New Twilight Zone Trailer Offers First Skin-Crawling Glimpse of Jordan Peele’s Reboot of the 1959 Series
If Black Mirror has been repeatedly described as The Twilight Zone for the tech-obsessed 21st century, what does that make the upcoming reboot of The Twilight Zone? We’ll soon find out, as the CBS All Access series is set to premiere on April 1, hosted and executive produced by Jordan Peele.
The first trailer was released on Thursday (incidentally, Peele’s 40th birthday) and hints at the many chilling trips into the uncanny valley viewers will be taking with Peele throughout the series. There’s a sweaty Adam Scott sitting on a plane next to Chris Diamantopoulos, who cheerfully tells him, “We’re not supposed to be here.” There’s Tracy Morgan asking, somewhat menacingly, “You happy with your life? Don’t you want it all?” There’s Jacob Tremblay as a small child running for office—seemingly successfully—with the slogan “Oliver 4 Prez,” Kumail Nanjiani staring desperately into a mirror and searching for a dog that maybe doesn’t even exist, and a creepy doll washing up on a beach. It’s all set to a sparse soundtrack that will get your skin crawling, along with a bounty of off-putting statements like “Everything that happens in this universe has to be the way it is” and “Life sometimes goes like you don’t expect it to.”
Also confirmed to appear in various episodes of the series are Sanaa Lathan, Greg Kinnear, John Cho, Steven Yeun, Jessica Williams, Ike Barinholtz, Taissa Farmiga, and Ginnifer Goodwin, among many others. After the first two episodes premiere on CBS’s streaming site, the rest will follow weekly, beginning on April 11. Watch the full trailer, below.
Peele’s is the third reboot of the original series, which premiered in 1959. When his revival was announced, back in December 2017, he said in a statement, “Too many times this year it’s felt like we were living in a twilight zone, and I can’t think of a better moment to reintroduce it to modern audiences.”
Though many of the details have been kept under wraps, one of Peele’s coproducers, Simon Kinberg, said last fall that they were taking “inspiration” from Black Mirror rather than seeing it as their competition. And while the two are destined to draw extensive comparisons, if Peele is following in the footsteps of the original Twilight Zone his series will likely focus less on the potential dangers of technological advancement than Black Mirror does and more on the general question of human morality and larger societal issues that go far beyond the so-called black mirror of phone and computer screens—perhaps setting it up to be even creepier than Black Mirror’s subject matter, since phones can (theoretically) be turned off and left behind, but other humans cannot.
Related: Ranked: The Post–Twilight Zone Careers of the Aughts Cast
