They're filming a sequel to the classic Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" (with young Bill Mumy wishing people into the cornfields) for UPN:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-m...01/16/12.00.tv

The twist is, they are bringing back the original cast! Interesting... I'll definitely be setting ReplayTV to pick this one up when it airs in February.

Gonna have to watch that. This latest Twilight Zone series is pretty bad, but I'll tune in for this one.

das

Yeah, same here. I've only caught two (unimpressive) episodes and have no real interest in the show... but this caught my attention.

Unfortunately, I'm sure the plot will just be "more of the same" rather than taking the story in interesting directions. I hope they resist the obvious and decide to be imaginative with it.

I remember reading the original short story in one of those "tales that inspired the Twilight Zone" collections about a decade ago... good stuff.

And, of course, I didn't realize that this was on last night and I missed it.

Anyone catch this? Any good?

• Quoth bboisvert •<HR SIZE=1>And, of course, I didn't realize that this was on last night and I missed it.

Anyone catch this? Any good? <HR SIZE=1>

It's on my TiVo ... I'm not rushing to get to it, but I may watch it tonight. Sorry you forgot about it. Don't worry ... I'm sure it sucked.

das

Crap, I forgot to tape it. My wife is going to kill me..........

Note to self: get Tivo

This was the first time I ever saw the new series, and I was disappointed with it.

Bill Mumy did a nice job of coming across as a menacing adult. I felt it started out well, but the resolution to the whole story seemed awfully rushed and contrived to me. Maybe if it was a full hour it could have been better developed.

I kept thinking it would be rather predictable, and thought It didn't quite turn out that way - but now I wish it did and I probably would have liked it better.

Oh, and Forrest Whitaker is definitely NO Rod Serling. Can he seem more bored with hosting this show?

Yeah, I'm not too upset about it. Still, I had wanted to catch this... I just completely forgot about it. Oh well, maybe I'll catch a repeat down the road (assuming that UPN leaves this on long enough to get to a repeat).

I had actually forgotten about it too until I saw the ads during Buffy and then Tom Banjo's post in the 'Too Much to Watch' thread.

das

bboisvert - I followed your suggestion and recorded it with my Replay TV. Why didn't you follow your own advice?

We have to band together - especially when the das Monkeys of the world apparently own enough Tivos to put Replay TV out of business.

And then I went and forgot about it. Go figure.

maybe they should of made this episode a hour instead? It was a OK episode but I wanted to see more of the daughter with her powers and how she deals with them.

[Edited - DVD Talk has a policy against the promotion of copyright violation. D-]

Finally got around to this. It wasn't as bad as most of them usually are, but it wasn't that great either. Bill Mumy was excellent reprising his role, but I too agree that the resolution was a bit rushed and a little too clean. I actually liked the take on "The Monsters are on Maple Street" better. It wasn't superb either, but I liked the twist they put on the scenario, and it wasn't as silly as I expected.

das

i haven't been able to fit this in all season, but have noticed it having many good actors and many other popular ones and even some that are both. is the show good? good enough for a set?

Casting name actors (not necessarily good ones) doesn't really affect the quality of the writing, IMO. I haven't seen much of anything in this show to make me tune in with any regularity. YMMV.

das

Some sequel. No Bedford Falls, no Clarence the Angel...

Neither Bert nor Ernie

das

I recently picked this up when the series set was on sale at amazon.com (and picked up several other Twlight Zone sets as well, original and the 80's revival). For the 2002 series, I had given up watching it early on, but thought fifteen bucks for the entire series couldn't be that much of a waste of money, and surely not ALL the episodes could suck just as bad as the ones I saw on TV, right?

Well, I will reserve comments on the rest of the 2002 series, but this particular episode in discussion is the one I most wanted to watch on the set. I had no idea it was on when it aired, and I only found out about it later, and it was a motivating factor for me to pick the set up (not the only factor, but one of them). I had no idea what to expect, though, so my expectations were only built by what the writers and director put into the particular episode.

During the episode, it's clearly not a story about a monster. It's a story about the dynamics of the relationships we see between the mother and her son, and the father and her daughter, and the daughter with her father and grandmother. And all through the episode, we see the tension build to the moment where the mother confronts her son, and lays it all on the line. She pays for her actions when her grand daughter wishes her away. We also learn that at some point in the past, Bill Mumy's character had wished away all cars because they made him mad.

So what is the resolution to this family drama? The girl brings EVERYBODY back! YAYYYY!!! You expect at the very least to see Cloris Leachman again, and hopefully other members of the family (and if they are played by different actors, so be it.) But what do we see? A brand new 2003 car at the end of their drive way honking to ask for directions??? WTF???? THAT IS THE PAY OFF??? First, we need a resolution to what we saw transpire between the girl and her grandmother! The girl brought everything back, except for Grandma?? Is she supposed to have left Grandma in the "cornfield?" That is not even implied. It's just lazy writing, if you ask me. How about a family reunion at the end of that driveway? Second, if they have to show a car coming back from the cornfield, why is it a brand new car? I am not exactly sure when Bill Mumy made the cars disappear, but I am guessing some where in the 60s or 70s. Hell, even if they showed an older 80s modle car pulling up, it would have been more plausible. Not only does the little girl bring everything back, but everything magically transformed from being what it was when it disappeared to coming into the 21st century! AMAZING!!!

Now I know that it would have been impossible in this episode to establish that everything that came back was still in its previous time period when it vanished, but why even muck around with that concept at all? It's too complicated to even dabble with. Where the hell is their family if they brought everything back??

I liked the proposition rennervision had for the end, but I was thinking they could have taken it in a different direction. Perhaps she could have made everybody disappear, her father included, but once you see from the father's point of view that he does not arrive in a cornfield, but he arrives in a "real Earth" where everybody he sent away lived normal lives in the real world, happy and free from him, and he has a choice to blend in with this new way of living, and choses to do so, and it turns out that the little girl is actually the one left in the "cornfield." (I always accepted the cornfield as a figurative description of isolation, not a literal field.)

I have yet to watch all the episodes from the 2002-03 series, but episodes like this really turn me off. The original series and the 80's series were so much better. To think that Ira Stephen Behr and the other creators involved were given such a wonderful heritage, and they just crapped all over it, and probably killed the potential for another great Twlight Zone series for years to come, just pains me to no end.

This has really come full-circle, because I picked up this set during the DDD sale (it was about $10, so I figured 'what the hell')...

The first one I put in for a spin (nearly 3 years after starting this thread ) was this episode... and calhoun07 sums up my thoughts exactly. It had a few decent 'nostalgia' moments, but had extremely lazy writing. That seems to plague all of these episodes, actually.

Are there any decent shows that I should watch before I dump this set? I saw the first couple of episodes during the initial run in 2002. And I just watched this one, the one w/the glasses that showed the murder, and the Jessica Simpson/doll one. I'm ready to call it a day, but I wanted to make sure there wasn't a gem in there that I was missing...

The most amazing thing about this tread to me is that the new Twilight Zone is still on! I gotta start watching the TV Guide channel!

Who is daring to air it?

There was an episode where a guy works in an office and a doll keeps making jokes...it was pretty good. Too bad thats all I remember.

Oh, if you want a REAL LAUGH, watch the episode where the kid makes action figures and onces comes to life (Played by Putty from Seinfeld). It so cheezy its awesome!