The Twilight Zone wanted to tackle the subject of police brutality head on

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"Replay," one of two new episodes released Thursday, explored the headline-grabbing police shootings of the past decade. Writer Selwyn Seyfu Hinds says he studied some of those shootings captured on video. "It was a really numbing and horrifying exercise," says Hinds, "and as I watched I got that feeling of time being rewound again and again."

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Ever watch the news and get the feeling you've seen it before? That's what inspired Replay, the latest episode of The Twilight Zone, which takes aim at racism and police shootings. It's a fantasy story, but it's all too real.

Replay is one of two new installments of the rebooted Twilight Zone available to stream starting Thursday, April 11 on CBS All Access. (Disclosure: CBS is CNET's parent company)

In the episode, a black single mother proudly accompanying her son to college discovers her battered camcorder has the power to rewind time. But even that mysterious power may not be enough to prevent tragedy at the hands of a racist white cop. The concept of time repeating itself is familiar from stories like Groundhog Day and Russian Doll, but here it's used to illustrate the implacable cycle of violence facing African Americans.

The episode's writer, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, was drawn to this familiar trope when he set out to tackle how police interactions with people of color so often end in tragedy. Hinds watched video after video of encounters between the police and young black men like Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner -- the list of names goes on.

"It was a really numbing and horrifying exercise," Hinds told me on the phone from LA, "and as I watched I got that feeling of time being rewound again and again."

Replay was born.

Science fiction and fantasy have long tackled racism and oppression. But whether it's mutants in the X-Men stories or alien races in Star Trek and Doctor Who, these themes have usually been couched in metaphorical conflict between fantasy figures. As a black character put it in a famous 1970 Green Lantern comic, "On a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins, and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there's skins you never bothered with -- the black skins! How come?!"

The makers of Replay aren't interested in dancing around the subject of police brutality. "Right now I could hang up my phone and walk outside in the streets of Los Angeles and find myself in that situation," says Hinds, himself a person of color. "This is urgent. This is something as a nation we ignore, this horror, and in our own little way I wanted to take a sledgehammer to it."


Direct as it is, the episode does strike a balance between tragedy and hope for the future. The young man heading to college, played by Damson Idris, is a filmmaker aspiring to be the next Ryan Coogler -- the director behind Creed and Oscar-winning hit Black Panther. Hinds sees Marvel's black-led Afrofuturist phenomenon as something close to a big bang moment in culture -- along with Peele's hit horror movie Get Out, of course.

"There's a moment in Hollywood where our voice is coming to prominence," says Hinds, who is from New York via Guyana. "Doors are open in a way that they might not have been before." Hinds can't talk much about his upcoming projects, but he is working on adapting Nnedi Okorafor's Afrofuturist novel Who Fears Death for an HBO series produced by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.

Hinds also highlights Twilight Zone mastermind Jordan Peele, fresh off the success of Us, as a key player. "Part two of that answer is that there's just no one like Jordan Peele in the landscape right now," Hinds says. "He has an energy, agenda and genius to take things to a higher level."

That said, Hinds praises Peele's hands-off approach while creating Replay. "He was always really respectful," Hinds says, "and he didn't want to 'put his fingerprints all over the episode,' as he called it."

Peele did make one suggestion that elevates Replay "from a pretty decent piece of television to something very special." While Hinds won't say exactly what Peele's contribution was, he does say the episode's final moments bear those Peele fingerprints.

The show is famous for gut-punch twist endings, which means even in its hopes and aspirations, Replay is still haunted by the specter of violence.

"There are some monsters that go from awake to semi-dormant, but we don't have the power to slay them right now," Hinds says. "And we didn't want to make something that was patently false ... There's no easy magical escape."


ALSO:

• "Replay" is almost a new Twilight Zone classic
  
  It’s too bad The Twilight Zone didn’t debut last week with “Replay”… or didn’t at least choose it over “Nightmare At 30,000 Feet” as the episode to pair with “The Comedian.” (The CBS All Access honchos and/or the show’s producers unaccountably chose to make “The Comedian” available to non-subscribers last week, as an… enticement?). I don’t want to rehash my beefs with “The Comedian,” but one thing I failed to mention in last week’s review was my frustration that the episode almost has something to say about how entertainers of color—moreso than just comedians in general—have to relinquish something essential about themselves and their culture to succeed in showbiz. But that point never quite comes through, despite how tediously overlong the episode is.
  
