CBS All Access is giving its subscribers a special treat this April Fools’ Day: the series premiere of Jordan Peele’s reboot of “The Twilight Zone.”
The anthology series will launch its first two episodes April 1, with new installments to be made available weekly on Thursdays, beginning April 11, Julie McNamara, executive vice president of original content for CBS All Access, announced during the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour Wednesday.
As TheWrap previously reported, Peele is executive producing and hosting the series, stepping into the role that original series’ narrator Rod Serling made famous. You can get a taste of what Peele’s narration will sound like here.
The anthology series’ previously-revealed cast members include Ike Barinholtz, John Cho, Lucinda Dryzek, Taissa Farmiga, Greg Kinnear, Luke Kirby, Sanaa Lathan, Kumail Nanjiani, Adam Scott, Rhea Seehorn, Alison Tolman, Jacob Tremblay, Jefferson White, Jonathan Whitesell, Jessica Williams, DeWanda Wise and Steven Yeun.
The new series, which will debut later this year, will be produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films. Peele and Kinberg serve as executive producers along with Win Rosenfeld, Audrey Chon, Carol Serling, Rick Berg and Greg Yaitanes.
Serling created the original series, which ran for 80 episodes from 1959 to 1964, and used socially-conscious storytelling to explore the human condition and culture of the times. There have been two prior revivals of the classic series. The first reboot aired for 110 episodes on CBS starting in 1985, and a second version, with Forest Whitaker in Serling’s role, ran for 43 episodes on UPN in the early 2000s.