The Twilight Zone (2019)

A majority of the episodes remain unseen, so I can’t accurately judge how well the season will turn out as a whole. These episodes certainly feel more strongly written than Season 1, and if the editing tightens up like it did before, these new entries could be amazing.

Hardly quaint or entirely redundant, these three are at least good, and the third — written and directed by Oz Perkins — easily the best. But something's still missing and that was the bane of the first season too: Neither sharp-edged nor jagged, they don't stay with you, or haunt you, or vex you in some hard-to-define way.

It would be fairer to judge each episode on its merits, and even embrace the anthology’s hit-and-miss nature as a part of the fun, like a bag of those assorted chocolates sold at all reputable boarding school tuck shops. The problem is we have had five orange cremes in a row now, and still no sign of a chewy toffee.

Previewing the new season, having been at best mildly impressed by the first one, that sort of depth is again lacking. Indeed, the latest "Twilight Zone" seems preoccupied with personal foibles and modest sci-fi wrinkles more than exploring universal truths.

The new Zone is still rather a mixed bag, though one brimming with imaginative pleasures and smart casting. [6 - 19 Jul 2020, p.5]

The work here isn’t bad, not quite. It’s overdone and underdone all at once. Derive what delights you can from “The Twilight Zone,” but if you want a firm sense of what these authors are capable of, look to their filmographies instead.

"Meet in the Middle" is barely more interesting than a standard catfishing case, and the trick in "The Who of You" wears badly about midway through. ... "You Might Also Like" is the kind of episode that makes someone look at the updated episode "Twilight Zone" and hang on to the notion that it can improve, that someone will look at the methods by which it succeeds and say yes, more of this. ... But that also fails to account for whether viewers have the patience to stick with rest of the middling for the off change that the series might strike greatness again more than once or twice.

Out of the three, the only one we’d take with us is “Meet Me in the Middle”. Chang and Amini make every minute count in this story about a man (Simpson) who connects with another woman (Gillian Jacobs) subconsciously. ... Elsewhere, Perkins gives a messy sequel to “To Serve Man” (and a modern twist on “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”) with “You Might Also Like”, while Rosenfeld tries on too many faces in the aforementioned “The Who of You”.