Jordan Peele’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ Casts Adam Scott in Episode Recalling William Shatner Classic

The cast of Jordan Peele’s latest incarnation of “The Twilight Zone” has a new face. And he might be headed to some familiar territory.

CBS All Access announced that Adam Scott would be joining next year’s revival of the classic anthology series. Scott joins a cast that also includes Sanaa Lathan, who was previously announced as the featured player in an installment dubbed “Rewind.” Production officially began on the series earlier this month, beginning with an episode directed by Gerard McMurray, who was also behind the camera for “The First Purge.”

Scott will star in an episode called “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet.” If that title carries with it a faint breeze of familiarity, it’s awfully close to the name of a classic “Twilight Zone” story that’s made it into multiple versions of the series before.

In a 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (based on a short story by legendary genre author Richard Matheson), William Shatner played Bob Wilson, an unassuming airline passenger who’s convinced he sees something on the wing of the plane. Every time he tries to alert someone else that there’s a dangerous creature trying to rip open part of the plane’s outer shell, the monster disappears.

The story got a big screen treatment 20 years later when John Lithgow took over a similar role in a George Miller-directed segment of “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” Over the years, the story’s been revamped in other ways for various versions and tributes, including in a 1993 “Treehouse of Horror” segment on “The Simpsons.”

Again, there’s no guarantee that Scott is in the same story here, but it’s fun to imagine what difference that 10,000 feet might make. Audiences will know for sure when “The Twilight Zone” premieres on CBS All Access in 2019.