Timeless As Infinity

Jordan Peele reboots The Twilight Zone.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, a legendary and seemingly indestructible intellectual property created in 1959 by a fellow named Rod Serling. An eloquent Jewish playwright raised in then-Waspy Binghamton, New York, he sympathized with underdogs, the misunderstood, and the persecuted. As a writer-producer in early television, he was pushed out of live theatrical drama because his politics were too confrontationally leftwing, only to realize, like intellectuals in authoritarian countries behind the Iron Curtain, that you could speak truth to power if you swaddled your lessons in metaphor and symbolism. As the creator of the most famous anthology program in TV history, he served as the series’ on-camera narrator, a hard-boiled shaman in a suit and tie, raising and lowering the curtain on a number of modern parables, his summation always ending with some variant of a phrase both playful and ominous: “in the Twilight Zone.”