1. The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)

by Robert Hornak

“I bow with great deference to the real masters… I can adapt science fiction I think quite adequately, but I can’t create it on an original level.” – interview with James Gunn, 1970

Serling on the influence of the show: “I think what it did do was to supply by virtue of its own moderate success a kind of an entre to the darkness that surrounds us.”

With these two quotes, Rod Serling, one of the greatest television writers to ever ply a thought to paper, diminishes himself in his usual style. But don’t let him fool you. The man created and curated the single best, concentrated menagerie of stories under a single banner that television has ever seen.

What follows is long, but easily navigable. Basically, it’s:

I.  Some background on Serling/brief discussion of the show’s development.

II.  45 “review-histories” – some more review than history.

III.  Some final, brief, too-scattered thoughts.

I.  BACKGROUND

There’s absolutely no separating The Twilight Zone from its darkly self-effacing creator. The show’s very existence owes itself to the animus stirred in him by the death throes of the television class he helped establish in the early-to-mid ’50s. By decade’s end, Serling had decorated his mantle with Emmys for his original teleplays Patterns (the world of big-business as lions and gazelles on the open plains), Requiem for a Heavyweight (Jack Palance as a broken-down boxer scrambling for his dignity), and The Comedian (Mickey Rooney as a TV comedian who’s really an abusive egomaniac) and was the de facto writer laureate at the granddaddy of all ’50s anthology shows, Playhouse 90. But as the stranglehold of corporate sponsorship tightened around the throat of creatives from those early years of broadcasting, many jumped ship for the oft-considered “more expressive” medium of motion picture filmmaking, and with that realm expanding beyond its own Hays Office stranglehold, and the walls of studio dominance crumbling slowly but ever so surely, it was a smart move. Yet while the luminous likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and others, made the leap to the Big White Screen, Serling was still inspired by and beholden to the milieu he helped birth with his superlative, gut-wrenching, and undeniably heady writing. Serling, nothing if not competitive and proud, and circumspect and morbid, and trenchantly funny and nimbly incisive, saw in his new anthology show a way to best the sponsors at their own game. If they didn’t want him to “go there” with stories ripped from the headlines, stories that lambasted the constricted, intolerant, abusive, and fascistic bent of the world at that time by writing about real people in real situations, he’d bypass sponsors’ fears by going all out the other way: put a guy in a space suit, or have him talking to a ghost, or dress it up in bizzaro comedy, or put the military in a post-apocalyptic context, then the product pushers had far less plausible argument to say no. It was Serling’s gambit to speak his mind his way, with as little interference as possible, and to denounce hate and fear and self-immolation with the popular art of the times – the television tube.

This 20-minute interview from 1959 with Mike Wallace, after Serling’s several teleplay Emmys, and just before the launch of The Twilight Zone, puts you square in the center of the writer’s frame of mind:

THE BEGINNING: Serling grew up in Binghamton, New York, an hour south of Syracuse, the place of his birth on Christmas Day, 1924. Binghamton was one of those small, non-industrial towns that essentially bypassed the Great Depression, preserving an idyllic small town spirit that bathed his childhood in a kind of freedom that would make certain sections of the rest of the country balk with righteous envy. In that environment, he grew into an outgoing, chatty, charming, smiling, and handsome kid. His height – he never stretched up past 5-foot-4 – kept him off the football team, a huge disappointment, but he channeled that competitive impulse into debate, where he could lord it over virtually everyone, including his teachers, with his prematurely gargantuan vocabulary. That gift was his weapon as well on the school paper, where he was the editor, firing off ambitious, if overly-verbose editorials on the politics of the day – school and otherwise. Only an average student in the classroom, Rod’s fervent mix of his conservative inventor father’s ingenuity and voluptuous, staccato diction and his left-leaning mother’s firebrand charisma made him one of the most distinctive and popular kids in his school. Yet his family was Jewish, and in a town where anti-Semitism was invisibly institutionalized, he still felt the sting on both ends: his family was like most, generally assimilated, so he was free to date Gentile girls, but that got him kicked out of his school’s Jewish fraternity while simultaneously being banned from the non-Jewish one. He was a good and gregarious kid, but he was not left unstung by the pain of exclusion.

RADIO: Meanwhile, by his teens he’d become steeped in radio. By then, the pendulum of radio’s place in the home had swung from news and information with a little entertainment on the side, to mostly entertainment – in myriad forms, from song, to spoken word and poetry, to all-out, imagination-engorging weekly radio dramas alongside situation comedies. Serling ate it all up, prompted by his early, deeply-rich bent toward storytelling. One need only note a couple of his favorite programs to sense the first buds of something like The Twilight Zone in Serling’s mind: first was Columbia Workshop, at first heavy on adaptation of classic stories and Shakespeare plays, then later, when headed by Serling’s eventual dramaturgical hero, Norman Corwin, much more concerned with social issues, which pushed its stories into a more political direction, and a weekly anthology horror show called Lights Out, which, by the time Serling was listening, had also begun injecting political themes per its later creative mastermind, Arch Oboler. The crucible-lite of Binghamton had turned out a highly intelligent provocateur and practical joker who could wield words that flattened mortal men and summoned charm from the depths of a raging sentimentalist. The only question was how far could this swirl of creativity and passion go? …And then came–

WAR: He was a junior when Pearl Harbor pulled America into World War II. After a year of pom-pomming the war effort in the school paper, the boy graduated and immediately joined the army as a paratrooper, inspired by newsreels that showed the obvious double-heroism of fighting the enemy and jumping out of planes. His experience would change him forever.

Serling and his father, Sam.

At first it was a two-year, dirge-like repetition of training and waiting, training and waiting, in places like Fort Benning, GA, and Camp Polk, LA, during which time he made it up the chain, not promotion wise, but as a divisional boxer. Then the training finally got real when, toward what would be the end of the war, MacArthur sent Serling’s division into the Philippines, where some of the most savage fighting of the Pacific theater occurred. Three missions later, he’d witnessed the carnage of battle, the intransigence of a deadly enemy, and the overarching pointlessness of war. He’d shown heroism (rescuing a female entertainer when a USO show came under enemy fire) and suffered several wounds (one to the kneecap would give him a limp the rest of his life), and was still fighting in the Philippines when two atomic bombs ended the war. Sealing the deal on his personal misery, it was while he was waiting to return home that he learned his father had died of a heart attack. Serling left Binghamton a young and gung-ho boy, but he returned, as so many do from war, a different person.

THE 50s: Back home, at Antioch College, Serling met his wife, Carol. Funny story, from his brother Robert. “Rod found a ring for Carol, wanted to propose, but had no money. He finds a company integrity-testing a new ejection chute in Newark, New Jersey, so he hitchhikes there, climbs into a converted P-51 fighter plane with specially added second seat, they blow the seat out, and he lands in bramble bushes that rip his face up. Comes back to college cash in hand, buys the ring. She looks at him, askew like. He says he got in a bar fight – she declines his proposal because she doesn’t want a guy who gets in bar fights.” It’s the perfect story for a guy who loves stories about heartfelt motivation, roadblocks overcome, and unexpected twists. He wanted to put this stuff in front of people, dreamed of doing some real writing, but he was stuck in Ohio coughing up local shows for local venues with no real creative satisfaction and only restlessness to power the search and something-to-say gnawing at his gut. He finally secured a New York agent who took an eternal year to sell something, but it was enough, and soon his tour through live television and Emmy accumulation made him a star among writers and, as outlined above, a tilter toward windmills. But when the windmill of corporate sponsorship leaned back too hard, and he lost sight of the meaning, he searched his guts again and carved a new plan for the new decade.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE: Serling was looking to dip his toe in science fiction as a means to tell stories that entertain while also expressing his thoughts on life, death, politics, and the men who desecrate them all. It wasn’t unprecedented. While they weren’t on the level of the adult-leaning philosophy and darkness that he envisioned, there were shows to build upwards off of, namely Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), a show that had a bevy of established science fiction writers on board. Also there was the popular Science Fiction Theater (1955-1957) and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock Presents had been on since ’55 and was proving week after week that there was an audience for well-crafted, filmed anthologies that weren’t just straight drama, but could delve into the twisted, the macabre, or the unsettling. He dug through a drawer, pulled out an old script called “The Time Element”, about a guy who finds himself slipped back into December 6, 1941, with some salient warnings for any who’ll listen.

He did a quickie polish, beat it around town,
and at last sold it to Desilu Playhouse, who were on the hunt for anything at all to lend an air of prestige to their anthology show – one of the few still around. It got the most positive letters of any other show they’d aired. CBS, who’d turned Serling down before, saw the error of their ways and lured him back with promises of autonomy. After Serling’s idea for the official Twilight Zone pilot episode, about a society that kills off people when they reach the age of 60, was rejected for being a bit of a downer, he readily agreed, then went off and drummed up a replacement script called “Where Is Everybody?” (described more fully below). The pilot was shown to execs and green-lit right away for a first order of twenty-six episodes. Serling was off and running.

II.  Selected episodes/review-histories

What I attempt below are what I’d call review-histories, a melding of episodic reviews (45 episodes of the total 156 aired), easily navigable. I’ve kept them in the order of broadcast so that a feeling of the progression of the show’s public life can be felt alongside my own personal takes, all of which are open to rebuke.

