Why Twilight Zone (2019) Failed

The 2019 reboot of The Twilight was a disappointment. What should have been a glorious return of one of the greatest television series of all time, instead devolved into a tedious string of mediocre stories and ham-fisted political naval gazing. But I've already been over this multiple times. I said it when I reviewed the first season back on my old blog, I said it in my post talking about the shows failed political messages and I said it several times when I reviewed every episode of season 2 just last year. So why am I talking about it again?

Well because in February of this year, CBS announced that the show had been cancelled after 2 seasons and only 20 episodes. Making it the shortest Twilight Zone series of all time and ensuring that its failure is absolute. Now, I knew this thing was doomed from the beginning, and not merely because of the lacklustre quality of the show itself. If Batwoman can last for 3 seasons despite ratings so low Mole Men are playing the hardest game of limbo with them, then 2019 Twilight Zone could have at least made it past the 30-episode mark. I think most of us are keyed into the fact that quality control does not exist in modern television.

But no, it wasn’t the quality of the show that doomed it, not fully anyway. I knew this was going to fail before the first episode had even released. Releasing a reboot for a show that hasn’t been relevant since arguably the 1980’s, on a streaming service people didn’t want was always destined for cancellation. It really isn’t hard to figure out. I even saw people in discussions online saying they were interested but didn’t want to pay for CBS All-Access.

And let’s be honest, for all its classic status there are very few people who honestly care about or remember the original Twilight Zone anyway. And the few that do are likely die-hards who wouldn’t accept it anyway because it isn’t the original. The show wasn’t exactly a major selling point and with CBS All-Access being re-branded, it’s obvious that the service itself was a failure. Twilight Zone 2019 had no chance of success.

However, while being exclusive to a streaming service few people owned is the largest contributor to its cancellation, I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit the dismal quality of the show itself didn’t play a significant part in the show ultimately getting canned. Don’t misunderstand me, even if the show was good it still would have failed, but at least then people would have reacted to its cancellation. The announcement of it being cancelled was so muted I only heard about it a month after the fact, and that was only because I decided to actively look into it.

So why am I even bothering to talk about it again? No one cared about it while it was airing so why should I care about it now. Well, consider this closure. A way to put this whole thing behind me once and for all. I did review both seasons and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least address its final fate. Now that it’s all over with, we can finally look back on it and definitively say what went wrong. Let's put the final nail in the coffin together folks. This is why the 2019 Twilight Zone failed.

Politics & Parables

Let's get this one out of the way right now because I feel like this one topic often overshadows the other problems the show suffers from. It was one of the chief complaints I saw online, people said it was “woke” or that it was too political. This inevitably led to the counter argument that the Twilight Zone was always political, and that people didn’t like it because it went against their political biases. Something I would take more seriously if the people praising this show didn’t do so because it supported their political biases.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the problem with the show was never the politics, it was the implementation of them. But I've already talked about politics in relation to this show extensively in the past. So rather than repeat myself I'm going to instead home in on one specific problem.

To do this I need to establish what The Twilight Zone is for those who might not know. The Twilight Zone is an anthology series with an emphasis on parable, simple stories designed to impart a moral lesson. Parables by their very nature require a simple, binary morality. They make a clear distinction between right and wrong to convey its message to the audience in as concise a manner as possible.

That was what the original Twilight Zone was. The stories were never intricate or complex, they were simple morality plays designed to impart a message onto the audience. The morals themselves were not political, they were universal messages that could apply to anyone. Having established this, are you beginning to see the problem of the 2019 version attempting to implement the basic morality of a parable onto complex political issues of the day. Ignoring the fact that the binary morality of a parable requires you to paint an entire side of the issue as evil, therefore ensuring half your audience won’t listen to the underlying message, it also trivializes the issues themselves.

Look at “Point of Origin” for example. It tries to tackle immigration but when broken down to its key elements, all it really says is “hey maybe we shouldn’t treat immigrants like garbage”. This isn’t a bad message, but it is an overly simplistic one that waters down the issue. By doing this, they insult the audience's intelligence and the people who would have listened to them didn’t because they felt like they were being preached to.

Not all the topics they bring up suffer from this. You could argue that “Replay” which dealt with police brutality and racism does work within the confines of a parable. Tackling racism itself requires you to demonize someone to get the message across, you can’t have an episode without racism without having a racist after all. And to be fair “Replay” is one of the better episodes when it comes to this. However, it still makes the mistake of implying that all police officers are racist, and it has all the subtlety of a freight train blaring out metal music while shooting out streams of fire. It's better than the rest, but still not that good.

