Blurryman

Seriously fire all the writers and reset the show!!!

I'm using the last episode of this remake of the iconic "The Twilight Zone" to review the whole series. I'm concurrently working my way slowly through the original black and white series produced by Rod Serling so it was interesting to compare the two. I do like that the 2019 version retains the original title font, theme music and the introductory and closing narration. The choice of acting talent and production values of the show are high and the new episodes are normally at least fifteen minutes longer. However I think the latter point works against the show's effectiveness as the shorter running time of the original tended to make the stories being told punchier and faster-paced.

Many have commented here on the reboot's political agenda and certainly a few of the episodes put polemic over thrills, I'm thinking particularly of the episodes with the racist policeman terrorising the black mother and her son, the one where an all-American housewife and mother was abducted from her family, the too-obvious Trump satire which puts a kid into the White House or the one where a form of man-rage in a small town apparently attributable to a meteorite storm turned out to be nothing of the kind. Some were just slow and boring like the sub-2001 episode about the tensions aboard a mission-to-Mars rocket crew, the series opener concerning an aspirant comedian whose act in the telling seems to edit out significant people in his life or the show featuring the arrival at Christmas time of a mysterious stranger at an Alaskan police station.

That really just leaves the ones that I did like such as the remake of the famous "Nightmare At 30000 Feet" episode starring Adam Scott, the Chris O'Dowd-starrer concerning a haunted gun and the series closer, a thoughtful, daring existential story within a story, which broke the fourth wall throughout and sought to link up the preceding episodes with an ominous-seeming "blurry-man" whose identity I guessed before the reveal. I also really liked the time-shifting premise of the "Replay" episode but as stated it overdid the right-on P.C. anti-racism message. It made me think of the Rosa Parks episode from the last Dr Who series which brilliantly and more daringly took on a similar subject.

I agree with others that few if any of these new episodes will live as long in the memory as many of those from the Serling era but i saw enough to persuade me to watch the second series which I see has now been commissioned.

A meta textual approach or an ironic confession that this new series of The Twilight Zone does not hold a candle to the original series?

It starts off conventionally enough with Seth Rogen as the gust star seeing the apocalypse. However it is when Jordan Peele appears things change. Peele does not like his lines.

The writer Sophie Gelson (Zazie Beetz) needs to quickly come up with a rewrite. Something from within her heart or soul. This is a show she loved to watch as a child, under pressure, someone has noticed that there is a blurry figure in the scenes that were shot.

There is a clip from Time Enough at Last starring Burgess Meredith. I saw this episode in the early 1980s and still remember it, particularly the cruel ironic ending. I cannot remember much of the the new series a few hours after I have seen it.

At least this one will be more memorable even if it is just for the reveal of the Blurryman.

After a pretty bad start to the series, I had thought the episodes were getting better. A bit heavy handed in the morality, lacking the finesse of the original series. Then comes this pretentious, incomprehensible episode (that actually started out promising). I'm about ready to give up on the series.

The nuclear storyline would of been more interesting.