My m.o. here is not a “best of” list or even a “my favorites” list, but instead a generous cross-section of the many various genres and story approaches that made the show the eclectic masterpiece it is. Some of these episodes (season two’s “Dust” would be an example) are ones I’d never seen before but felt they fit that criterion. Some of these, as you’ll read, would never be considered in anyone’s best or favorites list – meaning, they don’t live up to the high standard Serling set from the first episode on. But all in all, I’d say what follows is a fair representation of the highs and lows, the hits and the misfires that made the show, at the very least, something worth curiously investigating, and at most, something worth enshrining at the top of this reader-generated list of the greatest television shows of all time, another fact open to rebuke.

Be warned that many, if not most, of these capsule considerations reveal the end/twist of the story. If there are any you’ve been saving yourself for over the many decades since their original airing, please skip them.

Each entry includes the episode’s title, the date of its original broadcast, and the last name of its writer.

“It’s our thinking that an audience will always sit still and listen and watch a well-told story.” – Serling in a filmed pitch of the series to the network.

SEASON ONE (10/2/59 – 7/1/60)

Eps. 1-32: “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.”

Eps 33-36: “You’re about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop – The Twilight Zone.”

WHERE IS EVERYBODY? (10/2/59, Serling)

In so many ways, the quintessential episode right out of the gate. There’s mystery, paranoia, just the faintest tinge of science fiction seeping into the edges, even a little bit of horror. It’s got a pure Serling running monologue by an increasingly desperate character, a deepening, palpable feeling of personal doom, and it’s capped by a perfect little dollop of the unexpected – the twist that became such a crucial part of the show’s enduring popularity. Earl Holliman, who’d done a Playhouse 90 by Serling called “The Dark Side of the Earth”, is Mike, strolling around the Universal backlot – used for the pilot only – looking every bit like Marty curiously investigating his hometown in Back to the Future. Mike can’t remember who he is, or why he’s here, though there are clues all around of unmistakable life – a coffee pot is still brewing, a bell rings, a movie is flickering on a theater screen. He comes to believe he’s in a nightmare he can’t wake from and finally breaks hard under the feeling of being watched, listened to – until we finally realize what his new psychosis can’t, that he’s actually safe and snug and going quite mad in the belly of an isolation chamber at an Air Force training warehouse, prepping for a future moon landing. The lesson, as it were, only worked out in Serling’s closing voiceover, though not really in the story proper, is that we’ve pushed technology to the brink of putting man in space, but haven’t conquered the suffocating power of loneliness on our own planet. What’s strongest about the episode is not that message, but the striking confidence that allows a first episode to be nothing more than a man walking around talking to himself. The unsettling tone concocted inside that simplicity is the heart of the series – and though the ratings didn’t show it yet, that tone was addictive…You wanted to go back into the Twilight Zone.

WALKING DISTANCE (10/30/59, Serling)

Barely a whisper of science fiction, maybe more at home under the banner of fantasy, a harried businessman, Martin Sloan (Gig Young) takes a quick detour into his hometown, slowly realizing he’s walking through his own childhood. Serling later dismissed the episode as having collapsed under the weight of several poor depictions of reality, saying: the old soda guy would react more ominously, or at all, to news of his boss’s (later) death, Sloan would have his limp from the beginning of the story not just after his younger self’s fall from the merry-go-round, but mostly Sloan wouldn’t be able to emotionally move past the moment of meeting the parents of his childhood, so the fact that he continues with a level head into a longer story is absurd. But Serling sells himself short, as ever. “Walking Distance” is one of the more effective time travel stories from the series and one of my all time favorites because despite any of these flaws, it taps so deeply into the desire of any of us to retreat into our past, to speak to our younger self with the wisdom of age, to tell that kid to enjoy the greatest time in his life. It’s a story that can withstand Serling’s logic gripes because it’s so emotionally truthful, employing a “tender irony” (Serling’s phrase) to hook us into its brand of hard-edged sentimentality. Further, there’s a simple beauty in the episode’s depiction of time travel, a slow push-in to a mirror in which we see Sloan walk toward a curve in the road and into some trees. Its simplicity is almost poetic – a lesson that could be heeded by many Hollywood stories of much larger budgets: when you trust the human imagination, less is always more. The show is similar thematically to several later episodes including “A Stop at Willoughby”, “The Trouble with Templeton”, “Static”, and “The Incredible World of Horace Ford” and similar to Serling’s Night Gallery episode “They’re Tearing Down Tim Reilly’s Bar”. Clearly the theme of one’s supposedly idyllic past is near and dear to Serling, but this is the first and best foray into the topic – perhaps it could be said the ones that followed were simply trying to recapture the purity of this earlier episode.

TIME ENOUGH AT LAST (11/20/59, Serling)

The first of several with Burgess Meredith and another fan favorite for the strength of its ironic twist ending, Meredith is a bank teller burdened with heavy glasses with thick lenses who’s more interested in reading his smuggled-in books than helping his customers. Down in the bank’s underground vault, he’s the only man in the entire city that survives a nuclear blast. With no one to bother him and time enough at last to simply sit and read for the rest of his life, he gleefully raids the busted-open city library and arranges the rest of his days according to the stacks of books he’s collected from the rubble – only to drop his glasses on the jagged stones, breaking them beyond repair. One’s left to wonder why such a simple idea could become one of the most beloved and referenced TZ episodes of all time. There’s a requisite darkness that accompanies the realization of his predicament as he flatly states, “I’m not at all entirely sure I want to be alive.” Certainly the fun of the episode is the concrete-solid dark irony of those lenses breaking and the “oh how awful” audience identification. But there’s a cathartic irony of another kind, watching a man who’s just experienced the worst fear of modern man, the destruction of all of life by cataclysmic thermonuclear war, and all of it brought down to the individual level of one man’s simple loss. It’s almost an oxymoron to place the two side by side and certainly a dark joke on Serling’s part to make us think less of the incredible magnitude of mass destruction and loss of life and more of the mundane loss of one man’s ability to read a book. “That’s not fair… That’s not fair at all…” mutters our poor hero into the eternal abyss of blind time.

AND WHEN THE SKY WAS OPENED (12/11/59, Serling)

The first involvement of the great Richard Matheson, very loosely based on his short story “Disappearing Act” (about a writer and his disappearing friends), the episode concerns a flight crew back from the first space mission, and the visceral paranoia that builds when one pilot (Rod Taylor) suspects they’re being erased one by one from “the memory of man”. Soon Taylor is gone too, passing the baton of paranoia to the next pilot, who has to face an unbelieving throng of Air Force doctors. The episode well represents one of the strengths of the series, the exposition of growing, unsettling paranoia. The episode banks on the abject trust and heroics bestowed upon military people at that time. With no reason to ever doubt the word of a true American hero, the episode allows us to sink into a pure version of the old fear we all feel deep inside, when we check at all, that we simply don’t belong where we are, that somehow, somewhere, a mistake has been made, and that sooner or later, the universe will come calling to set the truth back on the rails. That it works out this neurosis in the guise of a simple sci-fi story, on the surface fully unbelievable, is made horrifying by a round and sweaty performance by Taylor, who mostly carries the entire thing on his shoulders.

THE HITCH-HIKER (1/22/60, Serling/Louise Fletcher)

Based on a radio play by Louise Fletcher (once married to sometimes TZ composer Bernard Herrmann), this is the first TZ to play more like a ghost story rather than straight up fantasy or sci-fi, further broadening the show’s multi-genre appeal. Another of the more oft-referenced episodes, maybe because it’s so easy to encapsulate: a female driver keeps seeing the same fedora-wearing hitch-hiker along lonely stretches of her route from New York to Los Angeles. With the unending open highway and the desperate voice-over, there’s a proto-Marion Crane aspect to the scenario – Psycho would be out later that same year – which may feed our modern appreciation of the story, feeling as we do that a woman, alone on the highway, is more vulnerable to all manner of lunatic violence. “That thin, gray man in the cheap, shabby suit” is the form taken by her indelible fear, and as she comes to believe she’s being stalked by death she tells herself what we all come to realize at some pitiable moment in our lives, that no matter where we go, the specter of mortality will always loom heavily over even the happiest of our freedoms. If the episode gets a little thin, and the end reveals itself a bit too easily by the mid-point, it’s saved by the believability of Inger Stevens’ steady descent into paranoid death premonition. An unfortunate note, in the broader discussion of TZ, is that the series is an example of the ingrained sexism of the time: only one episode of all 156 was written by a woman (season five’s lowlight “Caesar and Me”, written by producer William Froug’s secretary, Adele T. Strassfield, almost on a dare) and only three, all exclusive to season one, were adapted from a woman’s original story. “The Hitch-Hiker” was one of those three. Fletcher’s story featured a man as the lead character, and she says the switch to a woman for the episode simply replaced the universal theme of looming fear of ones demise with the rank tensions of a damsel in distress. Perhaps it was Serling’s desire to divert occasionally from stories about men that drove the choice to change the character to a woman, but even then, by Fletcher’s estimation, it was misguided. Serling, by his own admission, was notoriously bad at writing for women, thus the overwhelming predominance of male characters in the TZ universe, but the inclusion of more female writers – something he had more control of, and with his otherwise progressive passions, would have seemed a natural impulse – is left a grievous omission, and very telling of its times.

