Softcore pornography

That's ridiculous. At least softcore has a plot.

Densham does the same thing in his The Outer Limits retread when maybe one in three episodes were worth the time to watch but almost invariably worked in some sex. (And at least once every season there was a really stinking episode made from clips of other episodes. He really topped himself in the extra long Final Appeal that blew off a big all star cast on a lame concoction of reused material.)

Another thing he gets wrong in both series is the narration. Where the original (and 1980's Twilight Zone) have something pithy and pertinent to say about the story, Densham or his writers consistently manage to sound banal and pretentious while often also failing to connect with the story.

CB

Good Times, Noodle Salad

In regards to the way the episodes look, that's due to shooting on video instead of film. A lot of low-budget TV shows are guilty of this. Where once it was justifiable to use film, it's now regarded as a medium that's only justifiable to use for movies (and nowadays they want to do away with it for even movies in favor of things like RED 4K cameras). Due to the way that film is shot it gets a very different look to it. For one thing, film is shot at 24 frames while video is shot at 30 frames (which results in the noticeable speed difference with which things move). And then there's Peter Jackson's little experiment with high-speed digital at 48 and 60 frames, which everybody universally said looks like something from TV and looks like crap (and they're justifiable in saying so). When everything looks like it's speeding up and slowing down because of the frame rate, you know that the format has issues.

The original Twilight Zone series took $60,000 an episode to make because it was shot on film. During season 2 they produced 8 episodes on video to try and save money (which in the end, only saved $30,000 for all 8 episodes - roughly $3,750 per episode, which was deemed not justifiable for the loss of quality; and was met with distaste by fans who said that it ruined otherwise good episodes including "The Night of the Meek" one of the best episodes of the original series). But during the 1980s and 1990s video became the standard rather than the exception.

Back to the point, porn has always been shot on video. It's a disposable medium meant to shoot the cheapest and easiest scenes. Because of the way video works compared to film, it requires less light and it's easy to reshoot things on the same tape. And with the advances of video tape it became even cheaper to buy. How fortunate for pornographers that video moved from tape to digital (with digital storage being extremely inexpensive) which is also easier to store (which isn't to say that pornographers are making archives of their 30 year old stuff; they probably aren't even keeping 10 year old stuff around). But also fortunate for the medium that is TV.

Although there is an upshot for the viewer (you and I), which is that because of digital video it's now possible for every TV show to get a boxed set (whether it warrants one or not), and storing every episode of a TV series on a hard drive or SSD is pretty easy to do. I'm not sure if TZ2K is shot on digital video or just regular video tape, but either way, it looks just as cheap as it was to make because they did everything they could to stretch every dollar of their budget.

Nowadays it's pretty common for a show to have 13 episodes per season and be considered "long" seasons, but back then the 43 episode length of the first season is considered to be massive. Had it been shot on film, I feel it probably would have been half as many episodes.

Yes and yes. 😀

I used to blame this mainly on the look of the episodes, however the other elements the OP mentioned totally made this feel like the kind of cable show you would come across "After Hours".

I don't exactly dislike this series, but I mean... it is easy to find this distracting haha.