The lack of subtlety is also a driving factor on why a lot of audiences probably didn’t take to the show. I know some will argue that people are idiots and won’t get the message if it isn’t shouted out to them, however I feel doing this causes people to be more antagonistic to the messages. People hate being preached to which is why it helps if a message is delivered in a subtle way through metaphor. That's the whole reason parables exist. And if you don’t believe me when I say it, original series creator Rod Serling cops to it himself.

Worse still, most of these issues are things people are already sick of hearing about. The original Twilight Zone was famous for tackling issues most other shows wouldn’t touch. Rod Serling had to fight with the network just to make sure certain scripts were approved. Many of the original's episodes were so ahead of their time that they still feel relevant today.

The same cannot be said of the 2019 version. These messages are as tired as they are uninspired, racism is bad, violence against women is bad, prejudice is bad and so on and so on. These are not bad messages, I don’t think anyone would say they are, but they’re not interesting to think about anymore, not unless you come at them from a unique angle. Some of these messages I was hearing from cartoons back when I was growing up.

You could argue they’re still important but if I was hearing about this stuff as a kid and it’s still happening, if the news media constantly talks about it and it’s still happening, at this point it’s time to accept that we’re preaching to the choir. Maybe it’s time to find a new way to convey these messages or re-examine them to see why they aren’t working. It's almost as if oversimplifying complex issues doesn’t help in actually SOLVING the issues.

Really the 2019 version, especially season 1, felt like a grab bag of issues and talking points you would see on CNN or other left leaning new outlets. It was so transparent that I and several others were predicting the messages of certain episodes based entirely on the titles. This show tried so hard to be contemporary, it didn't just date itself, it carbon-dated itself.

Twilight Zone 2019 is not bad solely because of its politics, it simply incorporates them in a haphazard way that contradicts it’s parable like underpinnings. But that’s not the only reason it fails at being a parable.

Long in the Tooth, Short on Ideas

One of the things about parables that makes them work is their simplicity. Most parables are so straight forward they can be told in just a few lines of text. Go and read some of Aesop’s Fables, a lot of them are only four lines long because they don’t need to be any longer. You don’t need to know the backstory of the grasshopper to know why he died in the winter. The details of a parable are not important, the message is.

The original Twilight Zone understood this. Which is why many of the episodes were roughly 20-25 minutes in length. When you go back to the original Twilight Zone, you realize that many of the stories weren’t that complicated. They were short, simple and to the point. It did not obfuscate the story with unnecessary detail, it kept things as simple as it could so its message was as clear as possible.

The 2019 version has episodes that vary in length, but most are between a half hour to an hour in length. The idea appears to be that each episode is only as long as the writer wants it to be. There isn’t anything wrong with having slightly longer episodes, many of the writers probably thought it would allow them to tell richer stories. On paper this could have led to more complex interesting stories. In practice, the episodes have the same amount of depth as those in the original only with an extended run time that makes things unnecessarily long winded.

The writers of the show want to have their cake and eat it to. They want to keep the show as a parable, but they want longer more complex stories at the same time, and it just doesn’t work. You wind up with episodes so cluttered that often the moral of the stories become muddled in the process.

Granted a lot of the show's messages are very basic to begin and don’t take long to figure out, but this raises another issue. Why make the episodes nearly an hour long if the message itself is basic and straight forward? To the writers credits they do attempt to add more layers to each message, but they don’t really go anywhere or add anything of real substance. They give you a hint they’re about to do something interesting but come up empty when it comes time to the actual pay off.

Something which wouldn’t be so egregious if they used the run time effectively, but they don’t. Episodes meander with little actually happening in them. You could cut about 10-20 minutes out of each episode and lose next to nothing of value.

This why the length of each episode is so aggravating. They could have used that extended run time to expand on the plots or create more interesting characters. The original series had simple characters, but they were memorable with clear motivations and personalities. The 2019 series tries to give characters more in depth arcs but most of them feel rushed and unconvincing because they don’t spend enough time on them.

This creates a bit of a weird issue for the 2019 series. The episodes are too long to work as an effective parable but not long enough to allow for richer, more complex storytelling. Instead of trying to work within those limitations, the writers instead try to mash a square peg into a round hole. Ironically resulting in the exact opposite outcome they intended.

