Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot is a bizarre time capsule of issues liberals said they cared about in 2019. Just five years on, many of them seem unspeakable at the highest level of politics. What insights into this rapid about-face can we glean from its first season?
I watched the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone--the original Twilight Zone I mean--entirely by accident. The sketchy streaming site I used to look up the 2019 reboot had the original episode 1 filed as the reboot's episode 1. By the time I realized the mistake... well, I was hooked. A combination of tight writing, compelling character acting, and great lighting and shot composition elevate the basic premise of the episode--an amnesiac man wandering a perplexingly deserted small town desperately trying to catch out people who seem to be just barely escaping him--into a story that gripped me all the way to the twist end.
The pilot episode for Jordan Peele's reboot, "The Comedian", runs astonishingly about 2.75 times as long as "Where Is Everybody?", and on revisiting I skipped most of its predictable runtime. The story of a truly awful comedian finding that he can get big laughs by telling anecdotes about people he knows, at the cost of erasing them from existence, feels wanky and self absorbed, compared to the eerie weirdness of the original series' pilot. The misfiling on the dodgy site feels emblematic of the Twilight Zone's muted public response. Lesser loved series tend to have single source/failure points on sites like this, and wind up propagating busted, corrupted, or adulterated files. In this case, it felt like the site suggested, hey, wouldn't you rather watch a better Twilight Zone instead?
Sadly, no, I wanted to watch the reboot. Not because I fondly remembered its stories, but because as the 2024 election death march ground to its end, I kept thinking about what a bizarre time capsule of 2019 liberal fixations the series was. Its creators filled its scant ten episodes nearly to the end with Issues. There's the MeToo episode. The Gun Violence episode. The Abolish ICE episode. The can you believe there's a Dang Cheeto In The White House episode. And sometimes the episodes become metacommentary on the series' own propensity for Issue Episodes! It's not a comprehensive overview of every animating concern of liberal/left social media users during the first Trump administration, but they sure tried to hit the big ones. At the time I think the term of art was still "SJW"; now, people would simply call the show "woke".
I hate "Go Woke Go Broke" just on the grounds that it's a twee little annoying rhyme and people sound cringe when they parrot it, but it also misses the forest for the trees. It misidentifies a consequence--media feeling unfulfilling and half baked--with the wrong cause--woke DEI SJW yadda yadda. The general malaise in Hollywood has way more to do with the collapse of writers' rooms, seasons running for a third of their former length for just enough seasons to turn a profit while suppressing royalty rates, unconscionably long development times between seasons, indefensibly long and undisciplined run times, the turn towards un-unionized digital sfx work everywhere, production in right to work states or countries, the replacement of grants (which would benefit low budget productions) with tax rebates (which can only ever be a handout to established capitalists)... the list goes on, but everything on it can be traced to the dynamics baked into capitalism itself and its need to discipline workers and pursue profit at all cost, not to the fact that sometimes protagonists get played by black actors now.
The Twilight Zone is no exception to this. When the original series ran, there was a constant circulation of short fiction writers between different media: television episode writers, short story writers in magazines like Amazing or If, and radio play writers. Rod Serling may have written an astonishing number of Twilight Zone episodes, but his scripts often adapted stories or plays that appeared in other media, and the series employed teleplay writers who themselves crossed over between the fields. By contrast, the reboot is notable, even shocking, for how deeply embedded in not just a bubble of Hollywood production it is, but for how embedded in sitcom production it is. The writer of "Rewind", Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, arguably turns in the strongest script, and notably seems closest to the old model, having worked in a variety of different media and genres. Most of the other writers either worked on action and especially superhero stories (the Defenders; the X-Men films) or, bafflingly, cut their teeth on comedy shows like 30 Rock, Community, and Rick and Morty. If the theory here was that all comedy writers could make the Jordan Peele jump to horror, I'm sorry to say this was too optimistic. Aside from a couple standouts, the series produced few memorable stories, and lasted only for one more season, producing less total episodes than just one season of the original series.
