If you ever wanted to see Jessica Simpson get menaced by a porcelain doll with the haunted soul of a cranky Victorian orphan and somehow not be the most wooden thing in the room, you’re in luck. “The Collection,” from the short-lived 2002–2003 Twilight Zone reboot hosted by Forest Whitaker, is one of those strange, misfit TV artifacts that’s been gathering dust in the attic of anthology history, right next to that one episode where Katherine Heigl shoots Hitler. And yet here it is, like an uninvited doll-faced demon, demanding your attention.
Directed with the kind of low-budget panache usually reserved for SyFy Originals and late-night fever dreams, “The Collection” is a lean 20 minutes of tightly coiled absurdity—one part Child’s Play, one part Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and one part Jessica Simpson’s lip gloss.
Let’s get the plot out of the way so we can focus on the good stuff: Simpson plays Miranda Evans, a babysitter who’s sent to watch over a precocious little girl named Danielle while her wealthy, offscreen parents attend some black-tie gala full of people who presumably don’t know their daughter lives in a doll-riddled mausoleum. Danielle’s not the issue—though her deadpan stares and creepy observations should’ve sent Miranda running for the hills. The issue is the girl’s doll collection, which appears to move around on its own, glare menacingly, and occasionally try to shove a grown woman down the stairs like a tiny porcelain linebacker.
The concept’s straightforward enough. Dolls are creepy. Dolls that move when you aren’t looking are creepier. Dolls that murder? Well, that’s just network television magic.
And yet, here’s the thing that makes “The Collection” so unexpectedly fun—it plays the whole thing absolutely straight while letting Jessica Simpson do her Jessica Simpson thing. Which is to say: she doesn’t overact, doesn’t underact, and doesn’t try to be something she’s not. She delivers Miranda as a sort of bright-eyed, emotionally available valley girl with just enough wit and backbone to make you root for her, but not so much that you’re surprised when she’s flailing around the hallway screaming about evil toys.
Say what you will about Simpson’s acting chops—no, seriously, say it, I’ll wait—but she does something clever here. She leans into her persona without parodying it. You’re not watching an aspiring thespian reach for Shakespeare; you’re watching a celebrity harness her limited range in a way that actually serves the story. Her voice quivers just enough to feel real. Her reactions are believable in the way someone would actually respond to a possessed doll creeping on them in the middle of the night: a mix of WTF confusion, “is this really happening?” panic, and a healthy dose of “I’m too pretty to die like this.
And then there’s the episode’s real MVP—Forest Whitaker, delivering the intro with the gravitas of a man who’s just been told he has to explain to America why Jessica Simpson is in The Twilight Zone. He does his best Rod Serling impression, somber and smooth, narrating like he’s reading from a dusty leather-bound book titled “Tales of Mildly Sinister Babysitting.” His presence gives the episode a legitimacy it probably doesn’t deserve, but absolutely needs. It’s like having Morgan Freeman do the voiceover for a documentary about monster trucks—instantly elevated.
What makes “The Collection” tick, however, is not just the camp or Simpson’s likability. It’s the twist. Because of course there’s a twist. This is The Twilight Zone, after all—every story ends with a cosmic punchline, and this one delivers like a final slap from a doll hand made of spite.
[Spoiler incoming. If you haven’t seen this 20-year-old episode of a canceled reboot, avert your eyes.]
The big reveal is that the dolls aren’t haunted… not in the traditional sense, anyway. Danielle, the creepy little girl, is the real problem. It turns out she’s some kind of malevolent force who uses the dolls as vessels—collecting the souls of previous babysitters who pissed her off or tried to escape. And wouldn’t you know it? When Miranda gets too close to the truth, she becomes part of the collection herself—her eyes frozen in silent horror, her soul trapped in glass, doomed to sit on a shelf next to other forgotten nannies while Danielle smiles that wicked little smile and moves on to the next.
It’s classic Twilight Zone—a morality play cloaked in horror, where the innocent are punished, the guilty walk free, and fate comes with a plastic grin.
From a technical standpoint, the episode’s no marvel. The doll effects are somewhere between “haunted flea market” and “Hot Topic clearance bin.” The cinematography is flat, the music cues are blunt, and the budget clearly ran out somewhere between the first jump scare and the final pan-out shot. But none of that matters. In fact, it helps. The lo-fi charm makes the episode feel like something you’d stumble upon in a hotel room at 2 a.m., half-asleep and wondering if you dreamt it.
And really, that’s where “The Collection” succeeds most: in its surreal earnestness. It’s not trying to be high art. It’s not trying to deconstruct horror tropes or win an Emmy. It’s just a compact little tale about evil dolls and a doomed babysitter, told with enough sincerity and camp to make you smile and maybe check your own shelf for blinking eyes.
In the end, this weird, forgotten gem of early-2000s TV stands as proof that sometimes bad ideas, when executed with a wink and just enough polish, can turn into something strangely memorable. Jessica Simpson will never be Meryl Streep—but for 20 minutes in 2003, she was the final girl in a discount haunted dollhouse, and damned if she didn’t sell it.
Final Rating: 7/10 dolls with murder in their glassy eyes. A minor classic in the junk drawer of the Twilight Zonemultiverse.
