An episode of Black Mirror on Netflix
Before Black Mirror dominated Netflix as the gold standard for eery sci-fi shows, there was another show that aired in 1959 that grabbed that title first. The Twilight Zone is still widely beloved today and walked so the likes of Black Mirror could fly.
It was bound by restrictions placed on the media, yet still managed to maneuver around them by opting for a hauntingly metaphorical approach to deliver sharp commentary. It's not hard to draw parallels between the two series: sci-fi anthologies that dig out some irrefutable truth about being human in a creepily prescient way. So much so that Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone is worth revisiting for how relevant it still is over 60 years after it first released. 'Black Mirror' Was Directly Inspired by 'The Twilight Zone' It should come as no surprise that The Twilight Zone is not only the predecessor to Black Mirror, but also its inspiration. The original sci-fi anthology unwittingly kicked off a trend in the genre, as before it ended in 1964, we also got The Outer Limits, and later, Tales from the Crypt, or even more recently, Love, Death & Robots. All these shows are successful in their own right but stem from the groundbreaking framework that The Twilight Zone created. Black Mirror is arguably the most notorious result of the original show's bloodline, and in a 2013 interview, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker put words to why this formula is so successful and timeless. He says: "It feels to me that if you want to address technology a way to do it is extrapolate it from where it is. That was what The Twilight Zone did: it would take things they were concerned about in the present moment and crank them up. It would present these irresistible, 'What if' ideas, and then play them out in a way that when it would hit the right height was really chilling." By blending the present and the future, The Twilight Zone stands the test of time and leaves an enduring impact, no matter how many years have passed. Another component of its success is that the stories are"much less a critique of technology than of what you could potentially do with technology, or what technology could potentially do to you if you haven’t really thought through the consequences," as Brooker says. Even if the futuristic technology The Twilight Zone predicts doesn't come into fruition, it's the social commentary that is prescient, the investigation into the human response to extreme conditions. Related How a $10,000 Deal Gave ‘The Twilight Zone’ an Oscar-Winning Episode This ‘Twilight Zone’ episode had already made history long before it aired on CBS. Posts By Logan Kelly 'The Twilight Zone' Is Still Relevant Over 60 Years Later One of the major things that makes The Twilight Zone arguably more impressive than Black Mirror is time. The latter is still fairly modern in comparison, while The Twilight Zone only ages like fine wine. By looking at the show in retrospect, it's evidence that the formula Brooker described works. Episodes like"Eye of the Beholder" critique rigid beauty standards and society's habit of ostracizing those who don't fit, and"The Brain Center at Whipple's," which dissects the condition of labor under capitalism and the tragic reaction to losing a job to technology, all ideas that were certainly relevant at the time, but perhaps even more so today. In Serling's attempts at digging into the truth while navigating the constraints of the media at the time, he created stories that are bizarre and misleading on the surface. In"A Game of Pool," a literal game of pool is stretched into an episode-length commentary about competing with the dead and the complexities of human greed and ambition. Meanwhile, the absolutely wild idea of a gremlin only the pilot can see trying to take down a plane in"Nightmare at 2000 Feet" leads to a suspenseful meditation on how subjective reality is. Whether the surface is terribly mundane or far-fetched, The Twilight Zone is brilliantly creative in how it conveys its clever and precise investigations into social issues we are still trying to escape from. Subscribe to the newsletter for more Twilight Zone insights Hungry for deeper takes on classic sci-fi and TV reinventions? Subscribe to the newsletter for in-depth breakdowns of The Twilight Zone, thematic analyses, and contextual essays that make familiar episodes feel newly chilling. Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Even after watching a single episode of The Twilight Zone, it's clear how this sci-fi anthology reinvented the genre and kicked off a generation of TV shows that would strive to follow in its footsteps. After all these years, it's a show well worth revisiting, somehow evolving with time as we watch the stories with new context and information that make them far more chilling.Powered by Expand Collapse
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