The fight of 'The Twilight Zone & # 39; in the era of streaming services

File this under "Another sentence that would have made no sense in the year 2000": Tonight, the third episode of Jordan Peele blurred area The reboot will be available for broadcast on CBS All Access. The good side of things is by far the best of the first four episodes of the series. On the non-shiny side, it falls apart in the last act and is again by far the best of the first four episodes of the series. The twilight zone Perhaps between science and superstition, but creatively, it lands squarely on the most densely populated territory of television, Prettygoodistan.

The question is whether Pretty Good is enough. With the end of the first phase of TV streaming, viewers have a different set of choices to make. Room of cards first hit Netflix – and more and more, a platform will live or die to know if its renowned shows will be considered indispensable.

Although CBS All Access was launched in 2014, it only presented its first original show in 2017, and The twilight zone is his eighth since then. Yes, eighth. While Star Trek: Discovery and Good wife spin off The good fight are the platform's best-known shows, there's also urban fantasy Tell me a story, Occult Drama of the 1930s Strange angel, Funny or dying comedy No activity, a collection of Star Trek shorts called Short treks, and the mystery of the rust belt One dollar.

I did not know that there were so many? You are not alone. But even though these other shows might not have motivated the conversation, they did not necessarily need it: CBS's primary goals were modest. First, the company wanted to reach 8 million streaming subscribers by 2020 – a solution that it was managing by the end of 2018, although that number included both CBS All Access and Showtime – and its current goal is 25 million by 2022, which is close to what Hulu currently has. is bragging.

Yet as the streaming platform grows, an oligarchy solidifies around it. CBS has reached 8 million digital subscribers? Netflix added more than that in a quarter. Hulu and Amazon are now well established, both critically and commercially. Add to that the streaming services of Disney, WarnerMedia and Apple, not to mention the generic service with which you get your TV live, and determining your monthly TV offer depends on tough choices and maybe a great deal. Excel spreadsheet.

More and more, these difficult choices seem to come out of the world of video games. The new video game consoles were traditionally based on a "vendor system", a game that was convincing enough to be worth the price of the console itself. Thought Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii, Grand Theft Auto III for the PlayStation 2, Armament of war for the Xbox 360. Just like the frightening discussion about "deadly application" around any new technology, it was a way to identify and personalize the best experience on a platform.

It did not happen on television. With the exception of premium channels like HBO, television has always been a monolithic land of accessibility. If you had the cable, you had cableand access to all the shows and cultural conversations it contains. However, each service makes its own decision to add another $ 6 or $ 10 to your overall television bill – and the "system vendor" then gave way to the "service seller".

HBO had now Game of thrones. Hulu had Tale of the maid. Netflix had originally Room of cardsbut at this point, there are so many series and movies with as many views and sensibilities that he actually became a cable provider. Disney + will offer Star wars shows and a home for Marvel, Pixar and other Disney-owned properties; WarnerMedia wants to shoot friends away from Netflix for its own streaming library.

CBS All Access is here. Early, Discovery and the sport has emerged to be the most valuable properties of the platform. In January of this year, CBS announced that DiscoveryThe premiere of this season and the AFC Championship game combine to attract more new subscribers in a weekend than ever before. (CBS All Access also broadcasts an extensive library of CBS programming, as well as live sports for which CBS owns the broadcast rights, including the NFL.)

Certainly, the Star Trek Universe and the NFL are not exactly high risk businesses. (As intellectual property, it's playing, it's another story.) The twilight zone this will affect CBS All Access's fortune more acutely: enough cultural cachet to ensure the awareness of potential subscribers, with a dynamic and respected creator like Peele. The last variable? Word of mouth.

Until now, reviews have been mixed, and the online conversation has failed to cover all other shows. This is the key, because, even if the series is ambitious, his first episodes are adorned with enough blurred area Easter eggs and connected universe tricks to intrigue fans of the original series, the episode tonight is the first to attract new viewers.

Written by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and starring Sanaa Lathan as a woman leading her son (Damson Idris) to college, "Replay" is an icy meditation on how racism tarnishes the police and jeopardizes the black community. Serious and terrifying in every aspect that has made Peele's post-comic career so urgent, she is all the more scary for her lack of grotesqueness: get outsatire or We& # 39; funhouse doppelgängers to destabilize you. It's all the more shameful that he loses his sting in his final scenes, but the late-stage missteps will not prevent him from bringing in curious spectators.

CBS All Access has not released any specific numbers yet – presumably to follow the frustrating example of Netflix – but according to a spokesman, The twilight zone "Led the most unique viewers on the first day of an original CBS All Access series to date." Relative success? Absolutely. An absolute success? It depends on the rule you use.

"I think that many players will prosper," said Marc DeBevoise, president and chief operating officer of CBS Interactive, during an interview with Adweek. "As we like to say, a rocket takes off and we have our seat.Others can be on board the rocket too, but we are going to the next level of what may be the thing, and we have secured our seats there. "The problem is not whether you have a seat. whether viewers come or not. Especially when this tour is at another dimension.

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