Jordan Peele may be taking audiences into a land of both shadow and substance with a reboot of The Twilight Zone, according to sources. Per The Hollywood Reporter, CBS Corp. President and CEO Leslie Moonves announced the project on Thursday’s earnings call.
Peele, known for sketch show standout Key and Peele and more recently for his directorial debut (the riveting social thriller Get Out) will be joined by Marco Ramirez (Daredevil, The Defenders). The show is planned for CBS All Access, which recently launched another sci-fi revival, Star Trek: Discovery
They will have their work cut out for them trying to do justice to the original Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964 on CBS and is perhaps the most iconic television series of all time. The show was created by Rod Serling and featured stories from many of sci-fi’s top writers (such as Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson), as well as performances from countless stars and future stars.
Two previous attempts to reboot the series (three if you include the 1983 movie) met with limited success. Get Out proved that Peele has vision and talent in the field of socially-conscious science fiction, which was at the heart of most of the original series’ best episodes. The timing could be right, as many of the issues Serling and company dealt with (racial tension, fear of nuclear war, the potential hazards of technology) are on our collective minds as much as they were in the 1960s. Dark Mirror, a show that owes much to the original Twilight Zone, and deals primarily with the technological aspects, has been popular enough to be greenlit for a fourth season.
