Although The Twilight Zone is now best known for its supernatural stories and sci-fi plots, one of the original show’s most memorable outings came from an iconic DC movie director and didn’t feature any genre elements at all. The Twilight Zone is, without a doubt, one of the most influential shows of all time. In practical terms, the success of the sci-fi anthology series spawned imitators like The Outer Limits, as well as a trio of revivals over six decades, and inspired countless later sci-fi anthology shows from Netflix’s Black Mirror to Prime’s Electric Dreams.
However, in broader terms, the trippy, edgy experimentation of The Twilight Zone made it possible for TV producers to play with narrative, revolutionising TV in the process. Without The Twilight Zone, there would be no Twin Peaks or The X-Files, and without them, there would be no Fargo, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Stranger Things. Although The Twilight Zone is now often remembered as a straightforward sci-fi anthology, one of the original show’s best episodes didn’t feature any supernatural story elements at all, and highlighted the show’s surprising versatility with its ingenious storyline.
While almost all of The Twilight Zone’s most iconic episodes were sci-fi or horror stories, season 5, episode 19, “The Jeopardy Room,” broke the mold. Starring Martin Landau as Major Ivan Kuchenko, a political prisoner who tries to defect from his country of origin, this tense two-hander focuses on a pair of assassins who trap the story’s protagonist in a booby-trapped room. A smug hitman, Commissar Vassiloff, tapes a recording that explains Kuchenko’s predicament to him.
Vassiloff has hidden a bomb somewhere in the room, and Kuchenko has three hours to find and disarm it. If he tries to leave, he’ll be shot by Vassiloff’s nearby sniper, Boris. What follows is one of the most tense episodes of TV ever made as an increasingly desperate Kuchenko tries to find a way to escape the room with his life at any cost. Written by the show’s legendary creator, Rod Serling, “The Jeopardy Room” is also notable for being an early directorial effort from director Richard Donner.
Donner went on to direct 1976’s iconic horror movie The Omen, 1985’s adventure classic The Goonies, and all four movies in the Lethal Weapon franchise, as well as the underrated 1988 Christmas comedy Scrooged. However, he is perhaps best known as the director of 1978’s original Superman movie, one of the first truly great comic book movie adaptations of the blockbuster era. At the time of its release, Superman was one of the most expensive movies ever made, with a budget of $55 million.
However, the movie was a massive success, earning $300 million at the box office. Thanks to Donner’s typically assured direction, Superman was also a critical success, and remains fondly remembered as a seminal superhero movie to this day. While Superman’s set pieces were impressive, it was the movie’s successful attempts to humanize Clark Kent that still shine decades later. Donner’s ability to bounce between big-budget blockbusters and smaller stories is perfectly epitomised in The Twilight Zone’s most underrated outings, his self-contained suspense masterpiece “The Jeopardy Room.”
