As we approach the April 1 premiere of Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone” series on CBS All Access, it’s worth remembering that some of the most memorable episodes from the original 1959 run ended up being a little too prophetic. And even if we haven’t yet had an alien invasion like in the famed 1962 episode “To Serve Man” (“It’s a cookbook!!”), here are eight times Rod Serling’s masterpiece of a show proved unnervingly adept at predicting modern developments.
If you’re creeped out by news stories about Alexa and other smart appliances getting invasive, watch “A Thing About Machines,” in which a crochety magazine critic, Bartlett Finchley, is convinced that the gadgets in his home are conspiring against him — his TV, his clock, his razor, and even his typewriter, which writes “Get out of here Finchley.” He’s found mysteriously dead on the bottom of his swimming pool.
Find the popularity of plastic surgery creepy? “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” is set in a future in which all young adults go through a process called The Transformation, in which they are surgically altered to look like one of a limited set of attractive humans. When a woman rebels, she’s held against her will and hypnotized into accepting the surgery.
Then & now: Rod Serling and Jordan Peele.Getty Images
Recent news that the Carrier company laid off employees so it could install machines instead recalls “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” in which a factory owner eventually fires all of his human staff in place of robots — which end up driving him crazy and, eventually, making the owner himself obsolete.
Libraries are increasingly being drained of both books and employees, a development foreseen in “The Obsolete Man.” In a totalitarian future, a librarian is sentenced to death for the crime of being obsolete, because books are illegal. He’s allowed to choose the way he dies, and in a move that presages some of the more unsavory reality TV effects, opts to be executed on live broadcast via a bomb.
In a world where dating sites are plagued with ads written by bots, there’s a cautionary tale in “From Agnes: With Love,” which puts a comedic spin on our reality: A computer develops a crush on a programmer — and tries to ruin his life when she’s spurned.
The impending climate change crisis is presaged by “The Midnight Sun,” in which an artist named Norma is burning up in a world that’s ravaged by extreme heat because the Earth is hurtling closer to the sun — until she wakes up from a dream and realizes that, instead, she’s in a civilization heading into a new Ice Age.
An illegal alien of a different sort is demonized in “The Gift,” in which a spaceship crash-lands in Mexico, across the border from Texas, bearing an extraterrestrial aiming to help humankind cure cancer. He is shot and killed before he can deliver his message or the vaccine.
A neighborhood threatens to tear itself apart in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” reminiscent of Peele’s new film “Us” and its cultural metaphors. Here the Others — this time, space aliens — are said to be disguised as humans, and as the area goes to pieces over people’s suspicions of each other, one extraterrestrial remarks to another that “[humans] pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back — and watch.”
