WTF..just finished 'The New Man'

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I know this is years late but I just had to say I'm right there with you OP, having just seen this episode for the first time myself.

Usually I quite enjoy the storyline of most episodes but this one felt like a convoluted mess with no way for the audience to truly grasp a point and no real conclusion.

1. Is this retribution/punishment? Well if so, it fails at that making the main male character sympathetic. WE never see any need to resent or look down on him. Was he an alcoholic? Yes. Did hurt his family with his drinking? Yes. But we never hear of him beating his wife or having affairs, just drinking too much and leaving them with little to no money. Well, yeah, that's what alcoholics do and it's awful but hardly enough incentive for a Twilight Zone esque infinite loop.

2. There's nothing to prompt the appearance of this strange boy. Both in his case and the case of the man who appears in his spot right before the ending credits we never see these men fail. They don't drink, they're working hard, they're even excelling - yet out of nowhere this boy appears seemingly somewhat aware of the havoc he's wreaking on their psyches and lives.

3. We have no feelings of positivity towards their families. Petee? PB? Is a tedious self-involved teenager, the wife a fretting hen and 'Jerry' vaguely creepy. Since we start with our main character the other characters presented aren't compelling enough to
make us latch onto them. I personally did feel like, "Are the wife and kids in on this?" I couldn't view them as victims and Jerry only got more and more creepy.

Basically I felt very badly for the main character, confused by the point of the plot, unsure what the lesson was meant to be, indifferent towards the 'families' and very negative about the episode in general. A rare, but very terrible, failure.

Twilight Zone or personal version of hell is a good way to put it. The way I see it, Brad, is the temptation of the alcohol, or the devil you could say. Jerry is the kid he neglected and didn't get to know and lost b/c his family left him as an alcoholic. He lied to his wife about his drinking. However, the flip to that if he wasn't lying, even as a recovering alcoholic, he still doesn't know his kid b/c he missed his 1st 10 years. A parable.

All good things must come to an end - Chaucer

For me, it's like the final test to see if a recovering alcoholic has REALLY mended his ways. Put yourself in his shoes...

You've successfully resisted booze for a whole year. Then some kid shows up out of the blue claiming to be your son, and everybody believes him. For the life of you, you can not remember this kid at all, and your entire family blames it on your drinking. They ditch you, and you lose your job.

You have absolutely no idea what has just hit you. You've been doing so well all of this time, and this is your reward? You'd have been better off had you stuck with the booze and never sobered up!

Oh, what do we have here? A bottle of booze for li'l ol' me to drown my sorrows?

Now if you can STILL resist temptation after going through all of that, then, my friend, you have passed the test.

Contestant #1 failed.

I wonder how contestant #2 did...

*waits for the sequel*

The whole episode is basically an alcoholic in hell, damned to repeat everything over, and over again. He's constantly being tortured for the fact that somehow, in some way, he lost everything, and drank himself to death.The child Jerry is a demon. The boss is the devil. I can't believe nobody understands this. I've been watching The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and shows like Boris Karloff's Thriller as a kid, so for me, it's rather easy to figure out stories like this.

100% Comic Book Purist, and Bloody Proud of it !