THE LAST FLIGHT (2/5/60, Matheson)

The first non-Serling episode and the first of Richard Matheson’s fourteen penned TZ scripts, “The Last Flight” finds its greatness in succinctly highlighting the simple elegance of a unique time travel angle. Serling and Houghton let Matheson run with the idea after his simple pitch of a WWI plane landing on a modern airfield. Lieutenant Decker (Kenneth Haigh) is a British WWI pilot who flies out of a cloud, lands his biplane on a U.S. airbase in France in 1959, and convinces one sympathetic major (Simon Scott) he’s telling the truth about where and when he’s from. He confesses his cowardice to the major, admitting he avoided a German air battle by escaping into a cloud, leaving his patrol partner behind to die in an unwinnable attack… But then he learns his partner was the same man who’s now due to inspect the base later that day. Knowing the only way the man could still be alive is if he helped him defeat the German planes, Decker realizes that time itself has given him a second chance and evades his captors, retakes his biplane, and disappears back into the cloud. We learn from the visiting inspector (Robert Warwick) that he indeed almost died in an air battle forty years ago, but was rescued by his partner, who reappeared “out of nowhere it seemed.” Unlike the only other overt time travel story to this point, “Walking Distance”, (“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” uses time travel more obliquely), this story is never overly milked for emotional impact, preferring to hook us with its ideas, rising almost solely on the strength of Matheson’s clever plotting and its deeply sincere performances. It’s more like a perfectly-crafted little toy you can hold in your hand, yet that never diminishes the sure communication of its theme: second chances are hard to come by… recognize them and take them when you can.

THE PURPLE TESTAMENT (2/12/60, Serling)

Set in Serling’s old stomping grounds, the jungles of the Philippines during wartime. The opening narration is some of his most strikingly beautiful writing, owing to familiarity: “…These are the faces of the young men who fight. As if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear – yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of battle and these are the faces of war.” His Philippines experience, losing friends along with his own innocence, informs the lack of glibness in the episode, which follows a WW2 soldier (William Reynolds) who’s picked up a gift of foresight into who will die in battle that day – their faces light up before moving out. The gift is met by his fellow soldiers and commanders with a mix of morbid curiosity and fear, wondering if they’re due to die next. The key shot of the show is a slow pan across a line of nervous grunts waiting for his notice of their impending death, trembling as if he is death itself. Serling knew this flop-sweat moment too well too many times. It’s a quiet moment that says more about his experience than any of the several scenery-chewing speeches he gives to his lead. Those are par for the course for the series in general, almost as expected as the regular twist endings, but that moment of silent wondering and waiting is why the episode matters.

THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET (3/4/60, Serling)

One of the all-time great parables on the frailty of human rationality, as relevant today as then, and as throughout all of history. A sudden light flashes over Maple Street, and the discussion by residents, led by Claude Akins, begins from a place of innocent, confused civility, but eventually descends into a panicked mob, neighbor turning on neighbor. The theories start with “meteor crash”, but turn a sharp corner when a young comic book reader relates a storyline involving aliens that send emissaries ahead “who looked just like humans… but they weren’t.” And just that simply, the spark of paranoia is lit. The pan across faces quietly shifting their allegiance from the group at large to the primordial protection of self is as chilling as the latest bit of political opinion to flit by on your Facebook feed. The finger of blame and guilt shifts from the midnight star-gazer (“It’s like he’s waiting on someone.”) to the children (“How did he come up with that story of imposters?”) to anyone who is different in any way. To our modern eyes, the dialogue and scenario can be borderline kitschy, but taken as a straight shot of allegory, it still retains a tone of the darkest possible comedy embodying a damning central truth of human weakness. Serling’s impulse to create a show as platform for his social commentary meets its most perfect expression up to this point in the show.

A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE (3/11/60, Matheson)

A welcome switch of the show’s already-typical structure, in this case prompting its surprise twist right up front, before even Serling’s opening remarks. Arthur Curtis (Howard Duff) is a good-natured businessman entering the monotony of another workday at the Davis-Morton Company, when he suddenly realizes he’s on a television soundstage and everything he believes he knows is just words from a script. Merely confused at first, the rest of the episode is Curtis protesting through his sweat who he is while everyone in his “real” life quietly talks down to the actor’s obvious nervous breakdown. The episode’s power of mystery comes from shifting perspectives from the believable Curtis (called “Jerry Raigan” by everyone else) to his equally believable friends, ex-wife, and manager, a tactic which keeps us guessing well beyond closing credits which life is really his. The overarching fun of it is thinking of Serling, Matheson, et al, producing an episode that mirrors the potentially home-wrecking, 24/7 demands of television production, wherein two things are true: the good life is often sacrificed to neglect in favor of a fictional world, and more often than is desired, the fictional world you’re creating may be a more inviting world to live in. By the end of the episode, all evidence seems to point to the nervous breakdown angle, but we secretly cheer for Curtis when he finally returns to his “real” office, his “real” wife, and they escape into a much-needed vacation. Curtis has chosen fiction – but who among us hasn’t done the same, on some level, almost daily.

LONG LIVE WALTER JAMESON (3/18/60, Beaumont)

Charles Beaumont’s third of twenty-two scripts is one of the more measured, intelligent, and quietly gripping of the series. The great Kevin McCarthy is a college history professor, Walter Jameson, whose passionate lectures seem more like tales told from experience, and that’s because he’s secretly over two thousand years old, and he was there. Much of the episode is McCarthy talking to an aging colleague (Edgar Stehli), one who’s figured out his secret, about the negative flip-side to immortality, namely the long string of necessarily abandoned relationships and the constant subterfuge regarding your true identity – to live forever requires being a man constantly on the run. McCarthy reveals his fatigue over such a life but his cowardice over ending it with his ever-present revolver. The episode has gravitas, taking its time unpacking the fatigue and regret inherent in a life long-lived, while also honestly presenting the colleague’s growing desire to experience eternal life, despite Jameson’s warnings. After months of hectic production, The Twilight Zone finally premiered on CBS during the shooting of this episode and one can’t help but connect the desire to live forever to the hope for “long legs” and many seasons to come – but as time would tell, as Jameson learned, there can be a price to pay for sticking around too long.

PEOPLE ARE ALIKE ALL OVER (3/25/60, Serling)

Another space episode, among the best sub-genres the show marketed in. This one’s almost a sequel to the first episode, as we’re again with that same type of man, a lonely-leaning, frail-seeming Sam Conrad (Roddy McDowall), a biologist sent to Mars for his inquiring scientific mind (the traveling searcher named Conrad is not lost on us) but is more racked with fear of who he’ll meet there than he is scientific curiosity. Who he meets is a group that looks a bit like an ancient Roman cult, but they seem harmless enough, until he ends up a specimen in their alien zoo, in a cage that’s a replica of a modern home, gawked at as the new exhibit on the block by a wondering Martian public. The curiosity that compels men to explore beyond their atmospheric confines is not particular to humanity, it seems, but the message here isn’t “free the animals!” Serling, in his closing statement: “…and he will remain here, in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives.” Conrad may have slipped the surly bonds of his own Earthly provincialism, but he’s now the prisoner of what would back home be considered the ultimate goal of the working man – it’s the American dream as dark twist ending.

A PASSAGE FOR TRUMPET (5/20/60, Serling)

The use of fantasy in the TZ was often done with such a light touch that the impression left is nothing like what we get from most episodes – it’s not a chill or a twist, but a novella-like reflection of a character’s mood. This brand of episode might not have given the audience what it expected by episode 32, but without efforts like “A Passage For Trumpet”, we wouldn’t have a classy show. We’re immediately with Joey Crown, Jack Klugman in the first of his four TZ episodes, a man who just wants a second chance to make good on his horn, but doesn’t get that chance, declares “I’m tired of hanging around” and takes his life. There in limbo between life and death, Serling spreads his old Playhouse 90 wings, with his words getting underneath the panic of a desperate man, one who’s always getting “dealt from the bottom,” casting Klugman as the supreme everyman monologuist, chatting it up with the unseeing extras around him. Klugman is so good he fights with Serling over whether this medium is one for writers or for actors. Joey finally gets his second chance, chooses life, blows his horn, and – unlike Decker in “The Last Flight” – we get to see him pick up fillips along the way to the musical reward of that second chance.

SEASON TWO (9/20/60 – 6/2/61)

Eps 1-3: “You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop – The Twilight Zone.”

Eps 4-29: “You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead. Your next stop – The Twilight Zone.”

