The Twilight Zone Reboot: 10 Classic Episodes It Should Remake

The Story:

A well-liked suburban physician enjoys a birthday party with his wife and son, along with their long term friends and neighbours, who are amused that he has built a fallout shelter in the basement. That is until an announcement is made of unidentified flying objects heading for America. With room for only three in the shelter, previously suppressed grudges and hostilities now come to the surface, tearing apart both the group and the shelter.

Why Remake It?

Of 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone's original 1950s and 60s run, just three were stories with no supernatural elements, simply directly engaging with plausible real world fears. The most effective of these was this Serling original script from 1961, the height of the Berlin Crisis when nuclear war appeared a very real possibility (the Berlin Wall went up just a couple of weeks after the episode aired).

The backdrop of Cold War fears, fallout shelters and the possibility of all-out nuclear war is perhaps no longer so relevant to an audience today, but the barely-suppressed deep divisions in superficially friendly suburban communities, the racism and nativism which comes to the surface in a crisis, are absolutely relatable in Trump's America.

All a new version of The Shelter needs, therefore, is a credible contemporary threat, one which plays on the fears of 21st Century suburbanites and would be exacerbated by the 24-hour news cycle. A mass shooter, perhaps, where details about the character's motivations and background remain hazy and ever-changing in the media reporting.