4 Reasons Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone Failed

4

The Only Successful Twilight Zone Revivals Are The Unofficial Ones

Peele's Twilight Zone is only the latest attempt to revive this beloved property that turned out to be less than loved. But, to be fair to Peele and all the others: this is a dang hard franchise to bring back. Even creator Rod Serling himself couldn't do it when he tried to in the '70s, and over the decades neither could others like Francis Ford Coppola, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Bryan Singer. In the early '80s, it took the combined power of four directors with recent hits to get a Twilight Zone movie project off the ground ... only for it to crash and burn anyway, in more than one sense. 

Sadly, the most influential aspect of the movie by far were the new safety regulations enacted in Hollywood after two kids and one adult died while shooting a helicopter stunt. That, and the steep decline in people willing to pick up hitchhikers that probably resulted from Dan Aykroyd's opening scene. 

Despite the fact that the movie got mixed reviews and made way less money than expected (especially for something with the name "Spielberg" in it), CBS still used the momentum to kick off a revival series a couple of years later. It was canceled at CBS early on season two because of low ratings and then got a third season that went straight to syndication, where it bombed anew. It got zero acknowledgment from the Emmys -- unlike Spielberg's Amazing Stories anthology series that aired around the same time, which was basically a more optimistic take on the same concept. Spielberg and the other directors involved were clearly all fans of the original Twilight Zone, but because they weren't using the actual Twilight Zone name, they were free to try ideas and formats you'd never see in that franchise. It's pretty hard to imagine Rod Serling providing an ominous introduction to, say, an animated episode starring a cartoon dog. 

3

Twilight Zone Episodes Should Be 25 Minutes, Tops

Although Rod Serling originally pitched The Twilight Zone as an hour-long show, he came to appreciate the "half hour with ads" format. He once said: "Ours is the perfect half-hour show. If we went to an hour, we'd have to fleshen our stories, soap opera style. Viewers could watch fifteen minutes without knowing whether they were in a Twilight Zone or Desilu Playhouse." This makes sense for a show like this one: you can only state the theme of the episode for so long before the audience is like, "Okay, we get it," and you can only tease your clever twist ending so many times before it becomes boring and predictable. (See: M. Night Shyamalan's career.) 

CBS forced Serling to move to a one-hour format anyway for the fourth season, then promptly went back to half hours on the next one upon seeing the ratings. But at least when CBS did this, it was to fill a specific time slot. With the new show, there's a sense that the running time has to be longer for the same reason why they have to drop at least one F-word per episode: otherwise, it wouldn't feel like "prestige" TV. It's like showrunners think people won't respect them if every scene isn't as drawn out as possible. If your show doesn't include at least a minute of static shots of vegetation or empty highways per episode, you can kiss your Emmy noms goodbye. 

2

The Social Commentary Wasn't Supposed To Be A Selling Point

While it's undoubtedly good for society at large that you can now openly say "I'm gonna make a TV show episode about racist police violence," this is not necessarily a good thing if you're running a show known for its allegories. Rod Serling, an avowed anti-racist and anti-fascist, would have taken the same idea and said, "I'm gonna make a TV show episode about a woman who can turn back time" -- then hit you in the gut with the social commentary while you weren't looking. How are you supposed to hit anyone in the gut when you already told them exactly where you'll punch them? That's good advice for life in general, not just allegorical TV series. 

1

There Wasn't Enough Jordan Peele

Peele was in front of the camera on every single episode, but behind the camera it was a pretty different story. Despite co-developing the series with Kinberg and Marco Ramirez and coming up with general ideas, Peele only wrote the script for one episode and co-wrote the story for another -- the one that remade the classic airplane story but with a cursed podcast instead of a gremlin. (See, that sounds exactly like a Mad TV sketch.)