A MUSICAL NOTE:  Season Two gets a musical makeover. The jangly, plucky, four-note Twilight Zone theme everyone calls to mind was not the opening music of the first season. That season featured the great Bernard Herrmann’s mysterious, coldly lush combo of harps, vibraphone, and light brass, a slowly repetitive inquiry that fit the opening imagery of a gauze-like blur being removed to reveal sharp shadows and a distant, hauntingly beckoning cave of secrets. Herrmann’s theme perfectly set the tone for a show that would be a vague nightmare of slow realizations. But season two was living on the energy of universal success – high ratings, fan clubs, an Emmy award, a Hugo award, stacks of unsolicited manuscripts, and big name actors shifting down from their usually high asking price just to appear on a prestige show. The new theme, which would grace the show for the last four seasons and provide our culture with a simple whistle-tune to accompany any and all out-of-the-ordinary dollops of random weirdness, was written by a rarely-regarded Romanian composer named Marius Constant. Engaged his entire career (he died in 2004) in emotional, avant-garde compositions for ballets and operas, Constant took a detour in the late ’50s when CBS music director Lud Guskin commissioned some short pieces for the CBS music library. Two of those he provided, “Etrange No. 3” (repeated four-note phrase on electric guitar) and “Milieu No. 2” (guitar, bongos, brass, flute), were joined together and laid under Serling’s various voice-over narrations for the next four years. It’s now some of the most recognized and evocative music in TV/film history, as ubiquitous as Herrmann’s own shrieking violins in Psycho‘s shower scene or John Williams’ primal, two-note Jaws theme. CBS owned the rights and never gave Constant screen credit, royalties, or even warning, so the day he turned on his set and heard his own music on one of the most popular shows on TV, it must have been a Twilight Zone moment of his own.

THE HOWLING MAN (11/4/60, Beaumont)

If ever the show could be said to take a few steps into Hammer horror territory, it’s Beaumont’s story of a man, Ellington (H. M. Wynant), just after WWI, on a tour of Eastern Europe, who stumbles on a forgotten monastery where none other than the devil himself is kept in lock-up by the head of the order, Brother Jerome. The tone of the show is histrionic horror, with pounding thunder, canted angles, and Ellington himself addressing the camera with a tantalizing “you must believe my tale” entreaty. As if to make sure we know it’s a horror, Brother Jerome is played by a wonderfully hammy John Carradine, with his thick beard and up-swooping white hair, looking every bit like a crazed Moses. It’s all very broad, at times almost comically so, but like so many episodes that veer into the over-ripe, the contextualizing of them in the “other dimension” of the Twilight Zone somehow colors them with the quality we know the show so often lives up to. In the end, Ellington, of course, is tricked by the devil and releases him back into the world, much to the frustration of Jerome. The episode doesn’t seem to want to be anything other than an exercise in gothic expression, and it does it well, but as an entry in the canon, it still extends the general purpose of the show to preach the sermon that man is frail, his will is weak, and even when presented an obvious opportunity to avoid evil, he will more than likely indulge in it instead.

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (11/11/60, Serling)

I have no idea if audiences watching in 1960 predicted the end of this episode. Perhaps so primed for the twists that were the highlight of almost every episode of the first season, they were looking for it and found it right away. But surely to our modern eyes, the withholding of every character’s face from minute one to the end makes our minds naturally stretch for the kind of shots we do eventually get. All of that said, the episode is without question extremely high grade storytelling, and the mood generated by the lighting and performances exceeds the concept’s limitations. In some ways, it could be called gloriously predictable, meaning even with the assumption of the medical staff’s ugliness, the anticipation for the reveal is built with ingenuity and an almost perverse filmmaking skill to bring the moment to a fever pitch. (My wife had never seen it before and her squriminess leading up to that point was palpable, a sort of fun enjoyment of what was surely to come, to the point she actually intoned, “I’m on the edge of my seat here!”) What seals the deal on the impact of the show is not just the creative makeup by the great William Tuttle, but the final moments of conversation between beautiful-to-us Janet Tyler (Maxine Stuart/Donna Douglas) and the equally-agreeable emissary from her new leper-like colony (Edson Stroll), the contents of which aren’t nearly as important as the time it gives us to superimpose our own ideas of beauty and prejudice over the proceedings: how often have I seen “ugly” and cast it into a solitary room in my mind to be forgotten, or felt myself to be not as attractive as the next person and consigned myself to said room, or stood by while others delivered judgments on those I know and love for their differences, eccentricities, or beliefs, essentially allowing an individual with a heart and brain and desires and love to be covered over with the conforming power of bigotry?

NICK OF TIME (11/18/60, Matheson)

An update and improvement of Serling’s evil slot machine story “The Fever” from season one, Matheson explores the “middle ground between science and superstition”, following newlyweds William Shatner (in his first of two TZ episodes) and Patricia Beslin, as Don and Pat Carter, on a stopover in a small town to have their car repaired. Hunkering down through the wait at a small diner, Don becomes fixated on the answers supplied to him by a penny-operated fortune-telling machine, affixed atop by a small, bobble-headed demon. Don has a rabbit’s foot, a four-leaf clover, and crosses his fingers, wading always in a seemingly innocent tide of superstition, until today, when the undertow catches him and pulls him into a kind of sweating madness. Shatner shows the simple, smiling charm that marked the early part of his career, as well as his range, as the power of his own poisoned imagination dredges up a claustrophobic fear of the unknown. What better way to control the uncontrollable in life than by getting a heads-up by any means? The most chilling moment in an otherwise straightforward narrative (one of the least histrionic or expressionistic in the series) is the quick moment when Pat tells him he needs to stop, he asks, “Why?” and she responds, “…Don’t you know?” And the moment just hangs there, for us to picture a world of unseen demonic powers swirling about Don’s head, beckoning him to succumb.

THE TROUBLE WITH TEMPLETON (12/9/60, Neuman)

The only TZ script by journeyman television writer E. Jack Neuman is one of five time travel episodes this season alone, but it’s one of the most sensitive and poignant uses of the device in the entire series. A sort of companion piece to Serling’s season one script “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”, we’re alongside an aging actor pining for the good old days. Booth Templeton (Brian Aherne) is a successful Broadway actor (his director is a young Sydney Pollack) with a new, young wife who dallies openly on the side, burning even deeper the long-lost love of his long-dead first wife. When he finds himself somehow back in his glory days, he seeks her out (she’s played by Pippa Scott), but is shocked to recall face-to-face what a selfish, vain, and immature person she actually was. Memory has played a dirty trick on him by helping him forge a haloed image out of a frayed and frustrated reality, cementing the maxim: you can never go home again. As he disappears back into the present, we stay on her face as her pungent expression melts into a loving, longing one. Her sacrifice is made known – she’s willfully tainted his correct memory of the past in order to cajole him back into living in his own present. It’s a twist that can’t hold up in the telling, too flimsy a premise against any time travel logic brought to bear, but is braced up well by the emotional execution. The episode leaves us to ponder our own memories – which of them are mutated beyond all powers of reverie and, more so, which are at all worth bestowing agency over our next step?

DUST (1/6/61, Serling)

Perhaps just a nod to a genre still popular on TV at the time, the western, Luis (John Alonso) is a Mexican set to hang for running over a little girl with his wagon while drunk. Sykes (Thomas Gomez) is a corpulently sweating traveling salesman and as good as a laughing chorus for the events that transpire, poking cruel fun at the accused even as he’s cynically selling “magic dust” to the poor man’s father (Vladimir Sokoloff) with the promise that it’ll make the haters in the crowd suddenly love. At the hanging, Sykes is as surprised as anyone when the magic seems to work, but it works instead by breaking the brand new rope that he sold to the executioner. The man is free, the town is forgiving, and Sykes is left to ponder the possible authenticity of his own product, probably for the first time. Like so many TZ episodes, there’s a lot of genre service with only a smidgen of fantasy – the construct calls to mind other genre entries like “The Big Tall Wish” about a prizefighter who wins or loses according to the power of a young boy’s fervent wishes for it to be so. Serling was never above wielding sentimentality like a weapon, but these sorts of forays often result in an episode that feels half-TZ, half-writing-challenge-to-self. “Dust” is an example of a one-off that’s probably better than most weekly westerns in terms of its careful, cinematic execution (popular westerns this season included Bonanza, Rawhide, Wagon Train, and The Rifleman), but ultimately points to the fact that the show was never as good as when the story was about a modern person experiencing things outside the realm of modern understanding.

THE INVADERS (1/27/61, Matheson)

Agnes Moorhead is alone in her old, wooden, frontier house with her rudimentary wares, only the barest minimum of tools to live by, a simple-minded, curmudgeonly mute. At last she’s visited by a couple of tiny, pesky, space-suited aliens, and the rest of the episode concerns her attempts to rid the place of them like an ad-hoc exterminator. Taking an axe to the visitors’ spaceship, we finally learn that these interlopers are from Earth and she is the enormous alien they’ve encountered. Moorhead is quite astounding as the old woman, whose grunts and cries indicate some version of mental illness or disability until her silence is realized as an alien limitation. Outside of a few short lines uttered by the doomed earthlings, the episode is completely dialogue-free, a radical departure from the often run-on dialogue that typically cascades across the storylines. Alongside “Time Enough At Last”, Serling himself named this episode a favorite, calling it “pure science fiction”, yet he also named it exemplary of the “desperate, built-in problem of doing proper science fiction on television”, citing the “little wind-up rubber men” that are supposed to represent astronauts, a poor effect which nearly destroys the illusion and impact of the show’s drama. While it doesn’t make them any more believable, the fact that the “wind-up men” were actually operated by hand, through slits in the figures’ backs, at least points to slightly more thought and craft. Matheson intended only quick glances at the figures and was disappointed when the final cut featured such long, unconvincing shots of the men. Yet this glaring flaw in the production hasn’t kept “The Invaders” from being one of the most cited episodes in the entire run of the show.

