Since Get Out was released in 2017, fans have been learning that Jordan Peele isn’t just the goofy co-star from Key and Peele. Peele has a lot of interesting ideas on what truly makes life terrifying and has brought some new material to the art of telling scary stories. He has released a few renowned horror projects since Get Out, including the 2019 film Us, co-writing and producing the 2021 Candyman, and now the 2022 film Nope, all of which contain important social commentaries.

In between his work on motion pictures, Peele worked on a series close to his heart, a modern reboot of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. In a discussion with Dave Itzkoff of The Independent, Peele expressed that he was apprehensive about bringing back the series and that “he doesn’t easily embrace comparisons to Serling.” However, ultimately Peele knew that a Twilight Zone reboot was right up his alley.

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As Itzkoff explains, Rod Serling “envisioned The Twilight Zone as a delivery system for parables with deliberate messages of social justice and allegories of human weakness and folly.” Peele achieves exactly this in his films. With Get Out, Peele says in an interview with Indiewire that he wanted to illustrate “what it’s like to be a Black man in a world where you’re being viewed as Black before you’re being viewed as human.” Us, with its croaking doppelgängers, comments on capitalism and the act of taking advantage of others for our own comforts.

Jordan Peele’s contributions to the 2019 reboot of The Twilight Zone are similar, hard-hitting truths about humanity’s flaws. The reviews are mixed on this recent adaptation, however, critic Kylie Northover writes for The Age that the show “balances contemporary political concerns with an obvious affection for Serling’s work.” Here’s why Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone is underrated.

Twilight Zone Stars Diverse Talent Every Episode

This detail is one of the most exciting elements of the new Twilight Zone, especially when viewing it for the first time. The series premiere stars Kumail Nanjiani as a struggling comedian who fails to make his audience laugh until he starts making mean-spirited comments about people he knows. As he continues to make controversial jokes, Kumail notices that the people he makes fun of are starting to disappear. This is a classic Twilight Zone premise and contemplates how far a person will go for fame at the expense of others.

After Nanjiani, who knocks his troubled comedian right out of the park, the beloved Adam Scott takes William Shatner’s place in an update of the classic Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, Taissa Farmiga acts in a story about meteors that turn men aggressive, and Chris O’Dowd is stalked by a gun that has a mind of its own, the Blue Scorpian.

Twilight Zone Contains a lot of Jordan Peele’s Great Writing

As mentioned above, Peele’s The Twilight Zone comments on modern issues and approaches the stories in his own authentic way. A favorite episode of season one is called Replay, in which a mother and her college-bound son are pulled over by a racist cop. The mother discovers her video camera can reverse time, and so she travels back multiple times to try to prevent her son from being shot. It’s a heart-wrenching, powerful commentary on unprovoked shootings of African Americans in the US and ’the talk’ most Black families need to have.

Another effective episode with sociopolitical commentary is the aforementioned Not All Men, in which a meteor infects men and turns them aggressive, sending the world into chaos. It is revealed that the meteor was actually a placebo, an excuse for the men acting violently. Only one man, among the many who were exposed, was able to control his aggressive urges. Like most Twilight Zone episodes, Peele’s writing uses exaggeration and hyperbole to dissect the heart of a critically important issue; here, the theme is toxic masculinity and the excuses we give to people in power.

In his discussion with The Independent, Peele reinforced that his work will always communicate that “we have demons sewn into our DNA” and that humanity wants to be good, “but we’ll never be good.”

Twilight Zone Gives the Audience Rod Serling

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Not only does Jordan Peele replicate Serling’s stoic narration in each episode, but the series actually gives us Rod Serling at the end of season one in the brilliant episode ‘Blurryman,’ in which the set of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot and one of its writers is haunted by a figure lurking in the shadows. Serling has always been the calm, steady tour guide to the Twilight Zone, and it only feels right for him to emerge out of the shadows. Although Peele was careful not to do an impression of Serling, he confirms in his conversation with The Independent that he wanted to “conjure” Serling’s tone, but not do exactly as he did. With ‘Blurryman,’ Peele’s Twilight Zone is able to interrogate the very notion of reboots while paying tribute to the master behind the original.

Despite being compared regularly to Black Mirror, Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone creates a genre of its own that is highly underrated. Although the show was canceled, the two seasons of the series are available for viewing on CBS All Access. Jordan Peele’s new film, Nope, is set to release July 22, 2022.