In this case, though, it's not just the structure but the content that stands out, especially now that it's aged so poorly. Not because all the issues themselves have lost relevance for progressive politics! No, it's partly the heavy handed way the writing seems to latch onto each new social justice issue anxiously, with a need to let everyone know how seriously they are listening and learning. In 2022, looking back on the series, I tweeted jokingly that "there is no grass to touch... in... the Twilight Zone..." and it feels like a series written by people whose main interface with Americans and their local problems is through 2019 twitter feeds. All of which wouldn't be quite so bad, would not have caused the series to age so embarrassingly, if not for a grim, damning historical fact:
Most of the liberal causes that defined the show five years ago have been abandoned by mainstream Democrats, the ostensible liberal party. In some cases, they now campaign against the very causes a Twilight Zone episode was for! The most strident cries of the show now sit on the margins, in an upside down world where wrong is right and right... is the only place the left wants to be. The upside down world... of the Twilight Zone.
So. The episodes themselves.
There's a number of stories I won't be covering or just want to touch on briefly. Three--"Nightmare at 30,000 Feet", "A Traveler", and "Six Degrees of Freedom"--are pretty straightforward sci fi short stories in the culturally stereotypical Twilight Zone Mode. There's a few quirky things, like "Six Degrees" being about "the great filter", with an inciting incident of North Korea doing an unprovoked nuclear first strike against America. And there's a recurring theme of "unity and coming together vs dissent and division" that feels profoundly part of the ongoing Trump era. Really, I should write someday about seasons 3 and 4 of Star Trek Discovery as a similar kind of liberal decoder ring: both end with basically the same finale with slightly different paint, a moral reminding us that reaching out... and communicating with each other... is scary. But we gotta do it. I think of this message as the one smooth concept that remains once every other substantive, meaningful stance on a political issue gets sanded away by the rasping tongues of a thousand bootlicking campaign consultants. Wouldn't you know it, the Harris campaign ran on "Country Over Party", so, there you go. There are points to be gleaned from these episodes, then, but not the point I'm hunting down.
More directly related are a couple of episodes that straddle the line between the "campfire story" and "issue" modes that the series' own discourse about itself sets up. "The Blue Scorpion" is sort of the perfect middle ground: a story about a gun, with a bullet, with a name on it, which happens to be the main character's name and the name of every guy he subsequently meets, constantly tempting him with the possibility that he's destined to blow this particular asshole away. Pretty funny concept, for what it is. I can't escape the feeling, though, that it eerily mirrors how a lot of liberals actually conceive of the Gun, as this mythologized object. Like, they work a malevolent power to possess anyone who encounters them, like we've just been mass producing Elric's Black Blade for hundreds of years. It's a weird fetishism that transfers the mechanisms of gun culture, alienation, patriarchy, and so on, onto what is, ultimately, just a machine... but what to do with it here? This issue seems to be in some sort of Sensible Holding Pattern, where something should be done, but doesn't have to be done, if you see what I mean. Wait let me just--oh, Biden just directed his cabinet to spend 110 days drafting effective plans for schools to better run their active shooter drills? Hahaha. Sure man. Well, next episode!
Conveniently, the next episode evinces a similar sort of political fatalism, from another perspective. "The Wunderkind" is the most overtly Trumpian of the episodes, about a campaign manager who through clever message manipulation propels an 11 year old youtuber to the presidency... and pays a terrible price! Pretty on the nose. Also, it starts from the very very funny premise that the main character is a "disgraced campaign manager". Comrades, the guy who came up with the Dukakis tank stunt is still working as a consultant. Consequence free job, baby! Again, though, it exposes a kind of elitist fatalism that dripped from the campaign and online supporters before and after the election. The electorate in this episode herd mindlessly behind the most heart-tugging emotional appeals, accepting any level of absurdity if packaged with a good story. Are you nodding along to this? Well, let me just offer a question: if it's so damn easy to win, why are Democrats so bad at doing it? What does it say if a clown and a dunce with some slick marketing beats you not once but twice? I still remember when people pointed that out... about George W Bush's second term! You know, there's an old saying in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee-- Well, anyway, the moral of this story seems to be that if you put on an I'm With Stupid shirt, check to make sure you're not sitting next to any full length mirrors.
