Salzmank Watches the New “Twilight Zone”

He’s meeting an apparently famous comedian—which is a bit like “A Game of Pool” in the original, I guess. But it’s shot poorly—all modern close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots. Pretty bland so far.

“A man who refuses to compromise his beliefs for a cheap joke,” says our narrator. But he’s a—wait for it—a comedian! Sorry, not getting over this fact.

OK, producer-narrator Jordan Peele. He’s sorta-kinda doing a Serling impression—at least, I think he is, I don’t know what he usually sounds like—in the sense that every word is clipped and formal. And the Serling-esque ’60s suit is a nice touch. But his voice just isn’t very powerful, as Serling’s was: there’s not a trace of irony to Serling’s stentorian tones, which sound like a documentary narrator. Also, Peele, like narrators Charles Aidman, Robin Ward, and Forest Whitaker before him, isn’t writing any episode of the series, which makes him feel somewhat pointless, shoehorned in to play the Serling role.

No one talks this way.

Does anyone who writes dialogue actually know what real human conversation sounds like?

5 years and he hasn’t changed his jokes in all that time!? OK, sorry I keep harping on that.

This guy “Dave” looks a lot like Bradley Whitford in Peele’s Get Out (which I still haven’t seen).

The script needed an extensive rewrite.

It was pretty much awful—incredibly boring and unlikeable. The best parts were the opening credits and Jordan Peele’s narration. Even the premise is flawed: we needed a more direct connection between someone’s vanishing from existence and the cause—a painter’s getting rid of a figure in his painting, for instance. “Making a joke about someone causes that person to disappear” makes little sense. There’s no explanation for the Mephistophelean great comedian (is he dead? Who knows?), and have I mentioned the whole thing is boring? Extremely.

Someone in the YouTube comments section mentioned it seemed like “Squirrel Jokes,” an episode of the children’s show SpongeBob Squarepants (except used for horror rather than comedy, of course). The commenter was right, but “Squirrel Jokes,” a kids’ cartoon, is an infinitely more intelligent and inventive fifteen minutes than this episode’s entire hour. But why?

At least the last shot, with an inexplicable reference to The Shining, looks nice.

Just aBOOT!

To be clear, I haven’t seen (and probably won’t be seeing, as I don’t want to pay) the other episodes, which are just supposed to be better. But that first episode had pretty much nothing to appeal to us as TZ fans and, sad to say, nothing that was really any good at all (except Mr. Peele’s Rod Serling impersonation).