Last December CBS announced that Oscar-winner Jordan Peele (Get Out) is helping to bring back The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access, home of Star Trek: Discovery. Today we learned a little bit more about the show.
Production starts soon, Peele to host
In a press release this morning, CBS revealed that production will begin later this fall for their new Twilight Zone, and it will premiere on CBS All Access in 2019. It also confirmed that Peele will step into the shoes of the original creator of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling, and act as host and narrator for the upcoming series.
In a statement Peele said:
“Rod Serling was an uncompromising visionary who not only shed light on social issues of his time, but prophesied issues of ours. I’m honored to carry on his legacy to a new generation of audiences as the gatekeeper of ‘The Twilight Zone.’”
While it had been announced that Peele would head up the reboot of the show last year, he had previously shown some reluctance to also step into the role of narrator. Speaking to Variety over the summer, Peele expressed concern that he was too associated with comedy and his “presence would undermine the serious work he’s putting in to do right by Serling’s legacy.” It looks like Peele’s reservations were assuaged, given today’s news.
In that same Variety Magazine cover story, Peele spoke about his enthusiasm for the new series:
“The realization, for me, was that it was an opportunity to attempt to continue with Serling’s mission,” Peele says. “If we approach it without ego and sort of bow to Serling, that will hopefully suffice for our fellow ‘Twilight Zone’ fans but also bring back a show that I think is needed right now. Because it’s a show that has always helped us look at ourselves, hold a mirror up to society.”
Jordan Peele (Variety/Art Streiber)
New host teaser
Today’s announcement was also accompanied by a new teaser for the show showing Serling’s original narration slowly transform into Peele’s newly recorded opening monologue.
Every episode of the original series is available to stream now on CBS All Access.
The upcoming new series is produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films. Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg serve as executive producers along with Win Rosenfeld, Audrey Chon, Carol Serling, Rick Berg, and Greg Yaitanes.
Nice. Something to look at the one month I get it for Star Trek. Hope it is at least as good as the CBS ’80s TZ revival. That one was pretty good. Hope we don’t get the syndicated or WB versions that came later.
It will be interesting to see how this does. Each incarnation since has failed to come close in quality to the original, which I still binge watch from time to time.
I think the producers need to realize the fact that the messages in the episodes shouldn’t be from a single point of view. To do Twilight Zone right, you need to look at all the points of view no matter how scary or Un-PC they are. If they just try to keep a single POV during the series, they will fail.