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Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot is coming to CBS All Access next year

Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot is coming to CBS All Access next year

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On top of executive producing, he’ll also host the series

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2018 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones - Arrivals
Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

After getting the green light last year, Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot is officially coming in 2019, according to the first teaser tweeted by the horror / comedy auteur. Peele will take on creator Rod Serling’s double duty as both producer and host.

The Twilight Zone is one of television’s most renowned shows. It was an anthology series that ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964. In that short span of time, it managed to rewrite America’s idea of what surrealism in television could be. Its DNA is in everything from The X-Files to Black Mirror. Rebooting it is, to say the least, a daunting project.

“I was terrified,” Peele told Variety in a profile published earlier this year. “Why would I ever jump into the most established, pristine shoes in all of the genre? I could rip Twilight Zone off and call it something different and not be compared to Rod Serling. So I stepped away from it. And then several months later I got another call.” That call was from co-executive producer Simon Kinberg (Logan). They spoke again and realized their enthusiasm for the project could make it work. “If we approach it without ego and sort of bow to Serling, that will hopefully suffice for our fellow Twilight Zone fans, but also bring back a show that I think is needed right now,” he continued. “Because it’s a show that has always helped us look at ourselves, hold a mirror up to society.”

That “mirror to society” theme runs through Peele’s other projects, too, most notably the Oscar-winning Get Out and, more recently, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which Peele produced. He’s currently working on a horror series about the Jim Crow era in American history and a show for Amazon about hunting Nazis.

This isn’t the first time CBS has tried to reboot The Twilight Zone. As my colleague Andrew Liptak noted last year, the studio’s first effort in 1985 fizzled out after three seasons, and the network UPN produced its own one-season reboot in 2002. Peele seems to be the right person for the job, though. Get Out shares the kind of moralizing weirdness that made the original Twilight Zone tick. If anyone can pull this off, it’s him.