at face value: They told their stories, it was fun, but now it’s time to move on. Perhaps they found themselves getting interested in other projects. Maybe the pandemic made it difficult to get things rolling again. Why the kibosh on a third season? It’s hard to say, at least from the outside looking in. Most of them I touched on in previous posts about the series, and I summed them up after Season 1 in this one.Ĭuriously enough, the latest reboot wasn’t cancelled by the network, but by the creators themselves: Jordan Peele and his company, Monkeypaw Productions: There were elements I liked about the new version (one of which has nothing to do with the show itself).
This isn’t because I’m trying to be diplomatic. I’ve heard quite a range of reactions to the news that Jordan Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone won’t be back for a third season.
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