Overview
The Twilight Zone is a science fiction horror anthology television series, presented by Forest Whitaker. It is the second of three revivals of Rod Serling's original 1959–64 television series. It aired for one season on the UPN network, with actor Forest Whitaker assuming Serling's role as narrator and on-screen host. It was a co-production between Spirit Dance Entertainment, Trilogy Entertainment Group, Joshmax Productions Services, and New Line Television. It premiered on September 18, 2002, and aired its final episode on May 21, 2003.
Series history
Broadcast in an hour format with two half-hour stories, it was canceled after one season. Reruns continue to air in syndication and have aired on MyNetworkTV since summer 2008. The opening theme music was provided by Jonathan Davis (singer of the band Korn).
The series tended to address contemporary issues head-on; e.g. terrorism, racism, gender roles, sexuality, and stalking. Noteworthy episodes featured Jason Alexander as Death wanting to retire from harvesting souls, Lou Diamond Phillips as a swimming pool cleaner being shot repeatedly in his dreams, Susanna Thompson as a woman whose stated wish results in an "upgrading" of her family, Usher as a police officer being bothered by telephone calls from beyond the grave, Brian Austin Green as a businessman who encounters items from his past that somehow reappear, Jeffrey Combs as a hypochondriac whose diseases become reality, and Katherine Heigl playing a woman who went back in time on a suicide mission to kill the infant Adolf Hitler.
The series also includes remakes and updates of stories presented in the original Twilight Zone television series, including the famous "Eye of the Beholder" starring Molly Sims. One of the updates, "The Monsters Are on Maple Street", is a modernized version of the classic episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street". The original show was about the paranoia surrounding a neighborhood-wide blackout. In the course of the episode, somebody suggests an alien invasion being the cause of the blackouts, and that one of the neighbors may be an alien. The anti-alien hysteria is an allegory for the anti-communist paranoia of the time, and the 2003 remake, starring Andrew McCarthy and Titus Welliver, replaces aliens with terrorists.
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