With this, we come to the three episodes that inspired this article. Each represents fixations of 2019 liberal discourse which have all been, sometimes aggressively, marginalized by federal campaigns in 2024. Of all of them, I can do the least justice to the MeToo issue episode, entitled "Not All Men", because as a trans woman online I took a look at the title and opted not to do psychological violence to myself by watching. I will say, I made a good faith effort to understand author Heather Anne Campbell's deal, and she seems to be a genuine trans ally. (I will also say, this is more grace than is often extended to trans creatives online.) I also tried several times to come up with a fair and balanced overview of the MeToo movement as a whole, but I just don't want to touch it. If it seems intrusive to bring trans issues into discussion of an episode about patriarchal rage, well, consider the transphobic campaign being waged and the way it employs cisfeminine "victimhood". This overshadows any contemporary feminist movement.
I don't think I need to litigate MeToo or the episode in particular detail, though. We all remember its cultural significance, and the seismic simultaneous attack on abortion rights by the profoundly reactionary-by-design Supreme Court. Now, long time readers will recall I spent some time living in Pittsburgh during the pandemic. Political campaigns still seem quite convinced I live there, so I received a LOT of texts over the last few months. I just did a search for "abortion", for "reproductive", for "women's", and a few other phrases. The last time I could find a text about these issues was... the Fetterman campaign in 2022. In my email, the only thing I could find from any campaign mentioning abortion was my city councilor Alexis Mercedes Rinck campaigning on local protections for abortion. Good for her: it seems like federally the Democrats simply... didn't want to talk about it.
And why would they want to talk about women's rights? They already have a woman candidate after all... and other women, like uhhh Liz Cheney? She's, uh, "brat", right? This has to be sufficient. What else can they do when their current president, their patriarch who the campaign refused to criticize, is Joe Biden, an anti-abortion Catholic, and a man surrounded by a persistent cloud of accusations? Wouldn't any campaign running on women's bodily autonomy read a little bit hollow when Bill Clinton remains such a fixture of the party? I remember the liberal enthusiasm for MeToo and how it wavered as more and more of the old patriarchs from their own party, and the broader ultra-wealthy and celebrity funding base, faced callouts. It would not surprise me, in the wake of the coveted demographic of Angry Young Men breaking for Trump, if the same consultants responsible for losing this election opted to further marginalize feminist issues. Some of them might even benefit directly from a little less attention to the bad behavior of the powerful.
The next episode, "Point of Origin", actually prompted this whole article. See, I watch FROM, for some reason. I wrote a whole treatment of how you could re-edit the pilot episodes of that show to make them more functional. If you recall, I particularly disliked showrunner John Griffin's fixation on this just awful upper middle class family, their tedious problems, and their petty, small minded conservativism. Well, it turns out that one of Griffin's ONLY other credits, on anything, ever, is... writing an episode of The Twilight Zone!
True to form, this is an episode about ICE and its evils, that somehow manages to center an upper class woman, the horror being that she gets subjected to the same treatment as her housekeeper when the government comes to suspect she too is an immigrant. An immigrant... from another dimension. doo dee doo doo, doo dee doo doo, &c. While this allows Griffin to get in one reprimanding speech about how the protagonist should have known how inhumanly sadistic immigration policing is, mostly it lets him focus on the viewpoint that is, I think it's safe to say, his comfort zone: a privileged person brought low. Aside from this "wouldn't it be horrible if bad things happened to someone whose subjectivity matters?" framing, there's a lot about the episode that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Is the housekeeper both an immigrant from Guatemala... AND another dimension? The other dimension's Guatemala or this one? Also, there's a whole scene where the main character meets with a weird old woman from the other dimension who explains the premise of the episode, and then is dragged off screaming "This world is ours!" which is dramatic but frankly DOES make it seem like Earth is experiencing a coordinated invasion, accidentally feeding into invasion narratives about migration. Sort of bizarre!
