Yes, Jason Alexander Played The Grim Reaper On The Twilight Zone

Not everyone knows this, but Jason Alexander and Robert Redford have a lot in common. They are both actors, for example. They have both won a lot of awards for acting, just none of the same awards. They were both born in the United States of America. They both directed the 1993 movie "Quiz Show." Oh, wait, no they didn't. That was just Redford, never mind.

Okay, so maybe Jason Alexander and Robert Redford don't have a whole lot in common. But there is one unusual bit of trivia that connects. They both played completely against type as the Grim Reaper in an excellent episode of "The Twilight Zone," and they both knocked it out of the park. Robert Redford played Death as an unexpectedly kind and angelic specter of death in the 1962 episode "Nothing in the Dark," and Jason Alexander played Death as an overwhelmingly depressed burnout who wants to end his own life 40 years later, in an episode of the UPN reboot titled "One Night at Mercy."

The second episode of the short-lived early 2000s "Twilight Zone" reboot stars the late Tyler Christopher ("General Hospital") as Dr. Jay Ferguson, a young emergency room doctor working a 39-hour shift whose life gets turned upside down when a man who tried to hang himself is brought into the hospital. He's played by Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, and when they ask him his name he replies "Death."

Dr. Ferguson assumes this man is delusional but when Death says he remembers the first person who ever died in the hospital, he looks up the factoid and discovers that yes, it's true. And he knows about everyone else who ever died there, as well as how Dr. Ferguson's mother died, and how that experience inspired him to become a doctor. 

It takes most of the episode, but Dr. Ferguson eventually comes to believe that Death really is who he says he is. But Death is in a terrible place right now. He's been clinically depressed since the mid-1300s and wants to end his own existence. And now that he's realized he can't do that, he decides to do the next best thing.

He quits.

Dr. Ferguson, who saved his very first life earlier that same night, who became a doctor because he watched his mother die a slow and painful death, is ecstatic at the thought that nobody will die anymore. Sure enough, nobody's died ever since Death decided to end his own existence: The newspaper's obituary section even reads, "No obituaries today due to no deaths reported." (Another article amusingly reads, "Confidence feeds momentum," which means nothing, and whoever put it in there probably wasn't hoping we'd pause the episode and scan the other headlines.)

But although people can't die, they also won't have an end to their suffering. Only a few minutes later Dr. Ferguson sees the emergency room full of accident victims in horrible, brutal pain with no hope for relief. He tells Death he has to go back to work, and Death dejectedly agrees. Unfortunately, Dr. Ferguson was supposed to die that day from a brain aneurysm. 

"How does it feel to save a life, if you don't mind my asking?" Death asks him. "It felt good. It felt real good," Dr. Ferguson replies.

"Yeah," Death says, sadly. "That's what I thought."

Jason Alexander's episode of "The Twilight Zone" is very different from Robert Redford's, but they both find Death teaching a human being about the complexities of mortality and the importance of life's finality before they take them to the great beyond. Jason Alexander is excellent in the role, never once playing the character for a joke, even if it does seem like it would be mildly amusing to cast a famous comic actor in the role of the Grim Reaper.

Robert Redford never made another "Twilight Zone" but Jason Alexander sure did. After his appearance on the UPN reboot, Alexander starred in four installments of "The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas," a collection of classic episode remakes and new weird tales that ran between 2002 and 2012, for a staggering 176 episodes. Alexander starred in "The Obsolete Man" as a man put on trial because his job as a librarian no longer exists after books have been banned, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" as a soldier who finds himself at the bottom of a giant cylinder with four strange characters, "Caesar and Me" as a ventriloquist whose dummy starts to talk to him, and "No Time Like the Past" as a man who goes back in time and tries not to change the course of history.

Yes, Jason Alexander may not be as famous for "The Twilight Zone" as he is for playing George Costanza on "Seinfeld," but he's got a lengthy connection with the long-running anthology series. Meanwhile, Robert Redford only did the one episode. Check and mate, Redford.