You can thank Rod Serling’s widow for the presence of Jordan Peele’s on-camera narrator in “The Twilight Zone” revival.
Win Rosenfeld and Audrey Chon, executive producers of the new series — premiering Monday on CBS All Access — both say it was important to get Carol Serling’s blessing to revive the narrator role, memorably played by “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling in the original CBS series (1959-64).
“We knew we wanted the narrator but those were very big shoes to fill and, in all honesty, we wondered if it would feel corny in 2019,” says Rosenfeld. “The first time [executive producer] Jordan [Peele] and I spoke to Carol she brought it up. She said, ‘I hope you guys are going to be doing the narrator. It’s very important.’ And that kind of crystallized some of our thinking.
“The Rod Serling narrator character was omniscient, mischievous and haunting but also avuncular and comforting — someone who anchored you back into this world and told you how surreal it was,” Rosenfeld says. “It broke the conventions of TV and I’m glad Carol was on the same page.”
Peele’s narrator speaks in Serling-inflected overtones of irony and humor and is the most obvious connection to the original series, title notwithstanding. But there are references to Serling’s “Twilight Zone” sprinkled throughout the new series — particularly in “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” a variation of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the classic 1963 episode starring William Shatner as a man who thinks he sees a gremlin on the wing of his plane (he does — but nobody believes him). Two pilots in “30,000 Feet” are named Donner and Beaumont — a nod to “20,000 Feet” director Richard Donner and “Twilight Zone” writer Charles Beaumont — and there’s a stuffed-toy gremlin that looks a lot like the beast in “20,000 Feet.”
Adam Scott in the new “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” episode.Robert Falconer/CBS
Despite the 1983 big-screen movie and two TV revivals (on CBS and UPN), Rosenfeld and Chon say the timing was right for this new “Twilight Zone” series.
“Whenever you take on a title like this and decide to reimagine or remake it … you’re always looking for a reason to justify that reason,” says Chon. “We really started to drill down on how to approach this series in early 2016 and a lot of things happened that year. The world seemed to change … and people were saying, ‘We’re living in “The Twilight Zone.”‘ The timing felt right; it was very similar to the late ’50s and ’60s when Rod Serling was doing the show.
“It’s truly a re-imagining of Rod’s original series ,” she says. “It’s a genre show in terms of tone, but as Jordan [Peele] said, Rod had a lot of humor and you have to have a wink with the audience.”
“For us to do this in 2019 meant getting our heads around the simple idea that [the ‘Twilight Zone’] doesn’t need some kind of radical reinvention from us,” Rosenfeld says. “We tried to approach every story as an original, but … there isn’t an episode in the bunch that doesn’t in some way … reference or pay homage to the original.”
