The Twilight Zone coming to CBSAA
- Thread starter starmike
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The only way I can accept the Mission Impossible movies are as a reboot or a alternate timeline or something. In fact, I was so disgusted with what they did to the Jim Phelps character that I haven't even seen any of the movies since the first one!
I can't help but think that this is a show that would benefit from taking outside submissions much like Star Trek used to. Or, at least, make offers to some of the best writers out there to contribute to episodes. That way the weirdness gets diverse. If every episode comes from the same people in the same writers room, eventually everything will start to sound the same, despite the anthology nature of the series. I swear, back in the day, I was able to pick out an episode of Star Trek written by Brannon Braga just by listening to the the dialogue.
He did have his own "high concept" style, didn't he?
A lot is riding on TZ and other new offerings CBS is bringing to the streaming service. Hoping they succeed!
You should give Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation a shot. Those are IMO the only movies that come closest to the spirit of the show where they emphasize more on the team and everyone in it has their own story going on aside from Tom Cruise. In a weird way, the film series rebooted three times. First being a Brian De Palma thriller, then turning into a John Woo action flick, and then Bad Robot took over and steered it more or less on the right direction.
They've gotten steadily more ensemble-y over the past few movies, with several recurring characters being gradually accreted onto the series. Rogue Nation's team consisted entirely of returning characters from previous movies, except for Rebecca Ferguson's character who wasn't technically part of the team. In fact, it got a bit awkward, since Ving Rhames' and Simon Pegg's characters were both "the tech guy" and so they kind of had to be split up throughout the movie so they didn't overlap. The upcoming sixth film is bringing back all of Rogue Nation's protagonists except Jeremy Renner (who would've been back if not for his Avengers duties), and is also bringing back Michelle Monaghan from M:I:III -- making it the first film in the series to bring back a previous film's female lead (two, in fact) for a speaking role.
I'd like to see something that goes in the opposite direction from the big, flashy government-backed spy stuff of the movies and develops what I believe the original concept of the series was: an unofficial, deniable black-ops team, basically a garage-band spy operation in which a retired agent, unofficially working for his former agency, recruits various civilian specialists to go on missions so sensitive and dangerous that they can only be done on a volunteer basis, with the knowledge that the government will disavow them as rogue operators if they're caught. Also, one other thing the movies haven't really captured is that M:I wasn't a spy show so much as a heist/con game show. It was inspired by the heist sequence in Topkapi, but presumably the reason it was built around spies is because the network censors wouldn't allow criminals to be portrayed as heroes, so the con games and robberies had to be committed against enemies of the US and the world.
The thing is, I'm not sure M:I's premise really works in the modern world. The ubiquity of facial-recognition cameras would make it pretty hard for anyone to successfully go undercover, or for an agent's true identity to be unknown to foreign agencies. In real life, most spies just work out of embassies and recruit local people to gather information for them. Of course, that does kind of fit with the core idea I described, recruiting civilians as amateur agents. Still, having the same people play different undercover roles every week wouldn't be sustainable for long. Unless they all wore M:I's impossibly perfect masks all the time, but then the lead actors wouldn't get enough face time on camera.
The weirdest thing to me about Showtime's Outer Limits revival is that it had clip shows. Like so many shows from the era, it was required to do one clip show per season to save money. So they had to take installments of an anthology, stories meant to stand alone, and somehow knit them together into a shared reality. It was bizarre.
I think of the first two films as failed pilots for a series that didn't really kick in until the third film. As MakeshiftPython said, they don't even feel like a series, just a couple of standalone films with a common title and lead character name. The first film was a standard Brian DePalma paranoid thriller, the second film was a standard John Woo action cartoon, and the third was basically J.J. Abrams doing Alias with a feature budget. But once Abrams and Bad Robot took over, the series started to feel like a series. The past three films have had a consistency and unity to them that the first two films manifestly lacked.
So I recommend starting with M:I:III and moving on to Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation. You don't need to know anything from the second film, or even the first, to follow the Bad Robot-era films. RN does make a passing allusion to the events of the first M:I, but that's the only time I know of that anything from the first two films is referenced in the later ones.
I'm glad to see this being tried again. My favorite version of Twilight Zone is still the original, the remakes didn't really impress me. The Showtime/ScFy remake of Outer Limits was at times really good, but also a little to blatantly preachy at times. I've always thought Outer Limits did more straight scifi stuff than Twilight Zone did, but both are classics.
I will very likely give this a try, depending on how it looks-- I just hope it turns out better than Discovery.
A half-hour black-and-white series consistent with the original would be a dream come true. At the very least it should have the stylized sets, direction, and dialogue (and iconic twist endings) that defined the original. If there is nudity and non-mainstream vocabulary words, that is fine with me-- I think gore would be inconsistent with the TZ ambiance, though, as the original never really relied on action or violence to speak of.
A half-hour black-and-white series consistent with the original would be a dream come true. At the very least it should have the stylized sets, direction, and dialogue (and iconic twist endings) that defined the original. If there is nudity and non-mainstream vocabulary words, that is fine with me-- I think gore would be inconsistent with the TZ ambiance, though, as the original never really relied on action or violence to speak of.
And preachy in a bad way. That show was relentlessly technophobic and Luddite. Most of its episodes were driven by the message "Never try to learn or create anything new because the universe will punish you for having an imagination." I hated that. It wasn't science fiction, it was anti-science fiction. It was fiction that portrayed science itself as intrinsically harmful and immoral.
Oh, yes, certainly. The Twilight Zone was a fantasy/horror series that occasionally dabbled in soft science fiction, thrillers, etc. The Outer Limits was a straight-up science fiction series.
Was there ever any references to Jim Phelps' family on the original series? Did he have any children? Could Jon Voight have been playing Jim Phelps, Junior?
OK, I just looked up the age differences and Peter Graves was only 12 years older than Jon Voight. But is the same age difference between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.
OK, I just looked up the age differences and Peter Graves was only 12 years older than Jon Voight. But is the same age difference between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.
Season 5's "Homecoming" is the only one. It shows him returning to his hometown, and there's a sign saying "A. PHELPS AND SON BOAT RENTAL," with Jim being the son in question.
As you say, their age difference makes that a reach. It's simpler to assume that Voight's Phelps was an impostor. This is a universe full of masks and impersonations, after all. I like to imagine that the mission Ethan Hunt was offered at the end of the first movie was the rescue of the real Jim Phelps.
Either that or it's a separate continuity. Rogue Nation has Jeremy Renner say that the IMF has been doing good work for 40 years, i.e. since 1975, which would pretty much exclude the entire 1966-73 run of the original show from its continuity if we assume he didn't misspeak. Although maybe he means that 1975 is when the IMF became the full-fledged, official intelligence agency seen in the movies rather than the unofficial, semi-civilian operation it was originally implied to be. That would mesh fairly well with the 1988 revival, which presaged the movies' approach of expanding the IMF into a fuller organization with more than one team.
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