The Rembis Report And Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CXXVI

I’ll bet you are glad that’s over with. Sure, some of it was fun, but when your favorite uncle finally blacks out and starts mixing up his politics and sports, saying the whole team should be sidelined, football-head needs to be impeached, and those puck-faces in congress ought to spend some time in the penalty box - well, let’s just hope you got some video to upload on YouTube, because that’s what we really want to see.

I am sure that more than one of you Americans who traveled across town or country to get to your designated establishment of family squalor, when you finally pulled up in front of the house where everything was about to unravel, you might have heard Rod Serling trotting through the back of your mind.

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. 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. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone."

Friends beyond our borders do not share this day of forced communion among their brood. They have other holidays. But in the good ol’ USA, Thanksgiving Day, beloved by many, feels alien to others. Some folks are shy. They might not do well with crowds. Kids may be meeting relatives for the first time. Teenagers and older adults live completely different lives. The generation gap becomes as close and as wide as it will ever be, all at once.

In every home, to break up that monotony and digest our meals, there is TV. It might be a football game, a parade, or some holiday movie that everybody sits down for together, but when it goes on, and the attention that was on you for a while can be placed on the big screen, it is welcome relief. Aside from getting out and shopping, if that is your thing, you might just want to veg out in front of the boob tube when it is all over. If you are traveling to get back home by Monday, you might watch a movie on the plane, catch CNN at the airport, or maybe you are reading the latest Rembis Report on your phone. Whatever it is, our screens bring us solace.

I want to let you know that I finally did it. I watched every episode of TV ever branded as Twilight Zone (TZ). That’s right, I finally caught up with Jordan Peele’s 2019 version and watched those last two seasons he produced, all 20 episodes. This latest version of TZ is also the shortest run of all. The original boasted 156 episodes. In the 1980’s they produced 65 over a three season run. The 2002 series hosted by Forrest Whitaker had 43 episodes over a single season of 22 weeks. The show played as a double feature of half hour shows, with just one episode as a full hour story.

Since Jordan Peele’s TZ episodes were programmed to run on CBS All-Access, devoid of commercials, there was no fixed run time. Shows ranged from 25 minutes to a full hour. Most are around 40 minutes, which creates difficulty in syndication, so it is banished to the cornfield of Amazon Prime’s Freevee TV.

It was a well produced show, but stopped early because CBS wanted to move from a weekly drop to a binge drop, where the whole season pops up at once. While it was superbly produced and finely acted, this TZ was more focused on in-your-face morality preaching than subtle cautionary tales. In this article by Cracked Magazine’s Maxwell Yezpitelok, I was expecting to find a sarcastic, sophomoric tone, but instead, he nails what went wrong.

Now that I have watched, with scrutiny, every single episode, plus the lost classics, a total of 286 shows - oh - and don’t forget Twilight Zone: The Movie, I gently beg your forgiveness if you do not find me an expert on this subject, but I must point out the one glaring issue that ruined Jordan Peele’s version. Profanity.

They could have and probably would have kept going on with the show if the producers could have gotten on board with binge-dropping the series, but that did not happen. And the erratic run times and profanity didn’t really kill the show either, but these are things that detract from it in a huge way.

Rod Serling set a standard of short precise storytelling. His formula works. Every time you mess with that, it doesn’t matter how you try to brand it, when you stray from the basics, it is no longer Twilight Zone, it is like Twilight Zone. There is a difference.

The tone set by the original needs to be taken into consideration. There was no profanity. I don’t ever recall them even uttering “damn,” but they may have referred to Hell, as a place, not as a curse. That’s about it. When you sit down for a Twilight Zone that you expect to wrap up before you know it, and have your mind blown without any cursing, and it does exactly that, it is deeply satisfying. It is the reason you go back and watch the rerun. The oddball runtimes and swearing just reminds you that this not what Rod would do, and takes you out of the zone.

However, detriments aside, this version raised the bar through supreme production value. Opening and end credits utilize the original score by Marius Constant with Rod Serling’s monologue, quoted above, and the visuals are updated with brilliant color animation. This is just the start of the many merits of these 20 episodes.

Throughout the series, close attention is paid to story, dialogue, and special care is taken with cinematography. The directors knew they were producing art that would be judged against the original.

The strongest assets are the actor’s performances. Everyone brings their best game. This alone makes the revival worth watching. Let me tell you about some of them.

*SPOILERS AHEAD* I’ll try to not give too much away.

In Not All Men, Taissa Farmiga and Rhea Seehorn bring brilliant performances as women scared out of their wits, when a meteor shower brings a mega-boost of testosterone to the planet. The usually funny and cheerful Ike Barinholtz shows a much darker side as a menacing killer.

Jenna Elfman and Christopher Meloni are sadly convincing as grieving parents confronted with an alien posing as their resurrected daughter in A Human Face.

Billy Porter in The Who Of You, Morena Baccarin in Downtime, and Jimmi Simpson in Meet In The Middle, who all find themselves in bizarre and terrifying situations that only happen in the Twilight Zone, are standouts of the series.