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS (2/3/61, Johnson)

George Clayton Johnson’s first TZ script concerns a man, Hector Poole, who tosses a coin that lands on its edge, a one in a million chance, and finds that he can now read minds. He goes about his menial accounts job at the bank hearing the deep secrets and idle thoughts of his coworkers. He at first delights in his new gift, and it’s generally played for humor, which is the lucky gift of actor Dick York (Darrin #1 on Bewitched). He gets himself into some trouble when he starts acting on what he hears – a cad thinking lascivious thoughts about a lovely office worker gets a cupful of water over his head, a client who plans to use his loan to bet on horses gets outed to the boss, and an old, disgruntled worker who threatens to steal money from the bank for a trip to Bermuda gets Poole’s pointer finger. Johnson’s story is one of the better, more measured comedies in the series, one that benefits from York, who can be amusing even when he’s playing it believably straight – his earnest actions to stop the old man from stealing bank cash are imbued with a kind of beleaguered everyman quality that communicates his newfound gift is actually quickly becoming a burden. The humor is rounded out with a couple of more-intentionally funny moments: Poole thinks he’s hearing the thoughts of a bust statue, but it’s the maid hunched over on the other side of the wall, and at one point he steps up to a woman staring into space and there’s only silence. Poole is fired for accusing the old man, who later quietly confesses to Poole he was thinking of stealing money – as he does every day, but says he’d never actually act on it. The beauty of the episode is that Poole learns not everything he hears is something that’ll be acted on, a smart reality-twist on the old wish fulfillment angle, but the audience also gets to enjoy him using his temporary gift to leverage a promotion and a bank-expensed trip to Bermuda for the old man. Johnson had several of his stories adapted by others for the show prior to “A Penny For Your Thoughts”, but the smarts, humor, and nonintrusive pathos of his first official script prove he could’ve done fine all along – as I’m sure he suggested with more than just his mind.

THE ODYSSEY OF FLIGHT 33 (2/24/61, Serling)

According to producer Houghton, the single most expensive bit of film in all of The Twilight Zone was in this otherwise simply shot episode of a commercial jet airliner bouncing through time. When the crew, led by pilot John Anderson (his second of four TZ episodes), passes the aircraft impossibly over a prehistoric vista, the brief stop-motion shots of a bemused brontosaurus cost production a then-whopping $2,500. Meanwhile, the remarkably accurate cockpit chatter comes from Serling’s brother, Robert, an aviation writer with pilot connections, and that dialogue provides the bed of authenticity that helps us suspend our disbelief in the first place. This is another premise whose gimmick is so tantalizing that the very idea of it provides most of the energy of the half hour. There’s nothing to it beyond the basic complication (“how did this happen and how will we get home?”), yet we’re pulled into the suspense by the credibility of that crew. Serling’s own natural professionalism attracted him to scenarios that celebrated good men doing a good job, so we get stories of stalwarts whose competence is challenged and proven by the bizarre. But more so than any of that, what makes the episode so creepily indelible is the lack of closure – we’re left as the passengers and crew are left, in a state of limbo, never knowing if their final destination will forever remain a hazy hope on the horizon of time.

LONG DISTANCE CALL (3/3/61, Beaumont/William Idelson)

In late 1960, as a cost-cutting plan, production began on six episodes shot on videotape instead of film. The result was a few thousand saved per episode, but a critical loss in the quality of the programs. Recorded on soundstages at CBS Television City with multiple cameras and edited “in-camera” in the same way sitcoms and game shows are created, a severe limitation was placed on the scope of the stories and on the extent of creativity so often afforded the show’s directors and lighting men. But that’s nothing compared to the loss of dramatic impact when a Twilight Zone episode looks more like a soap opera than the “reality” afforded by moodily nuanced film stock. Watching “Long Distance Call”, the last of the six shot this way, is like watching, at best, an old Tales of Tomorrow episode, at worst, a Lawrence of Arabia on your friend’s TV with the wrong refresh rate setting – just wrong. And it’s a shame, since by all other accounts, this is a quality script with good acting, and a classically creepy premise: Billy’s (Billy Mumy, his first of three episodes) grandmother gives him a toy telephone so he can call her any time he wants. When she dies, and their conversations continue, he’s convinced he needs to keep her company and begins finding ways to off himself until his frightened parents intervene. This is the kind of story that requires mood to work – absent that, we’re left feeling like we’re watching a staged run-through. The network realized what Serling must have known immediately, that it was a mistake, and they promptly returned to tried-and-true film for the remainder of the series. This is a good ghost story, but an episode with a near-crippling asterisk.

THE SILENCE (4/28/62, Serling)

Offered here simply as an example of an episode featuring no elements of the supernatural, magic, science fiction, or fantasy of any kind, fitting the show more appropriately in the Alfred Hitchcock Zone or the Thriller Zone or even the O. Henry Zone. “The Silence” is built on a simple bet from one rich and prideful man (Taylor/Franchot Tone) at a men’s club to an annoying, overly-chatty and financially desperate man at the club (Tennyson/Liam Sullivan): lock yourself in a glass cage and don’t say a word for an entire year and receive half a million dollars. Taylor, by nine months in and fearing his bet may be lost, begins pitching lies about Tennyson’s wife to get him to exit early, but Tennyson stays strong so that by story’s end, it’s less an evaluation of his stamina, and more a picture of the desecration of Taylor’s honor. When Tennyson emerges the victor, Taylor confesses he’s actually a fraud with no money, and the devastating twist is revealed: Tennyson, knowing he’d never shut up for a year, has severed his vocal cords. It’s a twist worthy of The Twilight Zone, but minus the added dollop of the “weird”, which puts it in a very short list that includes maybe only one other, Serling’s season five espionage cat-and-mouser “The Jeopardy Room”. Both prove the usual TZ conceit could have been set aside more often with no harm done to its overall speculative cred.

THE OBSOLETE MAN (6/2/61, Serling)

Here’s a tale that plays like Kafka meets Fahrenheit 451. Burgess Meredith is back in the land of both shadow and substance, again concerned with the possession and appreciation of books, but this time obliterated by the mass destruction of not bombs but social oppression. Because he’s a librarian, and the ruling neo-Nazi state has outlawed logic and religion and any book that contains such ideas, he is to be made obsolete. The extremely expressionistic set design and feel of the first and last acts are clearly inspired by Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and its theme hopes to connect the passion for a free society to a rightly religious fervor. Meredith is cast as a gentle prophet wielding his secular jeremiad, and proving his worth as a human being with a kind of humble yet Machiavellian wisdom. Once he traps his accuser inside the same death chamber he’s been consigned to, he shows the watching world who the coward is, and sacrifices himself for the good of a future freedom yet un-reborn. Its position as the last episode of the season, and layered as it is with broad castigations of fascism, oppression, and closed-mindedness, make it feel a bit like Serling’s last scramble for an important message before final curtain on the series. One wonders if he knew there’d be three more seasons if he’d have toned it down, but as it stands, it’s as bold and declarative, if on-the-nose, a statement he ever dished on the show. His closing narration includes: “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.” It’s the kind of message anyone free enough to watch a TV show like this come a Friday night in 1961 would be unlikely to disagree with.

SEASON THREE (9/15/61 – 6/1/62)

“You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop – The Twilight Zone.”

TWO (9/15/61, Montgomery Pittman)

The season opener finds us years past some apocalyptic event, and, in a continuation of an informal tradition set by season openers “Where is Everybody?” and “King Nine Will Not Return”, we’re again in a story of solo humans wandering the barren and battered land. This time there are the two of the title, a man (Charles Bronson) and a woman (Elizabeth Montgomery), each from a different side of some unnamed war, and we watch them navigate their inborn, or army-taught, hatred. Bronson is the one who wants peace, while Montgomery has the itchy trigger finger. Much like season five’s “The Encounter” and John Boorman’s 1968 film Hell in the Pacific (Lee Marvin/Toshiro Mifune), there’s the imperative to transcend mandated hostilities, to find some kind of common ground or else die alone and starving. In the half-hour format, there’s not much room to work out the slow progress that would be necessary to bridge hate and acceptance, and the final truce – represented by the two each independently finding civilian clothes and presenting themselves to each other – feels a little quick. But the message is nevertheless well presented with sensitive acting by both, and a stress on the optimism that is in short supply, but is yet within reach even in the middle of desolation.

THE SHELTER (9/29/61, Serling)

A companion piece to season one’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, this version of the parable has a streetful of neighbors tearing each other apart over the one and only bomb shelter in the midst of a government warning of approaching UFOs. Every television-friendly vice is brought to the surface – racial prejudice, selfish pride, teeth-gnashing hatred – as one man, his wife and son in tow, sticks to his Noah-like reasoning that the rest were warned and chose to party instead, so no one will be let inside. The illogical use of a bettering ram by the amassed neighbors to rip open the door is followed by the radio blaring the news that the UFOs were in fact just satellites. Shamed and beaten by the whip-turn back to sanity, apologies and concessions are handed around – until our one shelter-building wise man declares the lot of them, including himself, broken beyond repair. It’s another brow-beating by preacher Serling, with broad character types providing the fodder for his latest sermon on mob brutality. The acting, along with its very lack of subtly, is what keeps it entertaining, while its reminder of just who our neighbors might actually be has a resonance in these recent days of renewed fears of wars and bombs. It makes you want to build a bomb shelter under your apartment, if only it wasn’t already the parking garage.