Instead of complex plots with many layers to them, the plots are cluttered, unfocused and messy. Instead of deep, nuanced characters we get overly simple and shallow characters with poorly developed arcs. This is why it’s important to be concise with your storytelling people. Extra detail can be great but only if you do something with it. Just look at the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League to see that being long does not make your story deeper or more interesting.

What's funny about this is that this was a problem for the original series too. Season 4 of the original series had episodes be an hour long because of a schedule change and it’s widely considered the worst season by fans and the original creators. You’re supposed to learn from past mistakes, not copy them.

Plots and Twists

Alright, so the show fails as a parable. However, all of this might have been salvaged if the stories themselves were fun or interesting. They are not. Granted some of the ideas aren’t bad and there were a handful of stories I thought were decent, but those were the exception and not the rule.

Most of the time the stories are bland and predictable. Let me give you an example, let’s look at the very first episode of 2019 Twilight Zone, “The Comedian”. The episode follows a comedian, obviously, who makes a deal with the devil and gains the ability to make people laugh by talking about people in his life which also causes said people to disappear.

Not a bad setup, but far from an original one. It was done before in the 1985 reboot episode “Take My Life... Please!”, with a little bit of Death Note thrown in for good measure. Sadly, both those stories handled themselves a lot better than “The Comedian”, which results in it feeling like a watered-down version of both. It doesn’t just fail, it fails in stereo.

“The Comedian” isn’t just unoriginal it’s also way too predictable. You can tell how it’s going to end the minute the episode begins. And it isn’t an outlier, most of the episodes are like this. Some are so predictable I was calling the story plot point by plot point based entirely on the preview.

This was an issue in season 1 but it only got worse in season 2. Season 2 is a slight improvement on season 1 if only because it ditched the politics and tried to be more of a straightforward science fiction anthology. Unfortunately, this only drew more attention to how anemic the stories actually are. The episode “A Small Town” might be the single most generic story in any of the Twilight Zone series and that’s including the abysmal 2002 reboot.

And that’s not counting the times they ripped other stories off. “8” is just The Thing but with an octopus and way, way dumber. “Ovation” is basically every be careful what you wish for story. And then there’s “Try, Try”.

“Try, Try” is meant to be a take on Groundhog Day but with a focus on a stalker. The episode is about a man stuck in a time loop who tries to get a girl he’s obsessed with to like him by creating the perfect date. The problem is, this was already done, in Groundhog Day! “Try, Try” is basically the 10-minute sequence of where Bill Murray tries to get Andie Macdowell to like him and nothing he does works.

I’m not making this up, it’s literally the same story as that scene just stretched out to 40 minutes. The difference is that Groundhog Day used that scene to further its core theme of self-improvement, while “Try, Try” is just a shallow dig at the “nice guy” trope. So not only is Twilight Zone 2019 ripping off other stories, its doing so without any of the depth or nuance of those original stories.

What makes this all the worse is the shows complete failure to write a convincing twist ending. This might be the most offensive thing about Twilight Zone 2019. The original series is known for its excellent twists. The endings are so famous in and of themselves that they’re probably more well-known than the episodes they came from. It's the one aspect any reboot must get right, and the 2019 version seriously drops the ball.

Some aren’t set up properly, some raise more questions than they answer, and others are painfully obvious. The worst twist ending goes to “Not All Men”, it completely destroys the plot in favour of hammering home it’s message that all men are inherently violent. I already went over it in depth in my post on the politics of the show and I recommend you read that to see how bad an ending it is.

Believe it or not though, while “Not All Men” has the worst twist ending, it isn’t the one that irritated me the most. It is the one that pissed me off the most, but in terms of the most irritating twist, that “honour” belongs to “Downtime”. Why? Because it’s a twist that has never, ever worked in the past. The twist in “Downtime” is that the whole thing was inside of a videogame, the main character was someone in the real world playing a role in the fictional game world. I’ve seen this twist done multiple times and not once has it ever worked. Seriously people, stop using this twist. It's stupid, nonsensical and renders the story pointless. Stop it!

