The dimension of imagination has been revived for the third time.
The first installation of Jordan Peele’s 21st-century reboot of “The Twilight Zone” is available on YouTube, and you can watch it for free. As a taste of episodes to come, “The Comedian” hints at the evolution “The Twilight Zone” has undergone since 1958.
Samir Wassan is a struggling comic who begins his stand-up routine by ripping on the Second Amendment. He’s clearly liberal (he later makes a graphic dig at President Trump), but he’s told that politics won’t help him succeed. The bit doesn’t earn him any laughs, and it’s not until he shares about his personal life that the audience connects with him and his humor.
But after meeting a legendary comic, he unwittingly makes a macabre deal: If he jokes about someone he knows, the audience will go crazy — and then that person will disappear.
“The Comedian” addresses the artist’s concern about art as exposition and what price people will pay to succeed. Peele, echoing the show’s original creator Rod Serling, explains these moral dilemmas at the opening and closing of the episode.
As a first effort in the remaking of an iconic TV show, “The Comedian” succeeds well enough. It’s creepy, it’s morally challenging, and it’s got Tracy Morgan. It’s no Serling story, but no update could be.
Peele’s second episode (available only through CBS), “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” copies Serling’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” It’s darker than “The Comedian,” more in the vein of the British science fiction show “Black Mirror.”
Judging by the quality of “The Comedian,” “Black Mirror” may still be the best “Twilight Zone” copy to date. It’s not a reboot of the old show, but like “The Twilight Zone,” it’s an anthology series that puts people in impossible predicaments to watch them react.
While “Black Mirror” updates Serling’s premises by exploring the quandaries of technology, Peele’s “Comedian” episode could have taken place at any time (minus the Trump joke). As I wrote when the trailer for “The Twilight Zone” dropped, Peele can revitalize the series by addressing modern cultural concerns such as artificial intelligence.
But Peele has a habit of scrapping universal concerns for middling social commentary. He used the 1960 episode “Mirror Image” as the inspiration for his latest horror flick, “Us.” But the film could have been so much better if he had relied on the episode’s metaphysical questions rather than opting for social commentary.
If the new “Twilight Zone” can seek relevance beyond a few political swipes, it may still achieve the goal of the classic intro, to take us to a space “as timeless as infinity.”