IT’S A GOOD LIFE (11/3/61, Serling)

What a great representation of the eggshell life anyone has to lead with an authoritarian creep in their life. The smallest and the cutest among this family is the monster, the kid, Anthony (Billy Mumy again), the one forever enabled by the fear that he creates with his powerful, selfish, petty, demanding, and wholly childish will. Everyone’s behavior is warped according to his will, to be kind, to be smiling, to be accommodating, to be at all times what he wants you to be. “Sometimes he can hear what we’re thinking, even when he’s not here. So you just go on thinking nice thoughts, won’t you?” So pervasive are the emotional tendrils of the covert-aggressive, or the alcoholic, or the serial abuser of wife or of child, or the raging egotist with little regard for the humanity of those around him, that even when they’re not there, they control your thoughts. The little boy is the immature child inside any of these cretins, be he a pauper or president, and the family is anyone who can’t find the will to unmask the fascist monster. It’s another story like many other Serling stories that present a world spirit-broken by oppression and constraint in the service of one man’s corrupted ego, but this one rises above all of them for its sheer, creepy, entirely recognizable enemy.

DEATH’S-HEAD REVISITED (11/10/61, Serling)

Here is Serling’s exercise in Jewish catharsis, fighting in a theater of the war he was denied by his tour in the Philippines, dropping a former SS captain back into a concentration camp filled with the ghosts of those he tortured, and getting a bit of the old eye-for-an-eye retribution. Oscar Beregi is almost too believable as Gunther Lutze, proud of his accomplishments during the heat of WW2, and enjoying a day trip back to his old stomping grounds, the now-abandoned Dachau… Or is it abandoned? What he finds is a caretaker, Becker (Joseph Schildkraut), who’s really one of his old victims, and he greets Lutze with a solemn welcome before introducing a barracks full of ghosts who proceed to try him for his crimes against them and the world. Lutze travels the arc from “strutting animal” to writhing madman over the course of his two-hour stay, the display of guilt-dredged pain recalling The Man in the Glass Booth, with Lutze the shouting stand-in for all evil and Becker for anyone who was ever neck-pressed by a jackbook. Viewers must make up their own minds about the success of a venture like this – it is certainly powerful, but is it tasteful? I’m guessing from all I’ve seen and read of Serling, he wouldn’t care. The fact that something like this story, so nakedly about a specific evil, not hiding behind a drape of science fiction or even, really, fantasy, despite the ghosts, came to audiences in season three, indicates he was finally feeling the power and freedom that grows out of his personal goals for the show – that it should be a platform for his passions, and it should be unafraid of the sponsor’s backlash.

ONCE UPON A TIME (12/15/61, Matheson)

It must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it sounds like a good idea right now. Put legendary silent film comedian Buster Keaton in a time travel story by Richard Matheson directed by a guy (Norman Z. McLeod) who directed the Marx Bros, W.C. Fields, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope. And maybe this is more beloved an episode than I’m giving it credit for, but for my money, the conceit doesn’t work if there’s no pacing. Matheson claims it would’ve been faster and funnier with all the moments he says they left out of his script – but that’s trying to prove a negative. As it stands, the opening 1890 scene is funny enough, if only due to the choice to make it appear as an old silent film, complete with title cards and sped-up film – but perhaps to laugh at those things is just a cultural Pavlovian response. But there’s no questioning that once poor, curmudgeonly, penny-pinching Woodrow Mulligan jumps into 1961, the comedy stops. Had it gone somewhere clever from there, it might’ve saved itself, but it’s stagnant as comedy, and a disservice to the expert timing and creativity of Keaton in his heyday. I will say that, at least for this sort of gimmick episode, as short as it is, I was delighted to hear Keaton’s flat, gravelly accent (which reminds me warmly of the great radio storyteller Jean Shepherd), and there’s definite joy in watching him give his all, verbally and physically, at his age. The conceit is still a good one, but it plays better in my mind as a concept than it does on the screen as a TZ episode. If there’s a takeaway, it’s the oft-related Midnight In Paris-ish life lesson that your own time is the best time for you, so stop complaining.

A QUALITY OF MERCY (12/29/61, Serling)

“You talk like it’s a football game and this is no football game, Lieutenant. It’s one long hard gut-ache with a lot of torn-up, mangled guys, and it’s gonna take a long time for us to forget it.” It’s one thing to mete out a “shoe’s on the other foot” parable to show the bloodthirsty young wannabe hero what it’s like to be the enemy, but there’s a cringy, misguided conceit in the heart of the execution, the fact that Dean Stockwell has to play both an anally by-the-book American officer and a Japanese soldier under a similar Japanese captain, and all the racist infractions that implies. But seen from the perspective of Serling’s own bloody experience at the hands of the Japanese, it’s a remarkably circumspect position, to exercise empathy toward the greatest enemy you’ll ever face. Many men never survived that enemy. Serling lived long enough, not to forget it, but to work it out, to join the throngs crying out against war, but also to come to the hard-won conclusion that to hate war means to love your enemies, present and past.

TO SERVE MAN (3/2/62, Serling)

The story begins from aboard a spaceship in flight, via the sci-fi-ish interpretation of the noir-ish device of a beleaguered man, his regretful voiceover, and his flashback, which is essentially a replay of so many ’50s sci-fi movies: the sudden appearance of flying saucers – those of the Kanamits – the desperate scrambling of sober men to put a lid on worldwide panic, the requisite conversation among UN delegates and the nine-foot Kanamit representative, this one looking remarkably like Richard Kiel with a huge headache – and that’s because it is Richard Kiel and probably with a headache, given the massive prosthetic cranium gummed to his scalp. He reads from a large book whose title is later deciphered as “To Serve Man”, which cinches up most of the more ominous fears of the various scientists and delegates. The visiting race promises, then delivers, a slate of fixes for the Earth that eventually abolishes war and hunger, ushering in a new kind of Eden across the planet. The crux of the thinking audience’s attention to this story is the obvious parallel to the so-called infiltration of subversive elements into American government and culture, and the constant friction inherent in the attempted balance between verifiable trust and the real desire to believe a good thing when you see it. And then there’s the quick but incisive examination of the dependable ability of man to adjust to huge shifts in whatever “the norm” might be this minute: within months of the Kanamits’ arrival, humans all over the world are willingly boarding ships for another planet, with promises of comfort and fun and, one assumes, quality cinema and finely-aging wine – only to discover humans are intended to be the alien planet’s dinner, like some intergalactic truck full of chickens, per the alternate meaning of that simple book title. The episode is relatively unique, and somewhat refreshing, in that its momentum is reliant on the ultimate optimism of humankind when presented with good alternatives, rather than the usual bleak assumption of our faults, and also may be the only one in the series where the twist is predicated on a homonym.

LITTLE GIRL LOST (3/16/62, Matheson)

Every parent’s nightmare – with a twist. Little Tina (Tracy Stratford) isn’t just lost, she’s stuck in another dimension. Mom and Dad (Robert Sampson, Sarah Marshall) can hear her, but they can’t see her. Luckily, their neighbor (Charles Aidman) is a physicist with a theory, and he acts on it, helping Dad to push his way through an offending inter-dimensional wall and pull the girl back to safety. It’s the prototype of everything from Poltergeist to Stranger Things and virtually any horror movie or TV episode that features a journey into a pesky, needy 4th dimension. Matheson works the blank empty spots of dread and confusion with believable parental authority – after all, the idea sprang from a real moment of panic when he went to his own daughter’s room and couldn’t find her… she’d fallen between the bed and the opposite wall. The episode is one of those classics that everyone remembers, but the concept may be better than the execution. One feels the story stretching to fit the half hour, with long, theoretical exposition on the 4th dimension tipping the scale in the middle part of the show. But the creepy factor – namely the haunting, disembodied voice of the little girl (oddly, recorded by an adult, Rhoda Williams) – pulls you along toward a hearty payoff by seeing the smoky gauze and twisty echoes of the other side – all done with oily lenses, smoke machines, and spinning optical prints, while the outer wall, defying your better sense, is a perspective trick: one wall positioned slightly behind the other so the camera’s angle allows a hand or two to disappear into the mystical beyond. Effects aside, any actual emotional traction here is courtesy of your own personal parenting nightmares.

