Rod Sterling, creator of The Twilight Zone, said this about TV shows: "How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form."I found that quote the other day, and it is eerily similar to my point whenever someone asks me why I only seem to watch TV shows on DVD. I can't stand the ads. Also, the majority of the shows don't hold much interest for me. I loved The Twilight Zone because it was how I thought the world would be when I got older - at it's core, the show deals with karma, and the episodes that stuck with me the longest (Nick of Time, Walking Distance, and One for the Angels) were the ones that weren't so much "scary" as they were meditations about choice, life, and what it means to be human. They were always the deeply personal ones - or ones that I took personally. Good gets to live a happy life - or at least a happy end - while evil is punished.
There have been several attempts to remake the series, but it never seems to work. They do the scary stories, but they're never as plausible, and they seem to focus on just scares rather than real terror. One for the Angels - the first episode I ever saw - is scary in a way that Terror at 20,000 Feet isn't. They are two distinct stories, but both come back to the same idea: normal people put in a situation that doesn't happen.
And while Terror is spin chilling (fear of the plane crash, the monster, and the Fort Worth Star Trek Convention all rolled into one), it can be applied to any future story collection. Planes, rockets - hell, even hover cars! - all of these can be applied to the formula that ends with "There's a man on the wing of this plane!" Even Doctor Who did a version of it (Midnight). You can modernize Terror at 20,000 Feet - but One for the Angels would be more difficult. These characters don't exist any more - the toy vendor has mostly vanished from popular vision and the idea of a group of kids waiting for an older man now has a sinister cast to it.
Does that mean that we'll never have another Twilight Zone? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous! Before TV there was an anthology show on the radio called The Clock, which can be looked at as The Twilight Zone in adolescence (the episode Personal Recommendation is a bit of a sweeter version of Nothing in the Dark). And just as there were differences between the mindset at the time of The Clock and the mindset during which The Twilight Zone was born, there are new differences now. We just need one that speaks to our time. Night Visions had this to an extent - the stories were pretty much a post modern take on the Sterling classics, and more realistic in that, for the most part, the karma was all kinds of fucked up.
What does it mean about us - and if you take the shows to be art, then they must in some way speak about us? That we've grown more cynical? That we now want to guess the twist ending rather than just enjoy the story? Hell if I know. io9 had a nice article about trope chasers and good writing - but I honestly think there's a few more levels here. There's only one story - everything else is just a weird take or twist on it. "Once upon a time someone fell in a hole. Then they got out of it." That's pretty much it. We twist the depth of the hole, the length of time spent there, the number of people involved, how they are involved, and even if they fall into/get out of the hole.
We do these things, and then we have this picture of ourselves - be it creator or observer. Slasher film excess in the '80s went hand in hand with Wall Street. Torture porn flicks of the aughts along side pretty invasive reality TV and the celebrity gossip machine - one goes inside people through various violent means, and the other floats around in the images they wish to project, and neither one really gets close to the truth about people because of either market demands or the subject matter itself.
But we keep trying, bless our crooked little hearts, and for various reasons to. And maybe the only reward we can really expect is to see our own reflections in the work and smile. At least that's the lesson I learned from The Twilight Zone.
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