The Twilight Zone showed the ambitions and the potential pitfalls of today's Prestige TV

The New Yorker

"Having spent the past year watching The Twilight Zone from start to finish, I can report that, on the whole, the series holds up surprisingly well," says Colin Marshall of Rod Serling's classic series. "Aesthetically, it seldom exhibits the comical shoddiness associated with nineteen-fifties genre television." But, he adds, "having also railed against the disruptiveness of commercial breaks, Serling would no doubt have appreciated the advent of ad-free premium cable channels and Internet streaming platforms. But he would be less pleased by the fact that, amid this much widened televisual landscape, 'dealing in controversy' has become one of the few reliable ways to secure a viewership. Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, for example, is even now pushing the limits of HBO’s permissive content policy by working ever more brazen depictions of sex, violence, and drug use into the lives of its teen-age characters. Such material, however implausible, can now be justified as gritty, unvarnished realism, but its real function becomes clearer when scandalized viewers (and those scandalized by the scandalized) take to social media to post their reactions, all of which amount to so much free publicity."