Abandoned – The Twilight Zone (2019)

Normally “abandoned” blog entries are reserved for movies or maybe limited miniseries. But on this rare occasion, I’d like to state my reasons for giving up on Jordan Peele’s reheat of The Twilight Zone even though it’s a continuing series. I absolutely loved Get Out, and I found Us fascinating as well. But this Peele project is intensely terrible. The first episode – a stand-up comedian slowly erases his own life – was a one-joke production that proved far too predictable to sustain its running time. But no big deal. Rod Serling’s original run had its share of clunkers, too. And the second episode was “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” which I figured would be much better. Nope. Instead of an awesome, plane-destroying gremlin, we get a writer listening to a mysterious podcast predicting the disappearance of the flight he’s currently on. It felt like watching a movie called Godzilla only to have it turn out to be about a guy fixing a flat tire. Nor did it help that the podcast narration was supplied by the super annoying voice of Hardcore History’s Dan Carlin. If the second episode was enough to start Richard Matheson spinning in his grave, I was prepared to pursue the series no further.