The PCP Podcast Feed

Submitted for your approval: an episode entirely without metaphor. The statement itself is a bold one for The Twilight Zone , considering the original series had some of its best episodes with you-can’t-say-that-on-television masked by way of the tropes of science fiction, horror, and westerns. Yet “Replay” succeeds without metaphor, and eminently so. Indeed, in so far as commercials can spoil a story (hint: they can, exceedingly so), the shape of “Replay” was tipped loud and clear: racial profiling, and more, received by African-American mother Nina (Sanaa Lathan) and son Dorian (Damson Idris) at the hands of the droll and decidedly white Officer Lasky (Glenn Fleshler). As for what was shown in previews, the episode is just that: a ponderance on American racism, casual and powerful and sometimes both. However, the episode, directed by Gerard McMurray, is also very much more. As someone who likely will never be pulled over by a profiling police officer, the episode was for me a vivid, ...

Submitted for your approval: the episode everyone knows best. Period. There are outings of the original Twilight Zone  that are better written than 1963's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," like "Eye of the Beholder" and "Living Doll," but there aren't many. In terms of pop culture saturation, everyone  knows about the plane episode, if only because it's William Shatner and something horrible on the wing. Not everyone knows it's also a Richard Matheson script, nor that the episode was directed by Richard Donner... but their expertise echoes down the decades in the final product. It was thus bold that the Twilight Zone revival would return to fly such familiar skies, its producers having gone so far as to say at the 2019 PaleyFest that the revival series would include no remakes. "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet," has its story by Simon Kinberg (who brought Jordan Peele onto the series), Jordan Peele (the face of the series), and Marco Ramirez (...

Submitted for your approval: CBS All Access attempting the impossible, again--to resurrect a classic television series, update it, and use it as a cornerstone in nothing less than the battle for TV's future.  In a certain sense, reviving  The Twilight Zone  is a task far more daunting than resuming Star Trek ; with the latter, the label never really had gone away... it simply went on a little hiatus after successive successful (well, varyingly successful) cycles had been found in every decade since the 1960s. Attempts to revisit The Twilight Zone  have been met with, curiously, Zone- esque levels of disaster, be it the chintzy 2000s revival (theme reinterpreted by the singer from Korn), the unmemorable restart in the 1980s (theme reinterpreted by the Grateful Dead), or the literal disaster of Twilight Zone: The Movie  (with three tragic, unconscionable deaths during production).  2019's "The Comedian" represents the best possible start to a s...