The episode A Traveler, featuring Steven Yeun and Greg Kinnear, is so well done, it felt like a completely different TV show pilot. I was all set to tune in next week to find out what happens. It stands on its own as a great short film, even without the TZ nameplate.

The original episode Nightmare At 20,000 Feet, which starred William Shatner and was included in Twilight Zone: The Movie, is rebranded as Nightmare At 30,000 Feet. They got a little higher and changed up the man on the wing to another threat. A completely different scare factor this time leaves you rethinking that next plane ride.

Then there is The Blue Scorpion, starring Chris O’Dowd, whose performance really knocks it out of the park. He is gifted a pistol that he does not want but just can’t get rid of. Whether or not the writer knows it, they wrote another episode of Gun, the six-part anthology produced by Robert Altman in 1997, now also to be found on Freevee TV. This is another series I highly recommend, if for no other reason than to get a glimpse of James Gandolfini, before he was Tony Soprano.

You saw that, too? Mike - you watch a lot of TV!

Yes, I have watched a lot TV.

Other shows I have seen every episode of include

• Dallas - 357 episodes

• ER - 331 episodes

• Criminal Minds - 324 episodes - Original run

• The Big Bang Theory - 279 episodes

• Frazier - 264 episodes

• M*A*S*H - 256 episodes

• Modern Family - 251 episodes

• Friends - 236 episodes

• The Goldbergs - 229 episodes

• Melrose Place - 226 episodes

• The Blacklist - 218 episodes

• The X-Files - 218 episodes

• Everybody Loves Raymond - 210 episodes

• How I Met Your Mother - 208 episodes

• Desperate Housewives - 180 episodes

• Seinfeld - 180 episodes

• Just Shoot Me! - 145 episodes

• Miami Vice - 114 episodes

• The Sopranos - 86 episodes

• Better Call Saul - 63 episodes

• Six Feet Under - 63 episodes

• Breaking Bad - 62 episodes

• The Wire - 60 episodes

• Twin Peaks - 48 episodes

That is a LOT of TV, Mike! That’s like 3,650 hours! That’s like 10 hours a day, every day, for a year!

Glad you are impressed. These are just some of the shows I really like. The list of everything I have watched is much longer, and your estimate also accounts for commercials. I have watched other series completely from beginning to end, but too many to list, and some where I may have missed an episode or two. These I can definitely attest to having watched them all.

Let’s get back to Twilight Zone. You may recall that in my past reports on the original series, the 1980’s reboot, and the 2002/2003 season, I shared my assessment of what I considered to be the standout episode. The best of the series.

My choice for the best of Jordan Peele’s TZ goes to Point Of Origin. This episode is exceptional in multiple ways and one of the best of all Twilight Zone episodes ever produced. Point Of Origin absolutely encapsulates the feeling of being in the otherwise indefinable twilight zone.

It is about a woman who is picked up by immigration for being an illegal alien. But she does not know that she is an illegal immigrant, because she came into the country as a child, with only vague memories of her past. Her point of origin is not another country, but another, lesser dimension. She came in a caravan of pilgrims who wanted a chance at prosperity. While she has built a life for herself, forgotten her past, even married a native and birthed two daughters, she is not of this world. She must be deported. The absolute terror of discovering and trying to reconcile your own reality with something utterly unbelievable is what Twilight Zone is all about. This episode captures that perfectly.

Ginnifer Goodwin delivers a solid dramatic performance that made me absolutely ill with empathy. Like all aliens held by immigration officials, she brings that fear of the absolute unknown to life. In addition to the allegorical message about the reality of our world and everyone’s place in it, this episode is also packed with excellent supporting actors, a smart music score, dreamy photography, and stunningly brilliant set design.

Chosen visuals construct a world that is close to what we know, but upon further inspection, tiny details may be construed as subliminal messages. The story is set in a brisk but mild winter. An ice cream man roams the neighborhood. It is a cold, cold world.

Our protagonist, Eve is aptly named for her biblical namesake, essentially free to choose in the garden of Eden. She chooses forbidden fruit: a world where she does not belong. Rod Serling told two Adam and Eve stories in the original series and used many tales as origin stories in their own right. This may be homage.

With a clever nod to Rod Serling, Jordan Peele’s closing monologue includes him enjoying an ice cream cone in lieu of a smoke.

I did not catch it the first time around, but when I went back to study the episode, I found circles playing a central role throughout the production. It is subtle enough to miss, but mirrors, windows, backdrops, and utilities took advantage of the circle to create a world which is not even truly our own. Whether or not the circle represents more than sleek imagery, that is open to interpretation. Nonetheless, I wonder if Eve did not come into our world, but left ours, and went to that one.

Being in a strange place can be unsettling, even when it should be completely familiar. What dimension do we live in? One that would welcome Eve, or reject her?

Is Thanksgiving Day any different on the other side of the veil?

Will there ever be another Twilight Zone?

I hope so. You can never watch too much TV.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.