While working on the set of the new The Twilight Zone, writer Sophie Gelson is haunted by a mysterious Blurryman.
Recap
By Gadfly on May 31, 2019
A writer, Adam Wegman, sits in his apartment, contemplates his computer screen, and says that it sucks. He wonders how he could turn the facts into a story, and figures that he's a fraud. Adam figures that the writer left the definitive part out of the story: the mushroom cloud. He stares at his note and realizes that he should have started the story with it, and starts writing it. Betty comes in and Seth tells her that he figured out the story. He says that they have to celebrate and yanks o…
Continue reading »Guest Cast
Zibby Allen
as Julie
Matthew Mandzij
voices FatherCast Appearances
Jordan Peele
voices NarratorEpisode Discussion
Login to leave a comment on this episode.
Seemed more like a 40 minute ad for the new Twilight Zone than an actual episode. Either that, or Jordan Peele finally admitting he's been trolling us all along. They got lost in the meta on this one.
It makes sense, sort of. There just isn't any there there. Part of it is what I noted in my review of "The Obsolete Man".
https://www.tvmaze.com/articles/582/the-obsolete-man-the-twilight-zone-s02e29-retro-review
The episode doesn't feel personal. I don't know if writer Alex Reubens is a standup comedian, but at least the other episode he wrote, "The Comedian" felt personal. Check out the 80s TZ episode "Personal Demons" sometime. It's 30 minutes, was written by Rockne S. O'Bannon, and feels personal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQWuNCwD-Ms
This didn't feel like anything personal by Reubens. For one thing, the writer character is female. Maybe Reubens watched the original TZ in his childhood, but it didn't feel like he was telling a story of his personal feelings about the show. It felt like he was either writing a love letter to the original show, but most love letters are boring to read if you're not the writer or the incipient. Or someone else had told him to write a love letter and he was doing so second-hand. "Blurryman" just felt like it existed to poke fun at Jordan Peele and to demonstrate that they could "bring back" Rod Serling.
I feel a review of this and "Blue Scorpion" coming on...
....This wasn't supposed to make sense, right? There have been a couple good episodes, but all-in-all, this was crap.
I've never thought the 80s version was "subpar". Some of their 10-minute "black-out skits" are pretty bad, as bad as the ones on Night Gallery. "The Uncle Dudley Show" is horrible. But there are way too many "classic" 80s episodes that outnumber them: "Shatterday", "Nightcrawlers", "A Message From Charity", "Paladin of the Lost Hour", "Dealer's Choice", "Her Pilgrim Soul", "To See The Invisible Man", "Dead Run", "Button Button", the remake of "Shadow Play", and "Last Defender of Camelot". And that's just the first season. The second season was so-so, but the third season under J. Michael Straczynski had a lot of classics.Part of it was that they did adaptations of good writers' stuff: "Gramma", "Last Defender", "Shatterday", "Paladin", "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", "The Cold Equations", "Invisible Man". And adaptations of the original's "Shadow Play", "A Game of Pool", and "The After Hours". The 2019 version is just stuff by TV writers. They may be good writers, but they're no King or Ellison or Matheson or Serling.
Boring, just like the previous episode. (I lost focus just as the "boogie man" showed up.) What happened to the main character? After watching the likes of "Juon," I didn't care. The "subpar 1980's 'Twilight Zone" presented compelling situations and more interesting characters.