I would argue that the reason most of these stories don’t work is because the twist ending ultimately knee caps them. However, there are some good stories in Twilight Zone 2019. Episodes like “The Blue Scorpion”, “A Human Face”, “The Who of You” and “Among the Untrodden” are all examples of 2019 Twilight Zone where it pulls everything off effectively. But that’s 4 episodes out of 20, not exactly a good batting average.

So the show fails at being an effective parable and as straight forward entertainment. The writing in this show simply isn’t up to par with either the legacy of its predecessors or other anthology shows currently on the market. And now that I've brought it up, let’s discuss why this show also fails as an anthology.

Diversity in All but Story

One thing I've learned from watching anthology shows is how important variety is. The best anthology shows thrive in the presence of variety, while the ones that lack it tend to be forgettable at best. Generally speaking, I find there are three ways in which variety can manifest in anthologies, genre, setting and tone. Those aren’t the only ways you can have variety in an anthology show but they are the ones that are the most important.

So how does Twilight Zone 2019 fare in this regard? Well in terms of setting it does ok. While it does use a contemporary setting most of the time it does have episodes that take place in more interesting locations. “Six Degrees of Freedom” takes place on a spaceship and “8” takes place in the arctic for example. Plus, the contemporary settings are also decently varied just enough to avoid repetition.

It's in the other two categories where 2019 Twilight Zone comes up short. Twilight Zone is remembered as a very weird and creepy show, and it is, but it was more than that. Sure, a lot of episodes were weird and creep, but there were also comedic episodes, romantic episodes, heartwarming episodes, heartbreaking episodes, episodes set in world war 2, westerns, civil war stories, fantasy, horror and tragedies. It was so much more than a weird and creepy show, it had a little something for everyone.

So why does every episode in the 2019 version feel so samey? Every episode has almost the exact same tone, weird and creepy, and very rarely changes it up. There is at least a little variety in the genres with science fiction, fantasy and horror, but that’s all it covers. “Meet in the Middle” starts as a romance story about two lonely people being psychically linked, but then devolves into another weird and creepy episode by the end. And where the hell are the comedic episodes, lord knows this show could use levity.

I was one of the people who was watching the show as it was coming out, so I had a little bit buffer period between episodes, but even with that this show became very difficult to sit through. It's so dour and dull. There's no levity or any episodes with any kind of hopeful optimism. “A Small Town” comes close but it’s the only one that even remotely attempts this.

Twilight Zone 2019 feels like a show made by people who know of the original show but have never actually seen it. Let’s compare this to something else, the 1985 reboot. Of the three reboots the 1985 version is easily the best, mostly because a lot of the original shows writers helped with the production. It still isn’t as good or influential as the original, but as a standalone 80’s anthology show it’s pretty good.

One of the things the 85 series excelled at was, you guessed it, variety. Well at least in the first two seasons. See one thing that made the 85 series stand out was that each episode consisted of multiple segments. In the first two seasons' episodes were an hour long, but they consisted of 2-3 mini segments that varied in length. Some were a standard 20 minutes; others were a lot shorter. Each segment also varied in tone, with some being light-hearted and fun while others were dark and tragic.

Compare this the 2019 series where episodes have the same dour tone episode to episode. This complete lack of tonal variety is what I would argue ultimately killed the show for a lot of the general audience. Even Black Mirror knows to have a lighthearted episode on occasion. This lack of variety results in a dull show that quickly wears out its welcome.

For all the talk about how diverse the cast and crew of the show are it’s a shame this didn’t translate to the writing. For the record, I'm glad the cast and crew are more diverse. This was something original series creator Rod Serling fought for during the original series and he’d likely be happy with how diverse the new show is. But diversity of storytelling is far more important for an anthology show and Twilight Zone 2019 is simply not up to par.

The sad thing is, all of this could have been avoided. The lack of tonal variety could have been offset if it weren’t for one simple problem.

Visual Fugliness

This one I'm just going to keep short and sweet. I’ve heard people praise this show as stylish and I don’t know what they see in it. It tries to go for a dark and creepy look, but it just ends up looking drab and uninteresting. What gets me is how ugly the colours are, they’re all bland and washed out. The original had more colour than this, and that was in black and white! I have heard the show looks better in its black and white version, but I haven’t seen it for myself so I couldn’t tell you if that’s accurate, and there no way in hell I'm subjecting myself to it again to check.

I will say that the visual effects are well done. The CG is quite good in certain episodes. A lot of work clearly went into the show's visuals, even if it didn’t pull it off. The original Twilight Zone was not a high budget tv series but they did a lot with what little they had. Some of the visuals of the original are so striking and people still remember them even today.

