Review of entire series, and a suggestion Some friends recommended that I sign up for a trial account of CBS programming online so that I could watch the episodes of the TV series Bull, about a man and his company that specialize in the trial science of analyzing jurors.
That was a good recommendation, so after I binge watched that entire show, I started looking at what else CBS had to offer, and discovered that they are doing a reboot of The Twilight Zone. I'd always enjoyed the original series, both as a child and later as an adult, so I started watching.
Holy mother of God, please just shoot me now. This steaming pile is the worst dreck I have ever seen, managing to combine infuriatingly preachy PC story lines with utter boredom, a combination I had not previously thought possible.
How about an episode where a woman discovers that when she uses an old camcorder, if things happen that she doesn't like, hitting the rewind button on the device not only rewinds the existing footage, but the real life events as well, allowing her to start over and proceed differently. That's a cool, Twilight Zone-worthy premise, so let's make the woman black, and have her driving her 18-year-old son to the start of his freshman year at a historically black college in the South. Stopping at a diner, the mother and her son encounter a white law enforcement officer whose sole purpose in life appears to be tormenting black people and preventing them from going to school.
Seriously? In 2020? To an all-black college? If I'd been the writer, I would have had the cop provide them a police escort to the school to make sure the kid filled out all the paperwork properly and was safely enrolled, to make it less likely that he would rob liquor stores, deal drugs, or become a Community Organizer...
Just about ALL of the episodes of this series are similarly preachy and tedious. One reviewer said this show should be called "The Democrat Zone."
The last episode I watched was an absolute mess, where they break the fourth wall and start talking to the audience. An angst-filled actress, black, of course, runs around like a blithering idiot, laughingly pursued by a "blurry man" who appears in every scene and performs scary acts of telekinesis such as making cereal boxes fall off the shelves of a supermarket set in the studio. Finally, the "blurry man" comes into focus, and it's... wait for it... Rod Serling! Thank God he's dead now and can't see what they've done to his creation...
Here's an idea for the opening episode of the next season:
The location is a rural town, where most of the black residents live in decidedly poorer conditions than the whites. A successful black man from out of town purchases a building lot there, builds a house on the property, and drills a well to provide water to the domicile.
INTRO: "A typical small town--a decidedly common rural community that could be almost anywhere in America, where working-class people know each other as they pass on the street, but where a divide exists, even though no one talks about it.
"A new resident has just moved to town, buying a lot, building a house, and drilling a well. This new resident hasn't moved here from the nearest big city, or any of the small towns nearby. This man has moved here from... The Twilight Zone."
After the intro, we see the newcomer holding an open house, a party open to all local residents, to introduce himself to the community. Almost all of the town's black residents show up for the free food the newcomer has provided, and since he is serving no alcohol, they wash it down with many glasses of tap water that have come from his well.
In the ensuing days, a curious thing happens. The black people who attended the open house start acting more responsibly. The adults show up on time for work and perform theirs jobs competently, while the kids stop shoplifting and ditching school, and many are seen voluntarily scrubbing graffiti off local buildings and removing trash from vacant lots. Minor slights or insults between blacks are shrugged off, instead of escalating to violence. The local pool hall, weave, nail, and hair extension shops, as well as check-cashing services, experience a large drop in business. Out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the black community drops to zero.
The town's black residents that missed the open house get word that "something special is in the water" at the man's house, and stop by, asking for some. Eventually, everyone in the town has sampled the water from the man's well, and the black residents there have experienced an unprecedented increase in literacy, work ethic, and prosperity.
Word gets out to black gang members in the nearest urban area some 75 miles away. There's something about the water at the man's house in the small town that causes black people to "act white." The gang members sneak into the town in the middle of the night, kill the man, and burn his house to the ground. The town quickly reverts to its previous condition.
As the camera shows black youths piling out of a stolen car, robbing a convenience store, and driving off while randomly firing guns out of the speeding vehicle, the Narrator comes onscreen to deliver the epilogue:
"It's the age-old question: Nature or nurture? Is our destiny hard-coded in our DNA, or not? Is low intelligence, low impulse control, and poor future time orientation a permanent condition, or can these things all be improved by something so simple as a change in one's attitude?
"It's a question that has yet to be answered--except in The Twilight Zone."