But, ok, the basic sentiment, that ICE is an unconscionably fascist organization, is correct. And it's something that had broad support in 2019: remember the "kids in cages" rallying cry? Unfortunately, family separations in a wide variety of forms continued under Biden, and in some cases the policies decried by liberals were voluntarily expanded. A large study published by UCLA's Center for Immigration Law and Policy remarks that "The negative impacts of family separations under the Biden administration are often less visible than the horrific images of crying children in cages that marked Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy," which is, of course, exactly the point the episode makes: the audience surrogate protagonist always knew things were bad, but had the privilege to look away. The Biden administration's approach seemed oriented towards making the grotesque injustice of America's immigration policy low key enough to keep their base from yelling at them, while shying away from anything too radical lest their opponents yell at them. The transformation of America from a state run nominally by an executive and legislative branch, into one where all policy gets determined by the judicial branch, suited this approach, as the specific nuances of policy could be worked out by the courts, while our own Pilate washed his hands.
At this point, the democrat consensus building propaganda machine had a vested interest in simply ceding ground on immigration. Any firm stance in favor of humane treatment of migrants, after all, risked critiquing their own ongoing policies. With no capacity to take a stance against the policy, the administration could not take an effective stance against the rhetoric, either. Moreover, the continuous supplying of condition-free weapons and aid to Israel as it carries out what internationally is recognized as genocide means that a humanitarian argument about immigration reform rings hollow. I'm quite sure that the consultant class was right about the nation moving to the far right on immigration. The populace is massively propagandized toward that end, and the Democrats were unwilling and unable to counter that propaganda. Five years after "Abolish ICE", Harris and Walz may have had no choice in running an anti-immigration campaign, but that is only because their team's own policy and messaging failures caged them in.
From a weak episode to a strong one. "Replay" might be the best Twilight Zone story, and arguably the worst served by the cowardice of the liberal political establishment. A rolling nightmare, the story follows a black family being tormented by a racist cop over and over, as the mother Nina desperately employs the family camcorder to rewind time and attempt a do-over. It's a brilliant twist on the now familiar sci fi time loop trope, suggesting that even perfect use of a magical tool might not be enough to escape the jaws of America's fascist police gangs. Gerard McMurray directs the episode like a slasher film, the pursuing officer given all the supernatural relentlessness and looming screen presence of Michael Myers. The writing, meanwhile, manages to quickly sketch a cast of compelling nuanced characters quite rapidly, in the best tradition of short stories, their histories and psychological quirks integral to the way the episode progresses. It's one Twilight Zone episode that feels well aged and even more timely after the failed George Floyd Uprising in 2020. And it does it all in 10 minutes less than The Comedian!
Unfortunately, "Defund The Police" is now a completely radioactive slogan in lib land. In fact, basically everyone now runs on RE-funding the police, OVER-funding the police, in response to a "defunding" that, in point of fact, never happened practically anywhere in any municipality in the country. Just as nearly every remnant of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle have been scrubbed, whitewashed, and bulldozed away, our repulsive reactionary city council even going so far as to obliterate the community garden built there to replace it with scraggly dead grass, every remnant of the movement for black lives and against a militarized police force independent of any legislative or judicial oversight (let alone public accountability) has been bleached with great prejudice from the party. Even progressives must be "realistic" and "acknowledge people's real material concerns about public safety", no matter what the actual crime rate "materially" is, and no matter how cynically right wing local media manufactured those purportedly organic concerns.
If there's a weakness to "Replay", its the way it "puts its faith in exposure", as Eve Sedgwick would say. It positions the camera as a shield that can protect against the guns of the disciplinary wing of a white supremacist state. I don't think it's as naive as some stuff that came out of this period of activism, though. It's ultimately not just the camera, or documentation, or film making, or careful study of history that saves the protagonists. It's the application of those things strategically, Nina's defiance in the strong location of her son's historically black college, in a crowd of newly admitted students, and her estranged brother Neil's use of his research into his gentrifying neighborhood's history that lets him guide them through safe back ways out of sight of the stalking cop. Nina's defiant speech where she declares "we're all witnesses" is undercut by an epilogue a decade later where, Old Laurie Strode-like, she clings to her magical camcorder and lives in fear of the Shape's return to claim her son. A siren chirps over the black screen at the end, like the slasher villain returning for one more scare. The sense, then, is that for all the defiance, Hinds and McMurray can't put all their faith as authors in exposure, that the problem of racist police oppression might not be one that film alone can solve.