The new show by comparison is too overproduced. It clearly has a much higher budget, but the visuals aren’t very memorable. I still remember visuals from certain original series episodes vividly even though I haven’t seen them in years, I barely remember anything from the new one even though I saw it less than a year ago.

But that’s all my own subjective opinion. Other reviewers clearly liked how this show looks and you might even agree with them over me. But one thing I will harp on this show is how each episode lacks a distinctive art direction. This coincides with the lack of tonal variety to make each episode feel the same. If you look at Black Mirror or the far superior Inside No. 9, you’ll see those shows will often employ different visual and cinematography styles to match each episode.

Twilight Zone 2019 doesn’t do this which results in certain episodes losing some of their impact. “8” is supposed to be darker because it is a horror story but because it looks like a lot of the other episodes, the mood it tries to set lacks any kind of impact. There are some episodes that do try to shake things up visually such as the final episode “You Might Also Like” but they simply do not go far enough. As a result, the show is boring to look at, which only makes the lacklustre writing all the worse.

Identity Crisis

While I have been very negative throughout this article, there are those out there who will disagree with me. Some people enjoy Twilight Zone 2019 and that’s fine, I would never begrudge another for their opinion. But whether you like the show or hate it, what kills the shows chances for long term cult success, is it’s complete and total lack of an original identity.

I have seen reboots that have managed to form their own identities outside the original and even stand alongside them. The 2011 Thundercats show took the original concept and crafted a great fantasy action show that had deeper characters and lore. The recent Ducktales show took the adventurous spirit of the original and added in a mystery element and long running story arcs. And then there’s the various Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series that each have their own dedicated fanbases. I realize all of those are animated shows, but my point still stands.

There are reboots that have managed to distinguish themselves from their originator. Crafting dedicated fan followings in the process. 2019 Twilight Zone is not one of them. It tries to emulate the style of the original show too much. It doesn’t even attempt to do its own thing to stand out which results in it feeling like a lesser version of the original.

The 1985 version was able to do a lot better because it didn’t copy the original. It had certain element from it, but also did its own thing with them to make it stand out. The 2019 is trying, desperately trying to be like the original that forgets to be something unique to itself.

But it doesn’t just borrow from the original Twilight Zone’s playbook, it also borrows heavily from Black Mirror as well. In fact, it arguably takes more from Black Mirror in terms of its tone and writing style. This is the most insulting thing about the 2019 version. It doesn’t take inspiration from the original series, it takes inspiration from shows that were inspired by the original series. It lacks a unique identity to call its own.

As a result, most people are going to forget this show even existed in a few years. Say what you want about the 1985 series, at least people still remember it. 2019 Twilight Zone will forever be stuck in the originals shadow, remembered as nothing more than a shallow copy of the original. For a reboot, that’s the worst fate imaginable.

In Closing

Twilight Zone 2019 is a failure. Even critics who tend to go easy on shows with a left leaning political bias were mixed on it. But did it have to be a failure? Well no, it could have been great. Jordan Peele has shown success with his own movies that have a similar feel too what 2019 Twilight Zone is going for. He could have made this a success, but it just didn’t work out this time.

Even if you released this on regular television it likely would have still been cancelled after 2 seasons. It's dull, dour, boring and tries to convey messages we’ve heard a million times before with no subtlety or dramatic nuance. The only reason I stuck with it until the end was in the vein hope that things would get better. And it did, at times, only for it to then fall back into the same trappings. By the end of season 2 I was well and truly done with it and it appears CBS was too.

Is it the worst of the various Twilight Zone reboots? Probably not. The 2002 series is arguably a lot worse on a technical level, but that just makes things worse. If it was the worst then at least that would be something to say about it. It wouldn’t exactly be an honorific title but at least you would remember it for something. as it stands, the 2019 Twilight Zone is a forgettable anthology show that takes too many cues from its contemporaries while adding little value of its own.

2019 Twilight Zone didn’t fail because it was a train wreck, although it certainly felt like it at times, it failed because it’s unremarkable. It's a waste of talent and space that you ultimately forget exists because it lives in the shadows of other, much better shows. And perhaps that’s what’s most tragic about this. But so is the shows fate, to be lost and forgotten in the cold depths, of The Twilight Zone.