![]() Race, gender, crime, and of course terror all came under the rebooted series’ sci-fi lens, though it’s up to the audience to decide whether the series lived up to the task of delicately handling touchy topics the way, say, Quantum Leap had deftly managed in the 1980s and 1990s.Įven so, the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, The Twilight Zone arrived at a turbulent time one far removed from the more homogenized social conventions that framed its 1950s-vintage ancestor. ![]() It did try to tackle social issues…sort ofĭebuting almost exactly one year after the Sept. For better or worse, some of the original series’ most well-remembered installments got the contemporary-overhaul treatment, including “Nick of Time” (which originally featured William Shatner as a traveler tempted by a strangely accurate fortune-telling machine), as well as “Eye of the Beholder” (which famously flipped the script on a post-op facial surgery patient’s idea of beauty). The same episode even found room to include the iconic Cloris Leachman, who returned once more to play the creepily complicated role of Anthony’s mother.Įlsewhere, the 2002 revival chose to reimagine classic episodes rather than give them a brand-new second act. “It's Still a Good Life” returned Bill Mumy to the same role he’d played decades earlier in the original series’ “It’s a Good Life” episode, this time as the grown-up version of demon child Anthony now raising a daughter with supernatural powers of her own. That was still enough time for the 2002 revival to leap back to the past and pick up some of the story threads that the Serling-hosted show had introduced roughly 40 years before. That means there’s no time like the present to take a quick, dimension-hopping dive into some of the long-departed UPN anthology's quirkiest, least-known, and downright forgotten facts. The start of the new year means SYFY is once again embarking on its annual marathon of the original Serling-created The Twilight Zone series (plus new episodes this year from the Jordan Peele-hosted 2019 revival). ![]() RELATED: Everything you need to know about SYFY's 2022 Twilight Zone New Year's Eve marathon With its gnarly Nu-metal intro theme and a rotating guest cast of stars firmly grounded in the Seinfeld decade, the post-millennial anthology may be the version of the show that fans still love to tease…but in hindsight, it’s hard to look away from a show that featured Forest Whitaker in Rod Serling’s hosting role, while forging a strangely nostalgic bridge between the1959–1964 original series and the growing, early 2000s appetite for fresh-feeling science fiction content on the small screen. By that standard, few shows fit the description like the short-lived 2002 revival of The Twilight Zone - an earnest reboot of the classic anthology that, let’s face it, remains the runt of the small-screen litter for anyone who’s tracked the series all the way back to its iconic 1950s roots. Call it a guilty pleasure, but there’s just something fun and kind of comforting about bygone TV shows that feel like the products of their times.
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