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC (5/18/62, Bradbury)

Ray Bradbury’s one and only produced contribution. His track record of novels and short stories made him a shoe-in as a go-to for the show, and in fact he was approached by Serling and producer Buck Houghton (seasons 1-3) before the series launched, upon which Bradbury submitted a couple of original teleplays, but they were deemed un-producible from a budget standpoint, and nothing came of the relationship till late third season. “I Sing the Body Electric” is, of course, based on Bradbury’s own story. A widower (Bewitched‘s David White), concerned by the new lack of maternal guidance for his children, takes them to Facsimile Ltd., which produces robotic nannies “capable of giving loving supervision to your children.” Two of the kids are gung-ho, excitedly choosing body parts from a selection of all shapes and sizes, but young Anne (Veronica Cartwright of Lost in Space, Alien) is still angry over mom’s tragic departure and when the new grandmother (Josephine Hutchinson) arrives, she refuses to accept her. Eventually, after a traffic accident that should’ve killed the faux caretaker but for her steel skeleton, Anne realizes she’ll never leave them and finally accepts her. This is one of the handful of episodes that doesn’t rely on a twist to reveal some truth or life lesson, which sets it apart from most of the series, makes it feel like a one-off, even if you don’t know it was the only one written by a prominent outside writer. But its existence at all within the context of the Twilight Zone universe nudges the imagination into a realm I think the story doesn’t intend me to go: namely, there’s a kind of cold creepiness to this older woman who’s so chipper as she bounds around dispensing wisdom and soothing broken hearts, and who continually reminds everyone she’s a robot who will never die. “That’s my job, to live forever,” she says by way of comforting poor mourning Anne. Grandma does “die” eventually – once the kids are college age (all starting at the same time, apparently), she packs her bags for Facsimile Ltd., where she says her “mind” will go into “storage” where it’ll share stories of what it’s learned with other minds until she’s needed again, perhaps years from now. But this up-beat departure, in this quick truncation of events, unfortunately bypasses the poignancy of Bradbury’s original story. Producer Houghton has commented on the rift between Serling and Bradbury (along with most science fiction authors of the era) over the wanton overlap of many TZ ideas and those extant in the print world. The show was careful to change stories well enough to stand apart, and the paucity of potential original ideas in a more general sense makes the accusation seem unduly pernicious. Serling never expressed a “gotcha” attitude about any of this, only kept his head down and focused on trying to make the best show he could, under growing network pressure, including the mandate to move from the half-hour format (the first three seasons) to an hour (season four only)…

SEASON FOUR (1/3/63 – 5/23/63)

Seasons 4 and 5 opening: “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is 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. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”

In many ways, season four was a different show. First, the obvious: it went from a half-hour to an hour per episode. The result of this decision is obvious with any episode you watch from that season, made even clearer by virtue of the fifth season beating a hasty retreat back to thirty minutes. Second, for reasons that I can’t find in research anywhere, the title card dropped the “The”, so that now it’s called just Twilight Zone. And third, Serling as on-set dynamo of energy was a thing of the past. He’d already begun a second career as a writing professor at his alma mater, Antioch College in Ohio. What had begun as a retreat back home became a minor, and loved, obsession. Thus, whatever writing contributions he made for the season were sent by envelope across country and modified by phone conversations. He made notes on the other writers’ scripts, but otherwise had little role in casting or any other on-set decision. That fell to new producer Herbert Hirschman, who replaced departing workhorse Buck Houghton. A visual devaluation of the show comes subtly: Serling was not in L.A. most of the time, so any time he was, Hirschman scuttled him onto the set to film a handful of intro/epilogue narrations at once, so gone are the fun whip-pans to Serling “inside” of each individual world and to stay are the drab cameos of Serling against dark, blank wall – like some sad psychological cue that daddy was away on business. While the show retains the thrust of the basic premise of the previous three seasons, it was demonstrably… different. And it suffered for it. Nevertheless, the shorter season (it was a mid-season replacement, so only eighteen episodes against the usual thirty-plus) still yielded a handful of fair-to-good shows, some of which I’ve highlighted below, with heavy caveats.

IN HIS IMAGE (1/3/63, Beaumont)

The first of the hour long episodes contains the seeds of the new format’s doom – unnecessary scenes, a kind of dirge-like, somnambulant pacing, and simply too much extra time for the characters’ navel-gazing – but as such, “In His Image” still has enough freshness of concept and a clever-enough series of revelations that it stands as one of the better of the season. The first half of the episode follows Alan Talbot (George Grizzard), who hangs with his new fiancée while, unaware of it, he also goes on crazy, murderous sprees in the night. (The Talbot/Wolf Man connection is not lost here.) Feeling unsettled, he hunts down a name he’s got floating in his fevered mind and finds, throughout the second half of the episode, that he’s actually an exact double and robotic creation of Walter Ryder, whose dream was always to create the perfect human. An over-long explication of the idea of doubles ensues, followed by a tussle, and finally the malfunctioning Alan is sidelined. The first long episode tests the patience of anyone accustomed to the half-hour format, which had been ingrained as the best medium for, as Matheson described it, “a really smashing idea that hit you right in the first few seconds, then you played that out, and you had a little flip at the end.” It’s exponentially difficult to sustain interest in the basic “smashing” idea for twice the time, so there was the infusion of more character building, but as a show that all but prided itself on its nifty parables of social criticism and commentary, character building simply wasn’t part of the expected formula. Audiences noticed. But the die had been cast, and the season was already under way.

HE’S ALIVE (1/24/63, Serling)

Dennis Hopper hones his intensity chops as Peter, a young “bush-league fuhrer” in neo-Nazi garb preaching fascism on the street corner, but he gets no takers for his brand of hate and fear-mongering. Hopper’s natural, squirmy vulnerability generates an unexpected sympathy for the rabble-rousing punk, even if the emotional exposition Serling relies on to make him semi-justified (“What have I ever had to love? A drunken father who slammed me against the wall?”) is a bit on the purple side. The Twilight Zone-y twist is presented rather early when Peter gets a visit by a silhouetted figure who seems to be (and later proves to be) Adolph Hitler himself, or some ghostly facsimile thereof, and Peter gets an impromptu education in Cause Management 101. But again, the length gives the episode too much room for speechifying that hammers home the theme far beyond what’s needed, and, in this case, presents no sense of time or place for the fear to gain an immediacy for the audience. I suppose the thinking is that this kind of thing can spring up anytime, anyplace, but an hour of it is a labor, and all the good things about the episode become moldy by the end, diminishing the brunt of a message that’s never not important.

MINIATURE (2/21/63, Beaumont)

Robert Duvall is Charley Parkes, a gentle misfit who falls in love with the figure of a beautiful woman in a dollhouse display at his local museum. To him, the figure and the others inhabiting the replica 19th century home are alive, and he remains transfixed by this miniature life. The premise is at first patently silly, and such a manifest outward sign of mental collapse that we can only side with his employer, co-workers, family, and museum security when they declare him peculiar, an outcast, and a square peg – he’s Boo Radley with a job – but eventually it reveals itself as a kind of street-level fairy tale. Still, for my money, the only thing keeping it afloat as a drama is Duvall’s sensitive portrayal of loneliness – the man is forever believable on screen, even at this neophyte stage of his career, wrapping his smart-simpleton earnestness around the part until we’re okay watching him cry over a tiny wooden doll. The episode is available on streaming services and is, of course, included in DVD and Blu-ray box sets, but for decades it went virtually unseen due to a plagiarism lawsuit that was eventually dropped, the irony being that the manuscript sent into TZ producers, about a man who prefers life among “living” mannequins at a department store, is itself extremely close to the previous TZ episode “The After Hours”. The wondrous land beyond that of imagination, it turns out, is not beyond the reach of the occasional litigious opportunist.

ON THURSDAY WE LEAVE FOR HOME (5/2/63, Serling)

One of the show’s great outer space episodes is found deep in the weakest season, an incisive character study of a man who can feel his assumed power slipping away and replaced by a dreaded feeling of uselessness. William Benteen (James Whitmore) is the leader of a group of space pioneers who’ve been trapped on a desolate rock of a planet for thirty years. Many of the population of 180-plus weren’t even born when they landed there looking for a new Eden to escape the wars and famines of Earth, so Banteen has become a sort of ad-hoc president with a side order of oral historian of the beautiful things they left behind. When a rescue ship finally arrives, there’s a genuine uplift of relief from everyone, including Benteen, until he’s relegated to just another settler being wrangled with orders from the rescuers. For once, the hour format actually works in aid of the proper kind of character development. We need to see the steady accumulation of small, humiliating moments that feed Benteen’s growing pride. “He thinks he’s a god and we’re booting him out of heaven.” But the great Whitmore never plays it with belligerent hubris. Instead he reads the character as one who knows his place, knows his people, and knows that without him they would have all perished by now – he just wants to see that process to the end. Serling’s balanced approach to this study of two types of leadership is precise and telling: what greater allegory could he have written of the steady loss of creative control of his own television show, one that he built with his own hands, but is, by this point, slipping more and more into the hands of others? The plot hinges on Benteen convincing the people against their stated will to stay together once they’re back on Earth, his argument being that without each other – and especially without him – they can’t survive. Ultimately, this is a literary episode about those twin vices, pride and prejudice – a self-deluded assumption of eternal importance and a prejudice against anything that counters the small, rocky, impenetrable world you’ve created for yourself.