  “Replay,” on the other hand, is more tautly constructed (it’s just 44 minutes!) and more intensely focused on what it has to say about identity and erasure. It even gets to Jordan Peele’s Rod Serling intro in record time.
  
  Sanaa Lathan stars in “Replay” as Nina Harrison, a lawyer who’s driving her son Dorian (Damson Idris) to his first year of college at an HBCU, in a rural community not far from where Nina grew up. While they’re sitting in a diner, goofing around with an old analog video camera that Nina’s dad once owned, Dorian squirts some ketchup on his shirt. While scrambling to help him clean up, Nina accidentally presses the camera’s rewind button… and reverses time! (Cue Peele.)
  
  That particular magic trick quickly comes in handy later when the Harrisons are stopped on the road by Officer Lasky (Glenn Fleshler), who ignores the family’s well-practiced “no attitude… be respectful” approach to cops, and instead immediately makes with the micro-aggressions. He asks if Dorian’s headed to “the black school,” and he demands they turn off their camera. The encounter goes south from there, until all Nina can do is push rewind again, and zip back to the diner.
  
  Selwyn Seyfu Hinds’ script for “Replay” functions as a barbed critique of one of the common responses to police shootings of unarmed black men and woman: What could the victims have done differently? Over and over in this episode, Nina goes back and tries to “fix” their encounters with Officer Lasky—up to and including sitting down with him at the diner over pie to get to know more about him, and to tell him more about her and Dorian. Nothing works. He’s determined to pick a fight. He calls Dorian “boy.” He asks Nina for proof of ownership of her car. He comes up with nitpicky traffic violations. He’s just the worst.
  
  What’s especially frustrating for Nina is that she’s done everything leading up to this moment in her life “right.” She turned her back on her working-class country family and went to law school, where in her own (only half-facetious) words, she “got too fancy.” She raised her son to be a good student and a sweet kid, who teases her about her love of old-school R&B. But if the universe—or the social conditions within a corner of that universe that happens to be hostile to black folks—has determined that Nina and Dorian are going to have their lives ruined by one thickheaded patrolman’s bad day, then what can she do?
  
  Hinds actually has an interesting, unexpected answer to this. During one of the rewinds, the Harrisons pay a visit to Nina’s brother Neil (Steve Harris), who’s still living out in the sticks. Neil connects them to the secret African-American history of the area, leading them through all the tunnels and alleys that “the man” doesn’t know about. Soon, by reconnecting with their roots, they’re at the gates of Tennyson University.
  
  And it’s here where “Replay,” in my opinion, makes a misstep that bumps it down from being a new Twilight Zone classic. Officer Lasky corners Nina, Neil and Dorian outside Tennyson. This makes narrative sense: bringing some closure to the story. The other students and parents pull out their phones to start recording the encounter. That’s also a nice touch: a reminder that the Harrisons’ “magic camera” is a powerful metaphor, and really not that far-fetched (time-travel aside). But then Nina confronts Lasky with a lecture and… frankly, the episode doesn’t need it. The meaning’s already clear. Explaining it so bluntly sounds a discordant note.
  
  To be fair, Serling did the same kind of thing with his Twilight Zone episodes. (Also, I’m aware that up at the top of this review I complained that “The Comedian” isn’t explicit enough… at least about its slyer themes.) But so much that’s great about “Replay” is in a lower key: It’s in the performances of Idris (so good on FX’s Snowfall, and just as likable here as a genial kid who has no idea what’s happening with his mom and her resets) and Lathan (who so rarely gets to play a role so suited to her full range, moving from “pleasant” to “anxious” to “raw existential despair”).
  
  When Nina tries to disguise her scrambling to avoid Officer Lasky by brightly suggesting to Dorian that they just get a motel room for the night, eat some junk food, and watch some bad reality TV, both the love between mother and son and the reasonable appeal of that specific request is so relatable. Don’t we all just want to be left alone to pursue happiness in our own way—be it advancing our professional ambitions or just vegging out with room service? There’s no need to steamroll those kinds of subtle, natural expressions of human desire with a big speech.
  
  “Replay” does end well though, with the first coda so far in this new Twilight Zone that actually makes the episode better. Jumping into the future, after Dorian has graduated and started a life and family of his own, Nina watches her granddaughter break the enchanted video-cam, then watches her son go out to run an errand, knowing she no longer has her magic reset button. The look on her face as “Replay” ends—so uncertain, so nervous—is a sublime example of how a great Twilight Zone can send a chill down the spine, and a shock to the mind.
  
