The original series portrays the gender norms, patriotism, and theology that almost anyone in their time would have espoused. They were straight white men, veterans of World War II. Serling and his peers were born in 1920s America. Color Me Black” deal with racism and fear of the outsider.ĭespite this, he was not the ideal hero of today’s social justice elite. Other episodes like “The Obsolete Man,” and “The Mirror” tackled the totalitarian regimes that dominated the era. He also wrote “The Shelter,” a vicious indictment of nuclear war, the mob mentality, and the breakdown of civility. He wrote famous episodes like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which decried the communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. He didn’t shy from controversial topics of the day. Without a doubt, Serling was a trailblazer and a maverick. The genius behind the original “Twilight Zone” series was its creator, narrator, producer, and prolific writer Rod Serling. ‘Twilight Zone’s’ Creator Wasn’t A Social Justice Warrior Instead of inviting us to explore the human condition as peers, it shows contempt for characters and viewers alike. In place of three-dimensional characters, there are only caricatures. But like the nitpicky opening sequence switch, the recreators have performed verbal acrobatics to insert a political agenda where it does nothing to serve the plot. There’s nothing wrong with trying to give screen time to underrepresented groups. What on earth does any of this have to do with the story? Nothing, and that’s the problem. The only one who resists is a gay teenage boy. In “Not All Men,” a meteor shower gives men the excuse they’ve been dying for to become murderous, violent rapists.In the convoluted space/Armageddon drama “Six Degrees of Freedom,” the crew to Mars consists of two utterly forgettable, non-threatening white men, an Australian woman who chose her job over her marriage, and a biracial American woman.Her white boss spouts Christian platitudes while being a prideful jerk.
In “The Traveler,” a female Alaskan-Native cop is provoked to resent her white coworkers by her drunk brother and an alien.Here is a quick and dirty summary of a few episodes from this latest “Twilight Zone” reboot (look here for a more thorough breakdown of “The Twilight Zone’s “plots): The Reboot Lets Agenda Get In The Way Of A Good Story It trades the magic of the original for something more glitzy, but ultimately less satisfying. It is so caught up in itself that it can’t face the complexity of history or human nature. This little tweak is the perfect microcosm of what is wrong with the latest “Twilight Zone” iteration, which ham-fistedly projects its values onto history. The re-creators evidently did think it necessary to change “man” and “his” to the gender-neutral “one.” It may feel petty and nitpicky to point out such a near-imperceptible change, but this clearly wasn’t just a slip-up.