Few chills in 'Nightmares'

We all know every generation has a right to its own rock ' n' roll. And every generation certainly deserves its very own hair products, even when they're named ``Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific." I wish post-Boomers could lay similar claim to a creepy anthology series like ``The Twilight Zone," the 1959-64 classic that still stands as intelligently disturbing TV. We all need a ``Zone" of our own, a timely and artful expression of our collective fears.

TNT is the latest TV outlet to attempt a contemporary horror anthology that aims for something more than boo-in-the-night frights. Called ``Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King," the four-week series promises eight psychologically resonant tales cloaked in horror metaphors, with a few O. Henry-like twists for irony's sake. As you'd expect with work that sprang from the mind of King, the hourlong pieces also don't shy away from humor and self-reference. Two episodes will air each week, starting tonight at 9.

Unfortunately, ``Nightmares & Dreamscapes" does not quite distinguish itself, despite its admirable ambitions. Like so many efforts to refashion ``The Twilight Zone," including two ``Zone" remakes, HBO's ``Tales From the Dark Side," and Steven Spielberg's ``Amazing Stories," it's a mixed bag that never quite moves beyond non sequitur creeps and special effects. The production values are sleek, and, with casts that include Jeremy Sisto, Steven Weber, Ron Livingston, and Marsha Mason, the acting is solid enough. But many of the stories fail to transcend their own narrative details toward something universal.

The exception among the handful of episodes I watched is tonight's first hour, which will be aired without commercials. Called ``Battleground," it stars William Hurt as a professional hit man who murders the CEO of a toy company. When he returns to his San Francisco apartment, he receives a box of tiny toy soldiers that proceed to wage war on him. His home becomes a battleground in which his conscience has turned on him and is pecking him to pieces. Like Gene Hackman in ``The Conversation," he tears his apartment apart in fits of self-defense.

The hour, in which there is no dialogue, also recalls the unforgettable and dialogue-free ``Twilight Zone" episode called ``The Invaders," starring Agnes Moorehead as a woman terrorized by tiny metallic-looking creatures from a miniature spacecraft. But the King version is a full-on morality play, and Hurt is riveting as the ambushed murderer. Every little flinch of his eyes and all of his aggressive half - smirks register more than many actors ' words.

But the other episodes don't have the simple power of ``Battleground." Tonight's second feature, ``Crouch End," follows American yuppie newlyweds in London facing a living hell in a deserted part of town. There's talk of another dimension and a ``thin spot," but it all comes down to nothing much with a few signature King ghouls along the way. A piece next week starring William H. Macy, as both a 1930s divorce detective and his creator, a grieving writer, isn't boring, but it flails around for meaning before petering out into pointless cleverness.

What helped lift Rod Serling's ``Twilight Zone" to its greatest heights was the lack of special effects. The drama and the characters had to be enough to make you shiver and ponder, because the production was so bare -- not much better than a summer theatrical. And the quandaries in each half hour cut to the central fears in a new world of nuclear war, space travel, and psychological angst. So many episodes were teleplays in the true sense of the word.

The ``Nightmares & Dreamscapes" episodes I watched certainly have rich moments, but much of their human drama is muted by the sophisticated production. Also, while there are laptops and iPods and cell phones aplenty on the series, the hours' themes are too familiar and don't quite bring new dimensions to our core fears. These cable short stories play off stock material about greed, the nature of art, and human obsession, and they fail to rise to the occasion of our times.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.