Bigotry, nuclear annihilation and climate change were all targets for the original show, which is being revived by director Jordan Peele
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man ... It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. ... It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.
On Monday night, TV viewers will once again hear the portentous opening narration of “The Twilight Zone,” the celebrated dramatic anthology produced and largely written by Rod Serling, when the latest reboot of the 60-year-old series premieres on CBS All Access.
This time, however, those ominous words will be said by Jordan Peele, the acclaimed director of “Get Out” and recent hit “Us,” who also is executive producer of the new “Zone.” Whether the latest incarnation of Serling’s show, which aired from 1959 to 1964, will prove as successful or enduring as the original remains to be seen.
One of the reasons the original “Zone” still strikes such a chord with today’s viewers is that those episodes have proved to be uncannily prescient.
Fear of the other, nuclear paranoia, body shaming, the perils of artificial intelligence — each of these phenomena is still with us.
“In his ‘Twilight Zone’ scripts, Serling grappled with the contradictions and anxieties of post-World War II America,” says Ron Simon, curator for television and radio at the Paley Center for Media. “These deeply rooted fears persist today as the same prosperous country confronts its unresolved uncertainties.”
“Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” Serling’s haunting disquisition on fear and raw prejudice, was broadcast on March 4, 1960.
On a quiet summer day on Maple Street, a meteor speeds overhead causing a failure of all power equipment. Residents gather and try to explain the outage, and a young boy who reads comic books says that humanlike monsters from outer space have actually already invaded.
At first the adults laugh this off, but then they begin to point fingers at each other. Who is the monster? The accusations become more vehement.
Finally, violence erupts, with one resident getting shot. Then the camera pulls back to reveal two aliens discussing how their experiment in fear has proved successful; one little power failure, and Maple Street — and every other street like it — will destroy itself.
For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, Serling says in his closing narration, while the town below continues to self-destruct, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.
And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
And they remain deeply entrenched in 21st-century America.
The atomic bomb and the fear of the bomb were a major preoccupation of Americans during the Cold War.
Serling was particularly perturbed by the bomb-shelter craze those jitters induced, including a column by a Catholic cleric who declared that Americans would be justified in keeping their neighbors out of their shelters during an actual atomic attack.
In “The Shelter,” broadcast Sept. 29, 1961, the radio warns that UFOs have been sighted and everyone should run for their shelters. A beloved neighborhood physician, Doc Stockton, locks his family in their shelter, but his neighbors are unprepared. They plead with the kindly physician for entry from outside. No longer kindly, he refuses them.
The neighbors’ anger boils to the point where they break down the shelter door — just as the radio announces that the UFO sightings were a false alarm. Stockton knows, however, that the experience has destroyed them as a community, anyway.
No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, Serling intones over the closing credits. Just a simple statement of fact: For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.
Fear of nuclear annihilation is still with us. Witness the hysteria created by last year’s false nuclear alert in Hawaii and the resultant pandemonium. Once again, there is a boom — or at least a boomlet — in building bomb shelters.
Actor Burgess Meredith performs in the television show “The Twilight Zone.” (Getty Images)
Serling also took aim at the increasing popularity of psychotherapy and cosmetic surgery in one of his most prophetic — and heartbreaking — episodes, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” which aired Jan. 24, 1964.
In a future society, teenagers are compelled to go through something called the Transformation, by which they can choose a “beautiful” body type acceptable to their vacuous, Kardashian-like peers.
Marilyn, a literature-loving teenager with “sub-acceptable” looks, whose parents drink something called “Instant Smile” (read: Prozac) balks.
However, after remedial therapy, she relents and permits herself to be Transformed. At the end of the process, which takes place off camera, the newly svelte — and brainwashed — teenager emerges to meet her mother and her friend Valerie, who also models the statuesque No. 12 look.
As the “beautiful” Transformed teenager preens before the mirror in front of her carbon copy friend, she babbles, “And the nicest part of it all, Val, I look just like you!”
Portrait of a young lady in love — with herself? Serling muses before the fade-out. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which, after all, is The Twilight Zone.
Prophetic words in the age of Instagram.
Climate was not something that Americans thought much about in 1961. But Serling did. In “The Midnight Sun,” the installment that aired on Nov. 17, 1961, an artist, Norma, and her landlady, Mrs. Bronson, are the last occupants of their New York City apartment building.
After a mysterious change in the Earth’s orbit, the planet is slowly falling into the sun. All of Norma’s and Mrs. Bronson’s neighbors, it seems, have either died or moved north to escape the super-high temperatures.
As Serling declares in his opening narration, The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. This is the eve of the end, because even at midnight, it’s high noon, the hottest day in history — and you’re about to spend it in The Twilight Zone.
As the mercury rises and the climatological end draws near, Mrs. Bronson beseeches Norma to paint a waterfall before dropping dead of heat stroke. Soon Norma also collapses and presumably dies.
However, in the ending twist that was a signature of the classic, mind-bending series, we see that Norma has been dreaming — only to awaken to a different, literally chilling nightmare. It turns out that in reality Earth is moving away from the sun and the world is actually freezing to death.
Serling, who died in 1975, didn’t live to see the dystopia he foretold in “The Twilight Zone,” but he called it.
Or, as Simon, of the Paley Center for Media, puts it, “Rod Serling’s vision is still real — perhaps too real.”