  
  Read a brief history of The Twilight Zone theme

In the opening scenes of the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie, Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks pass the time on a car trip by playing a trivia game in which they try to guess TV shows from their theme songs. It’s the kind of scene that makes you want to yell the answer at the screen, because Brooks immediately recognizes the theme from Hawaii Five-0, and can even sing along to Aykroyd’s rendition, but can’t quite come up with the name. But there’s one TV show everyone knows the theme to:


The theme from The Twilight Zone is one of the most easily recognizable pieces of music of the 20th century, a four-note motif for electric guitar with hair-raising dissonances that conjure up the uncanny and the unknown in an almost Pavlovian way. Its creepy-crawly charm transcends all cultural barriers; in Twilight Zone: The Movie, it even ignores cross-species boundaries, much to Albert Brooks’ dismay. The problem is that the music we all know as the theme from The Twilight Zone isn’t, in fact, the theme from The Twilight Zone. It’s two pieces of music spliced together from a stock library CBS built as part of a cost-saving and union-busting campaign. Marius Constant, the original composer, was unaware for years that he’d accidentally written the theme to a popular television show, and for decades was paid nothing beyond his original fee, even as the show lived longer than Walter Jameson in syndication. The original theme for The Twilight Zone was written by legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, but was sent to the memory hole for decades in favor of a new introduction with Constant’s royalty-free music. Here’s that original version—the theme from The Twilight Zone that nobody knows how to hum—as seen in the show’s pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody,” on Oct. 2, 1959:


CBS didn’t love the theme or the accompanying animation, and by the first season, they chopped a glissando or two off the music and replaced the original UPA titles with a new sequence featuring a close-up of the human eye, a version that was chiefly notable for how half-assed it looked. Here’s its debut, in “Mr. Bevis,” on June 3, 1960.


That version of the theme and intro didn’t even last a month: The season finale aired on July 1, and by the time the show returned on Sept. 30, the whole thing had been thrown out. CBS asked their preferred composers for their best shot at a new theme, commissioning work from Jerry Goldsmith and Leith Stevens, and even hiring Herrmann to take another crack at it. But they didn’t like those results any better than the original theme, so director of music Lud Gluskin came up with a plan that CBS executives were sure to love: getting what they wanted without paying anyone any more money by exploiting nonunion labor.

It wasn’t Gluskin’s first rodeo. In 1956, the American Federation of Musicians took the extraordinary recourse of fining him $5,000 and expelling him from their membership for a related violation of union rules. At the time, AFM’s contracts with television stations were built around a live music model—a holdover from radio days, according to Gluskin—and specifically forbade networks from building reusable music libraries that could be shared among shows. Gluskin was accused of recording music under false pretenses, ostensibly hiring session musicians to make a commercial record, but then using the recordings as television cues instead. He denied that he’d done anything wrong, but his incentive to do so wasn’t hard to understand, because he helpfully explained it in a 1956 congressional hearing: Recording music for television cost too much money because the AFM required studios to contribute to its pension fund. Gluskin and CBS responded by seeking out cheaper, more easily exploitable labor—first, allegedly, with whatever happened that got him kicked out of the union, and then abroad. Throughout the late 1950s, Gluskin traveled to Europe, where the AFM’s rules didn’t apply, commissioned musical cues from European composers at cut-rate prices, recorded them there, and shipped the tape back to CBS with all rights secured in perpetuity and no need to worry about providing workers with a dignified retirement. If that sounds like something out of The Twilight Zone, well, where else would the theme have come from?

On one of those trips, Gluskin hired the Romanian-born composer Marius Constant, who was struggling to get by in Paris at the time. “I received a phone call from a producer, and he said, ‘We’re doing this TV show and I’ll give you $200 to write a theme by tomorrow. If your work is accepted, you’ll make another $500, ’ ” Constant recalled in a 1997 interview. Feeling like the offer made him “as good as Stravinsky,” Constant wrote a collection of cues, waited three months before getting paid, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Sometime during the summer of 1960, faced with a pile of unusable music, Gluskin had the idea of Frankensteining together a theme from the stock music cues. He took two discordant pieces Constant had written, originally entitled “Milieu No. 2” and “Étrange No. 3,” spliced them together, and made television history on the cheap. Here’s the first time Constant’s theme for The Twilight Zone appeared, from the second season premiere, “King 9 Will Not Return.”