It's shameful that so many purported liberals have moved as one, in the years since the George Floyd Uprising, to enthusiastically declare themselves part of that problem.
How did The Twilight Zone arrive at such a strange historical place, becoming a cultural object rendered obsolete a mere five years after its first season? Or to put it another way, how did the ruling party abandon so many of the principles that progressive culture makers expected them to actualize? There's plenty of reasons: greed, a need to uphold the violent extractive system of capitalism and imperialism that earns their money, simple laziness and cowardice, or self destructive bigotry. But there's another seed of weakness we can see if we look at The Twilight Zone's opening and closing episodes.
As I've already mentioned, the pilot of The Twilight Zone, "The Comedian", is about a titular bad comedian using his acquaintances as fuel for his rise to stardom. What I didn't mention is that his comedy is, explicitly, bad because it's too woke. The first joke he tells is a tedious "by your logic" gotcha about the wording of the Second Amendment! Meanwhile, the final episode, "Blurryman", is about a tv writer haunted by the ghost of Rod Serling. She too struggles to reconcile her desire to tell stories that have some elevated social message with the show's penchant for "campfire stories". Writer Alex Rubens, a comedy writer on shows like Community and Rick and Morty, thus brackets the whole season with a set of navel-gazing anxieties of a really, really small set of liberal entertainment industry people.
A social commitment in stories is a funny thing. From one perspective, the anxiety in these episodes, and that haunts the whole series, might be taken as a sincere desire to use a platform for good. On the other hand, the worry that what the people really want is campfire stories or nasty but personal joking anecdotes suggests that audience reception looms large in this show's priorities. From that perspective, doesn't all this social justice stuff seem less like a firm commitment and more like a signal to the audience, "hey, I'm hip, I know about the Problems; I've listened and learned, so please don't be mad at me."
You can argue at least this somewhat venal approach gets you to the right place, but how well does it stick? "The Comedian" and "Blurryman" were written at a precarious moment, where it seemed like left wing critiques were insurgent, but it was also written in the context of approximately a trillion anxious articles after the 2016 election about how media and political elites had lost touch with REAL Americans--Real Americans here meaning frothingly racist rural car dealership owners or young fascist day traders. The genre is making a comeback as we speak, with a new twist. The main difference? In 2019 liberals asked, "how can we not alienate The Masses while staying true to our principles?" Now, the articles seem to ask, "how can we get marginalized people to shut the fuck up about their problems and stop demanding we do things for them, while still making them vote for us?"
Even these 2019 stories are remarkable for their insecurity. In the climax of "The Comedian", the titular character gives an extensive, whiny, self deprecating rant about how much he sucks, disappearing in a puff of funny (?) self loathing, all of the people he poofed with his earlier "jokes" restored. (And I have to emphasize: these are not good jokes. Very odd to write a dig about "forgetting to put any jokes in your set", then writing just a series of absolutely lifeless routines that the episode seems to think are good.) So, the dichotomy every character in the episode holds up is that "woke" comedy just doesn't work, you can't tell a funny second amendment joke. The only alternative, though, is this sort of interpersonal tear down comedy, where you just become a wretched scumbag in pursuit of fame. I mean every other comedian we see in the episode ranges from "raging asshole" to "serial sexual harasser who committed drunken vehicular manslaughter". Generously, I can see how the episode is animated by concerns like, "Doesn't comedy seem a bit superficial at this moment, and don't a lot of comedians seem to suck?" But that's addressed with way more clever points, more emotional vulnerability, and frankly MUCH funnier jokes, in both Bo Burnham's Inside and The People's Joker. Inside at least seems to conclude that there's ultimately still something funny to be found in all this self-effacing nihilism, like at least we can still laugh and, yeah, maybe even do SOME self reflection. The People's Joker at least still believes there's a real value in finding a way to express oneself without compromise. What does "The Comedian" think the point of comedy is? What, by extension, does it think making another season of a show like The Twilight Zone accomplishes?
