As with any such anthology worth its salt, this book comes at its topic from a variety of angles. The essays are organized according to five themed sections focused on The Twilight Zone's themes, specific episodes, 1980s big and small screen incarnations, later off-shoots (specifically the cheesy big-screen portmanteau Encounter with the Unknown and Jordan Peele's recent streaming series), and stage incarnations.
The value of any book is down to how much there is to learn from reading it, and as a reader who has lost a lot of my taste for academic writing, I still picked up a lot of interesting tidbits from The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone, such as the existences of the gloriously bad Encounter with the Unknown (which I watched just last night to get a better handle on this book and don't regret at all despite its absolute terrible-ness) and the stage productions. I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of more personal essays by writers who actually worked on the eighties edition of The Twilight Zone. An essay on Serling's handling of the nuclear age revealed how invested many of his viewers were in this topic and how they felt he had a responsibility to address it on his show.
As for the central academic purpose of this book, I can't say that most of the essays made me see The Twilight Zone in a new way, but most were fairly interesting despite some flaws. A piece on the series' rhetoric spends so much time defining terms (What is science fiction? What is rhetoric? etc.) that it doesn't leave much room to discuss The Twilight Zone, and when it does, it ignores the obvious--The Twilight Zone is rhetorical because most episodes argue a very clear position against the evils of conformity, bigotry, dehumanization, etc.--and instead argues that it's mainly rhetorical because each episode asks "What if?" Which, you know, is true of every piece of fiction ever written. An essay examining the series as a horror text selects the odd, not very horrific episode "Stopover in a Quiet Town" as its main reference point instead of a genuinely scary episode like "Living Doll" or "The Dummy". An essay that ostensibly compares the TV and film versions of "It's a Good Life" is too short and doesn't actually provide much direct comparison. One comparing the original series to Jordan Peele's not only reads like a parody of wordy academic writing but rambles (there's a two-page tangent about the influence of The Godfather on The Sopranos for some reason), contradicts itself (the writer states his aim to not write a critical essay--before spending the bulk of its criticizing Peele's show), and has a general self-congratulatory tone that it does not earn. Plus, there are just way too many analyses of "The Shelter", a fairly middling episode that covers a lot of the same ground as the superior "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street".
Valerie L. Guyant's opening essay, however, does a nice job of arguing that the original Twilight Zone was more progressive than any version that followed it. Kevin Bolinger's shines a light on how regularly artificial intelligence played a role in the zone, while Alexander E. Hooke does the same for Serling's ambivalence toward humanism, and Melissa A. Kaufler's does it for Richard Matheson's contributions to the original series' excellence. I also found co-editor Wetmore's piece on how the fatal disaster on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie colored reactions to the film fascinating. In other words, much like the The Twilight Zone itself, The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone is a mixed bag.
