The Twilight Zone Reboot: 10 Classic Episodes It Should Remake

The Story:

In the 1950s an advertising executive, stressed from the high pressures of the modern world, stops at a gas station close to the small town where he grew up and decides to walk back there. He is surprised when everything from the cars to the price of ice cream at the drugstore haven't changed at all since he was a child in 1934. Seeing his younger self carving his name into a bandstand, he realises that he has travelled back in time.

Why Remake It?

While typically remembered today as a show that provided creepy stories or dark and disturbing twists, the original Twilight Zone was equally happy to embrace a nostalgic sentimentalism, with Walking Distance - the original series' fifth episode and arguably the first classic - perhaps the best example.

The themes of Walking Distance are evergreen, recurring both in many later episodes and in fiction ever since. It engages in a bittersweet fashion with issues of nostalgia for a simpler time, the idea of the grass always being greener and the impossibility of truly returning to how things were.

The initial story's timeframe and locations were specifically very personal to Serling himself and his frame of reference. It would be interesting to see the same concept, but updated to how a similar writer today relates to their 90s youth. That our current cultural diet is becoming ever more nostalgia-driven and the fact that we now see Serling's fast-paced 50s as an example of the very simpler time to which he hearkened back could both provide ample fuel for a new take.