Conveniently, "Blurryman" sets out to answer exactly that question. Its conclusions aren't necessarily less solipsistic though. The whole episode is, after all, about a character struggling to write an episode of The Twilight Zone. She keeps overdoing the narration at the beginning, leaning too heavily on moralizing about her story where... a writer's fiction comes to life nightmarishly around him. She has talks with Jordan Peele about this where he critiques her "art vs entertainment" worldview (which she worries is a "slippery slope to Idiocracy"), and butts heads with her ball-busting succubus lesbian wife and co workers, all in a way that feels less like a fun voyeuristic look at soundstage drama, and more like tedious inside baseball. The hook of the episode, though, is that she's being haunted by The Blurryman, a... blurry... man. As I've already revealed, it's Rod Serling, who's tormenting her with magic powers I guess. And despite the fact that the whole opening problem of the episode is her need to over-explain the moral of the story she's written, the dreadfully rendered and bizarrely voice acted CGI Rod provides a heavy handed moral monologue at the end to remind us that actually we shouldn't run away from popcorn crowd pleasing storytelling or fantastical fiction or childish things, but embrace them, because they may be our only hope.
Our only hope for... what exactly? I'm sort of nonplussed by this narrative. It has a heavy handed moral, but it seems to be a moral the creators of the show are telling to themselves, and then expecting the audience to congratulate them for concluding that as long as they have fun and do their best, that's what matters. Which was really the ultimate conclusion of so much media during Trump I: this work may all feel pointless, but actually, it matters. It matters so much that we, the creators, are making this thing, and that you, the consumers, are consuming it. One of the recurring themes of Inside's jokes is the way "raising awareness" can so easily turn into "raising awareness of how important I am for raising awareness". "There's only one thing I can do about it", Burnham pronounces in "Comedy", "while still being paid, and being the center of attention."
Looking back, I can't help but feel like if everyone was so confident that what they were doing was good, they would just be doing it, instead of doing a metacommentary about how important it is that they're doing it. In contrast I suspect that the issue episodes of the most recent Doctor Who season, for example, will age better, as they are both denser in their approaches (e.g. MeToo is clearly a touchstone in 73 Yards, but it's interwoven into the more complex moral and supernatural quandary Ruby traps herself in), and they also seem like a genuine result of the creative team having principles, and wanting to stand by them. Even in episodes of the Twilight Zone that feel genuine (again, "Replay" stands out), the framing of the show as a whole, and the decision to bookend the season with these two episodes, makes the overall effort feel self absorbed and insincere. It feels emblematic of a moment where Hollywood looked out at the world, recoiled, looked inward, and asked, "good lord, is it possible that Los Angeles California might be a bit of a weird bubble?" And now, everyone living in the bubble has a great opportunity to conclude that even if that's true, it's a really NICE bubble, and changing the zoning to allow multifamily housing in the bubble would change the character of the neighborhood too much.
In the effort to pin the crushing Harris defeat on minorities, I've seen some pretty clever tricks. Like, the claim that even though Harris ran an alienating right wing campaign for fucking no one, certainly not for the working class, it's still actually "wokeness" that brought her down, because she DID run on that stuff in 2019, and that's the REAL reason people didn't vote for her. That's sort of the point though. If you run on that stuff in 2019 and then start scrubbing it from your messaging in 2024, you just come across as cynical and insincere. It's hard to have a political vision when you care less about what you're saying, and more about what people are saying about what you're saying... or what you think Rod Serling would think of the job you're doing.
Though, I guess there's an appeal to summoning his digital ghost up. You'll always be popular, with a receptive audience, when you write lines for the dead.
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