Will Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone Return? CBS Has Made A Decision
Jordan Peele brought The Twilight Zone back for a new generation of fans. Now we know whether it is coming back for Season 3
This article is more than 2 years old
Jordan Peele has had an incredible amount of success on both the big and small screen over the last few years. He’s brought it in a big way with the comedy, but also made something of a career pivot recently into more of the horror genre. Unfortunately, one of his most recent projects isn’t going to go down in the success category when it’s all said and done. That’s because CBS All Access has decided to not pick up his Twilight Zone reboot for a third season on the streaming platform.
Jordan Peele and The Twilight Zone won’t be coming back onto the platform and wasn’t announced as part of the future scheduled programming for the streaming service this week. While the creatives issued a statement about the future of the show, it was somewhat clear that this was at best a mutual decision and at worst some recognition by CBS All Access that it didn’t have much of a future moving forward. This is what Jordan Peele and company had to say about The Twilight Zone leaving CBS All Access.
We greatly enjoyed our time working on The Twilight Zone — particularly when the real world around us often felt more and more like another dimension. We cherished the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented writers, actors and crewmembers. After 20 unique episodes, we have told the stories that we wanted to tell…
Jordan Peele and company remade The Twilgiht Zone very much in the mold of the original version. It used much the same format as the iconic one, telling one-off stories with the darker side of things and offering proverbial twist endings. Some were retellings of stories from the Rod Serling days, but many were original works with their own little bits of dark humor or worse. They ended up doing 20 episodes total and brought on a host of writers and directors to helm and pen the series. There were a number of references to original series, even bringing a version of Rod Serling into the Season 1 finale that brought with it a continuity arc through the storytelling.
That first season earned Jordan Peele and the crew very solid reviews, scoring it at 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. Season 2 dipped down to 65% which still rang in well on the critical side. It’s likely that CBS All Access, soon to become Paramount+, just didn’t see the show as viable with its streaming numbers. Those analytics weren’t released though it’s a safe guess they weren’t all that robust. And there’s also some chance with this kind of storytelling, without a full narrative thread but simply standalone stories, the creativity piece was starting to run dry. It’s totally reasonable.
Jordan Peele remains busy as ever though. The Get Out and Us director has an untitled horror film he’s calling an “Event” hitting screens sometime in 2022. And there’s also been rumors of him remaking Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. He also produced and helped write a continuation of Candyman which is due out this year. He’s steeped in the horror genre to the point that it’s easy to forget he basically got his start in the comedy game. But it just nods to his insanely amazing creative talent. The guy can handle just about anything. So Peele remains more than a little in the horror game, it just won’t be on The Twilight Zone going forward.
