Twilight Zone and Twilight Zone-esque shows

[FelixSH]

While I haven't watched too many shows of this kind, I do enjoy them a ton. They are basically short stories in TV show format, and if they hit, they hit so well. Let's see, what do we have...

Twilight Zone (Original)
Twilight Zone (80s version)
Twilight Zone (00s version)
Outer Limits

I think these are the classical shows. Are there any others?
Then there are, of course, the newer ones:

Black Mirror
Philipp K. Dick's Electric Dreams
On Children

Any other shows of that kind? Also, any favourite episodes? And also, do you have any ideas for episodes you would like to see in these shows? Any topics to explore there?

While Black Mirror is too bleak for me, and too much on the side of Humanity Sucks, it has a few episodes that I quite like. San Junipero is excellent, Fifteen Million Merits is just too horribly dystopian for me not to love it and Nosedive felt like it wasn't so down on Humanity (it showed that it was possible to live a good life, even if you ignore the technological yuck).
It's a Good Life has always left a strong impression on me.

I only watched one episode of On Children. The show has only a few episodes, and they all are about helicopter parents, and how they make their kids miserable. It's made in Taiwan, and quite well done. That one episode was about a mother getting hold of a remote control for her son. She can rewind him as often as she likes, and uses this to force him to learn all the time, and in general totally controlling his life. It gets pretty intense, and is horrifying to watch, but also felt very real. I highly recommend at least that one episode.

--------------------------------

I listen to a podcast that discusses episodes of the 90s sitcom Home Improvement. At one point, one of the hosts made a joke of making a Twilight Zone-esque episode about this show, and the last part stuck with me. "What if more power was applied to him?" Him meaning, of course, Tim Taylor (if you don't remember, he always tried to give tools more power).
Since then, I wanted a Twilight Zone-esque show, that took old sitcoms, and corrupted their premise. Like, the episode of Home Improvement would start as a random episode of the 90s sitcom, including a laugh track and all that. Lighthearted stuff (and ideally without the toxic masculinity). And maybe, Tim actually found a way to give more power to himself. As the episode goes on, this shows more and more dark sides, with some horrible twist at the ending. The laugh track gets used less and less, making a move from 90s sitcom atmosphere to creepy, chilling and/or disturbing.
For Full House, you could do something about the house being an actual entity, with the final realization that the members of the family are stuck, living together forever.

I like this idea so much, because I have a really weak spot for combining the relaxing and joyfull with the terrifying and disturbing. For breaking the former up with the latter. There is probably nothing more relaxing for me than I 90s sitcom (tons of nostalgia for that), so twisting this stuff hits me at my most vulnerable.

----------------------------

Ok, I'm done. Any other fans of these shows?

 

[Matchstick]

I think these are the classical shows. Are there any others?

Rod Serling had a show in the late 60s/early 70s called Night Gallery that I recall seeing various episodes of way back in the day. There was also a series called Darkroom in the early 80s. I remember watching it, but nothing about any particular episodes.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Night Gallery was Serling's show but it also wasn't. He hosted AND wrote a number of episodes AND got creator credit but unlike Twilight Zone, he didn't have creative control of the show. Night Gallery stories where sometimes short and in between featured some dreadful "comedy sketches" with monsters. Serling hated them, not just for being bad but for throwing off the sinister tone of the show.`

Generally, I wish there were more anthology shows. I watched a couple episodes of Room 104, an anthology drama series of varying genres taking place in the same hotel room.

 

[Adrenaline]

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

 

[Octopus Prime]

The original Twilight Zone remains one of the high-points not only of the six-fi anthology series genre, but television on the whole, for me. Or at least, like, half of it was. Quality was a bit scattershot, on the whole. I find you can tell which episodes are worth watching as they were rarely the ones with the cool titles.

I picked up the entire 80s series for cheap a little while ago, but haven’t watched it yet. I did see some reruns back in the day, though.

 

[YangusKhan]

I've started watching Quantum Leap, which I think at least qualifies as Twilight Zone-adjacent. It's not fully anthology, but after reading its Wikipedia page, apparently the creator made it this way because he wanted an anthology show but networks at the time did not at all want anthologies, so I guess he came up with the caveat that the situation for Sam changes every episode but he and his friend Al remain the constant.

I'm only 3 episodes in so far but it does deal with some similar Twilight Zone themes, and the structure of every episode so far is Sam and Al trying to figure out what and how they need to "fix" the situation Sam leaps into, which I think feels like a Twilight Zone mechanism.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Looks like the new Twilight Zone is cancelled. I'm kind of OK with this. When it was good it was very good but there were more misses than hits, unfortunately. Still, the last episode was a good one and a weird one and I wished they did more extra off-kilter episodes like that. Plus the one with Topher Grace did a classic sci-fi plot from a new perspective. I feel like a lot of the Glen Morgan penned episodes were the weaker ones.