One person who didn’t get to appreciate the first appearance of The Twilight Zone theme over the air was Marius Constant, who wouldn’t find out until years later that his music had been used as a theme song. Although the underlying animation changed from season to season—the floating door didn’t appear until the fourth season—the theme for The Twilight Zone stayed more or less the same from then on. Whether it was an attempt to give the series a consistent look and sound or an attempt to avoid paying royalties to Bernard Herrmann, the original introduction was unceremoniously cut from the Season 1 episodes and replaced with a short introduction that used Constant’s music. That introduction, with no trace of the Herrmann theme, was used for reruns, syndication, and Twilight Zone UHF marathons: You couldn’t see the Herrmann version for any price until DVD releases in the aughts. So history did what history does, as people all over the world combined well-known and well-documented facts to reach a completely erroneous conclusion:

• Bernard Herrmann wrote a theme for The Twiight Zone.
• Since the summer of 1960, every time an episode of The Twilight Zone was broadcast, it opened with Marius Constant’s theme, for which no one was credited.
• Therefore, Bernard Herrmann wrote the theme for The Twilight Zone.

This mass delusion reached its apex in 1979, when light jazz group the Manhattan Transfer released their album Extensions. The third track, “Twilight Zone/Twilight Tone,” wasn’t just a terrible disco arrangement of Constant’s theme—it also had terrible disco lyrics about how great the song was to begin with:

Out of nowhere comes this sound

This melody that keeps spinning ’round and ‘round

Pyramidal locomotion from a mystic unknown zone.

But the band’s appreciation of Constant’s work only went so far, because their record credited the song to Bernard Herrmann. Why, yes, there was a terrible disco music video!


In the Manhattan Transfer’s defense, almost nobody outside of CBS realized that the Twilight Zone theme that everyone knew wasn’t written by Herrmann. It wasn’t until 1983, when Warner Bros. Records was preparing to release the soundtrack to Twilight Zone: The Movie, that Constant’s name came up. “Cleffer Gets Due for ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” Variety reported, but what Constant didn’t get was any money. CBS believed it held the worldwide copyright to the song, and in January of 1984 sued Constant in federal court to establish their rights. The eventual settlement secured Constant future rights to his composition, in exchange for relinquishing all claims to anything he might have been owed for the last few decades of royalty-free exploitation.

And speaking of exploitation, in 1985 CBS decided to bring the series back to television, and commissioned a new version of the iconic theme from the one band terrifying enough for The Twilight Zone: the Grateful Dead of the mid-1980s. Executive producer Philip DeGuere was a fan and set up a meeting with the entire band; only Mickey Hart showed and, according to DeGuere, opened by announcing that he lived in the Twilight Zone. The Dead got the job despite this demonstrable lack of interest, but Hart’s enthusiasm, punctuality, and willingness to attend a meeting he’d previously agreed to attend took him the extra mile: He was hired as the new series’ sound designer. The 1985 version of the theme was recorded by the Grateful Dead plus keyboardist Merl Saunders. Here’s how that went:


Well, it’s better than the Manhattan Transfer. And it’s also better than the next reimagining of the theme, for its second television revival in 2003. As you may recall, that was a year full to bursting with terrible ideas, so it’s not too surprising that UPN’s one-season Twilight Zone, hosted by Forest Whitaker, has mostly been crowded out of our collective memory. It’s a kindness, really, because that means we’ve also forgotten that the 2003 version of Constant’s theme was arranged and recorded by none other than Jonathan Davis of KoЯn. Next stop, the nu-metal zone:


What a terrible year! By the time Jordan Peele got around to bringing the show back again, tastes had changed: Classicism was back and “**** it, let’s just hire KoЯn so we can all go home and watch the Iraq war, which will certainly be over very soon” was out. So the 2019 version of The Twilight Zone starts very much like the 1960 version, with a faithful arrangement of Constant’s theme by composers Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts.


Now that’s a Twilight Zone theme that everyone except for Bernard Herrmann’s heirs can enjoy! It remains to be seen, however, if Mr. Jordan Peele, Mr. Marco Beltrami, and Mr. Brandon Roberts—three ordinary men who are about to have an extraordinary experience—have truly paid the past its full due. Because when they spoke to the press about rerecording the distant music of yesterday for the television reboots of tomorrow, they left the distinct impression that the theme for The Twilight Zone was, quote, composed by the maestro Bernard Herrmann, end quote, a misconception that should have died with disco. Now they have a can’t-miss appointment with a vengeful ghost. The location for this fateful meeting? Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee …