With three Emmy Awards for writing already to his
credit, Rod Serling began to air in October 1959 the first episodes of
the series that not only consolidated his status as one of the pioneers of quality
television but also established him as a legend of the science fiction and
fantasy genre: The Twilight Zone.
Even with endless imitations, parodies, and revivals
at the hands of others, it’s easy to lose sight of just how different The
Twilight Zone was from what might be termed “alternative futures” at
that time.
Serling would have none of the little green men
invading Earth, mad scientists, and assorted other creatures that reflected
American paranoia about the Red Scare in the 1950s. The quotidian existence of his
characters was one that his mass audience could relate to, only for these
everyday figures to be launched, as one of the show’s famous intros put it,
into “another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a
dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of
things and ideas.”
The themes that Serling consistently explored were
alienation, prejudice, loneliness, colonialism, climate change, domestic abuse,
and war—a subject that its creator knew all too much about, having seen action
in the Pacific Theater in WWII. (This summer, a Serling short story believed to
have been lost for 70 years and based on his wartime experiences, “First Squad,
First Platoon,” was published in The Strand Magazine.)
The series first saw light as “The Time Element,” a
Serling script deep-sixed by CBS until it was resurrected and run as an episode
of “Desilu Playhouse.”
The network, realizing its mistake in burying the
project, now gave the green light to what turned out to be the pilot proper for
the show, “Where Is Everybody?”
The Twilight Zone
arrived on TV in the heyday of the anthology series, a genre that also gave
rise to such acclaimed shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse
90, The Naked City, and Thriller (which I discussed in this prior post).
Serling wrote or adapted 92 of the 156 episodes of the
original The Twilight Zone, but as time went on he also enlisted the
services of Charles Beaumont (who wrote another 22), Richard Matheson (16) and the
future creator of The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr. (8).
So much of The Twilight Show has passed into
legend: from the eerie theme composed by Marius Constant, twist endings a la O.
Henry, and Serling’s onscreen lit cigarette (the product of a three-pack-a-day
addiction dating back to his wartime experiences).
Serling’s deep voice and staccato delivery of the
introductions and conclusions made him as indelible a narrator as Alfred Hitchcock.
But he was nobody’s original idea as host.
According to Josh Weiss’ post from March of this
year on the SyFi Wire blog, the services of Westbrook Van Voorhis,
famous as the narrator of The March of Time radio program, were engaged—until
hearing his voice on the pilot left network execs feeling he was too “pompous-sounding.”
The idea of Orson Welles was then floated, and though
that voice was certainly memorable, it would have come at a cost that would
have ballooned the show’s budget. Finally, Serling suggested that he try it. To
everyone’s delight, it worked out wonderfully.
For years, the creepy nature of the show left me a bit
leery about viewing it. In the last few years, however, I’ve relented, and have
developed some favorites among the episodes:
·
“Nightmare at 20,000 Square Feet,”
with William Shatner as the airplane passenger convinced that a monster only he
can see is out to wreck his flight;
·
“The Jungle,” with John Dehner as an
engineer back from a hydroelectric power project in Africa, increasingly
discomfited by signs that a witch doctor’s curse may be coming home to roost;
·
“Eye of the Beholder,” about a
young woman undergoing a surgical procedure meant to make her look “normal”;
·
“Time Enough at Last,” on a
bookworm finding himself with no distractions from his reading after a nuclear
attack; and
·
“What's in the Box,” with William
Demarest and Joan Blondell as an unhappy couple feuding after his TV set shows
him quarreling with and killing her.
If The Twilight Zone made Serling, it could
also be said to have unmade him. The non-stop demands on his time as executive
producer, host, and chief writer—and of battling the show’s advertisers (McCann-Erickson)
and network censors over tone and content—left him running on empty in the fourth
and fifth seasons. “You can't retain quality,” he lamented. “You start
borrowing from yourself, making your own cliches.”
They also left him craving adulation from the public
and critics he had achieved with his on-air presence, leading to short-lived
lucrative but creatively unsatisfying 1960s ventures as a game-show host,
documentary narrator, and commercial pitchman for Schlitz Beer and Famous
Writer’s Correspondence School.
When he did return to his typewriter, he flailed in a
new entertainment landscape where his ideas were downgraded, disregarded or
sidelined.
His screenplay for Planet of the Apes, for
instance, was revised by Michael Wilson (the famous ending, involving the
Statue of Liberty, was his major surviving contribution), and on the early
1970s series Night Gallery, he possessed no creative control, leading to
complaints that it was a low-grade knockoff of The Twilight Zone.
His constant smoking and stress caught up with him,
and death came to Serling in 1975 at the age of 50 amid heart surgery. A decade
after its cancellation, the series that he helmed—more of a success d’estime
than a commercial hit in its original network run—was already a cult favorite
in syndication.
Over the years it’s
influenced the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, James
Cameron, J.J. Abrams, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jordan Peele
(who would become the showrunner and host for a 2019-2020 remake of the series
on CBS All Access.
