CBS is desperate for CBS All Access to carve out a niche in the Streaming Wars. I don't expect them to survive. CBS has not done too well with the beloved franchises they happen to have access to. Spoiler: Behind the Scenes Footage off the set of Star Trek Discovery CBS aside, most remakes and rebranding of beloved media creates something weaker than the original but there are some modern adaptations of old stories that are good. it's not impossible to remake an old classic well, it's just hard. Two recent modern adaptations rebranding an old story that I have much respect for are the television show Ducktales and the movie Alita Battle Angel. I can make a long list of adaptations I think were good or okay and which ones were subpar or unspeakably awful but that's besides the point. My concern is I think the original Twilight Zone really is impossible to do justice with a remake. The original Twilight Zone was elegant in it's simplicity in ways that modern television has not tried to do for decades Classic film noir can really invoke fear and other dark emotions with skilled shadow effects. These type of lighting effects are more effective in black and white. The relatively low budget forced the writers of the Twilight Zone to be on their A-game. I believe people in the current year are harder to scare than people in the early 1960s A lot of the Twilight Zone episodes were allegories to the Cold War which was objectively scary but I'm going to argue that people in the current year are more desenitized to violence and threats via the news than before. That's just the news. Beyond this, niche movies like the Saw and Purge franchises and relatively mainstream shows like Game of Thrones have raised the bar for what is scary and we raised the bar for what acceptable depiction of violence looks like. Lots of Baby Boomers have told me that the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz gave them nightmares as a kid. I didn't believe them as a kid. Those things? They are kind of cute. There hasn't been a pyschological thriller with mainstream appeal and impact since The Sixth Sense which is twenty years old now. The teasers I saw for the new Twilight Zone show depicted brutal alien probing which is not an iota as artful as classic Twilight Zone. The more squick you have, the less cleverness you tend to have. The original Twilight Zone was not concerned with being woke While it is becoming more acceptable to show blood and gore and TV, when it comes to feelings the bar is being lowered for what is or isn't acceptable. It makes it harder to focus on great stories if you are focused on being woke. In the current year, twist endings are common It's not just M. Knight Shamalyan. Between 1959 and 1964, shocking twist endings were pretty rare. Now they are pretty common. A new Twilight Zone would not have the same gravitas as the old one. Peoples' attitudes towards classic Twilight Zone has been improved by nostalgia. There were 156 episodes. Not all of them were timeless classics. A lot of them were medicore or worse. These are not the episodes people reference today. People reference about the same 20-30 best episodes. If the new Twilight Zone is exactly as good as the oldest, critics and fans will fixate on the bottom 80%, not the top 20%. Anyway, what do you think? Am I wrong? Is it possible to recapture the magic of the original Twilight Zone in the current year. Or perhaps I'm wrong for a different reason. Maybe the Twilight Zone was pretty lousy on the whole.
I haven't seen much of the old one, and what I saw was pretty lame IMO. So I don't have much hope here.