THE BARD (5/23/63, Serling)

In this final one-hour episode, an all-out comedy, Jack Weston, seen earlier as a sniveling reactionary in “Monsters Are Due”, is a wannabe television writer named Julius Moomer who, under great pains and a severe deadline to prove himself to his frustrated agent, has to write a pilot for a show about black magic over the weekend. We’re in farcical territory, and if you don’t believe me, just wait for the moment when a book on black magic flies of its own volition off a library shelf at Moomer’s feet and later Shakespeare (John Williams) pops into his room to punch up the writing. But all this is just a bit of fun before Serling lets loose with his targeted jabs at his own industry. Like the loose-but-serious quality of “The Obsolete Man” at the end of season two, one gets the feeling Serling is doing a “last words” kind of thing here, but with comedy. In the guise of just-joking, he gets away with a barrage of broadsides against everyone from agents (whiplashing from berating the writer to calling him a “modern-day chronicler of human foibles” when the right people are in the room) to network big shots (none of whom seem to recognize actual Shakespeare dialogue when they read it) to the sponsors (demonstrating their eager willingness to change the words of Shakespeare – “onion” from a The Taming of the Shrew quote becomes “turnip”…”You say turnip to the lady in Dubuque, she’s with you.”) to actors (a young Burt Reynolds does a keen Brando impersonation asking with intensity, “What’s my tertiary motivation?”). The thrill of this episode is like nothing else in the series – it’s the fun of watching Shakespeare himself having to suffer under the indignity of having his work changed by a group of TV hacks. It’s among the best comedy episodes the show turned out, coming as it does from the guts of a bullied writer of Serling’s caliber, who’d more than suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous network notes.

SEASON FIVE (9/27/63 – 6/19/64)

By Serling’s own admission, the writing in season five was well below his own standard: “Toward the end I was writing so much that I felt I had begun to lose my perspective on what was good or bad.” But as is his nature, he’s downplaying the quality of the whole at the expense of some good work throughout. In any case, at least we’re back to Rod on set, back to his whip-pan intros inside the opening scene at hand, restoring a subliminal bond between host and universe that was missing in season four. And, gratefully, the shows are back to their rightful thirty-minute length. In all, there are fewer episodes that were culturally indelible, a sure sign that the end was near, or in some ways had already passed. Yet there’s enough here of quality to make fans happy the network tossed out the line one more time…

IN PRAISE OF PIP (9/27/63, Serling)

Contrary to dismissals of season four above, this is a story that could have actually used a full hour to unspool. With an actor like Jack Klugman, simply getting a glimpse of his life running rackets in the underworld leaves too much untold – there’s a depth to his prematurely craggy face that pulls you into his inner world, makes you want to know more, or at least have more time to watch him work it out. Here he’s an alcoholic con-man whose son, he learns, is near death on an operating table “in a place called South Vietnam” (the first network show to acknowledge casualties in that war-to-be), and the jolt of news inspires a violent escape from his bookie boss that results in a mortal stab wound of his own. Stumbling through the lanes of a nearby carnival, he has an encounter with his son’s 10-year-old self (Billy Mumy again), wherein the man seeks forgiveness for his absentee fatherhood. Klugman comes full circle over his several TZ appearances. When we first meet him in season one he’s a trumpet player who offs himself over his own alcoholic destruction of potential, hovers in limbo, but then chooses life as a second chance to succeed; in season four’s “Death Ship” he’s in a time loop, forever trying to cheat death by thwarting the forever-inevitable crash of his space ship; and finally in this story, he freely chooses death so his combat-wounded son can live, a barter of supernatural proportions. It’s a love story of father and son and a fantasy on the edge of death that deals in the themes of loss, regret, sacrifice, and personal salvation. Meanwhile, Serling-the-writer is back in a kind of rare form in a story that bolts together his penchant for sentiment with an oblique but strong rejection of war.

NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET (10/11/63, Matheson)

Man sees gremlin on wing of plane, can’t convince anyone else it’s there, simple as that. It’s hard to prove, but this has to be the most popular – or at least the most popularly known – episode in the Twilight Zone canon, even to those who haven’t seen it, and that’s for several reasons. 1) The script by Matheson mixes two palpable fears into one: the universal and very natural physical fear of being sealed into a tube that then hurtles through the sky, and the intangible fear of being alone inside your own paranoid vision of doom. 2) William Shatner’s performance is so good it’s fun, just like the best of anything he’s done in his career, letting us see the strings of his acting just enough to enjoy the technique as much as the story surrounding it – it’s a kind of (probably) unintentional meta-self-consciousness that in instances like this melt into the hard-to-believe plot to create a balance. 3) The direction by Richard Donner, known best for later directing Superman, The Goonies, and the Lethal Weapon franchise, is quite flawless, squeezing just enough juice out of Bob’s (Shatner’s) “abject cowardice” to make the legitimacy of his nightmare a question mark up to the final reveal, and allowing room for some of wife Ruth’s (Christine White) understandable histrionics. She is the unsung straight man in this scenario, all of her reactions completely believable, from a psychological standpoint, and her love for him never wavering even as he’s preparing for his final descent into madness. If there’s a bone to pick with the episode, it’s that it tips its hand a bit too much toward the reality of what Bob saw, rather than letting the event remain a mystery in the viewer’s mind (the fun of many of the more paranoid episodes). Beyond just the end reveal of the ripped-up wing circuitry, Serling’s closing remarks lend too much credibility to what should be an extension of Bob’s own fear of insanity: “…his isolation will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so tangible a quarter as the Twilight Zone.” It’s a misfire in an otherwise perfect entertainment, with testament to its ultimate quality pinned exactly on the fact that it happens to survive William Tuttle’s rather silly “furry bear” gremlin suit.

LAST NIGHT OF A JOCKEY (10/25/63, Serling)

Another “guy in a room alone” episode, but when the guy is Mickey Rooney it’s hard not to watch. He’s the titular jockey, of course, name of Grady, barking into a phone at such a pitch right at the top of the show that you wonder if he has anywhere left to go. He’s down on his luck, up on his venom, defending himself against the truth coming at him through the telephone, that after the streak of violations and reprimands, he’ll never work again. It’s quite a thing to watch an actor so unconcerned with being liked, so unaware in his passion that he’s an unappealing basket case of sweat and bile, so close to the borderline of abject self-immolation that he might ignite right there on the soundstage. Rooney owns that little fake room, to the point you almost don’t need the infusion of fantasy – but you get it anyway. His cleaned-up and sober self appears to him in a mirror and offers him, genie-like, anything he wants. When Rooney, as Grady, screams that he’s tired of being a shrimp, that he wants to be “Big…Big!!“, you have a hunch he’s speaking as Rooney, the one-time biggest star in the world, one of the wealthiest, most popular actors of the golden age of film, but consigned for the better part of three years to almost nothing but one-off television appearances. Meaning, there’s a palpable need in his performance that seems to out the reality of his life. But even more than that, it doesn’t take much to transfer the entire script to Serling’s own state of mind – as of this episode, the show had yet another brand new on-set producer, it had become a compendium of its own self-struck clichés, and Serling himself was burning out, having continually written for nearly five years straight. The episode, with its bigger-than-life theme of becoming big and paying the price for that wish, seems to have bled right out of the man’s own desperation.

LIVING DOLL (11/1/63, Beaumont/Jerry Sohl)

“A little weirdy about a man and a doll,” says Serling. Apparently young Christie’s seeing a psychiatrist to get through the tough transition to life with mommy’s new husband, Eric, an ogre-ish Telly Savalas, but when the girl brings home a new Talky Tina doll (voiced by cartoon voice actor June Foray) and the doll starts taunting Eric with declarations of hatred alongside threats of actual bodily harm – “My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to killll yooou…” – it’s clear who the unbalanced one is. Wife Annabelle (Mary LaRoche) and Christie (Tracy Stratford of “Little Girl Lost”) make the best of it as dad winds down from snarky, above-it accusations to crumbling paranoia. By the time he’s putting Talky Tina’s neck through a buzz saw, we can see how much fun Savalas is having, letting Eric’s sick neuroses and hatred for all of life pour out onto a defenseless doll he’s convinced wants to kill him. A rather tragic aside: the story is Beaumont’s but was actually written by fellow writer Jerry Sohl. In a terrible personal turn, Beaumont (who wrote more TZ episodes than anyone but Serling) became ill about this time with a strange set of symptoms that wrecked his concentration and made him age prematurely. He soon lost his ability to pitch ideas or apply story notes to existing scripts, but his writer friends (on TZ and other shows) did what they could to help keep him afloat, and let him take credit for scripts that they wrote. He was later diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease possibly related to spinal meningitis from his childhood. He died in 1967 at the unforgivable age of 38.

THE OLD MAN IN THE CAVE (11/8/63, Serling)

You can’t let the series end without getting in another post-apocalyptic story. Unfortunately, this one isn’t necessarily a standout. It’s twist, the “old man” is really a computer that lets the straggling townsfolk know how best to survive into the tenth year post-bomb, isn’t nearly as good as the meat of the show, which is the violent intrusion of authoritarian control into the peaceful coterie of survivors. The forced order comes in the form of the great-as-always James Coburn, as Major French, and his small band of military droogs who lord it over the people with a tattered boot, intent on breaking the will, especially, of de facto man in charge, Mr. Goldsmith (John Anderson). The fear inspired by Coburn connects with the fear we can still see all around us, the naked political play for our emotions, our passions, our allegiance. But it’s hard to tell if this is meant as a political or a religious allegory – the military presence speaks to the political, but when French incites a riot against the computer that’s been “feeding them lies and starving them of food” and the entire town, minus Goldsmith, destroys it, the Major cries “Don’t you see, now you’re free. You’re free!” it sure feels like a God Is Dead moment – and the deal is palpably sealed when the computer’s warning of contaminated food proves true, and Goldsmith is the only one left alive. The real sin of the episode isn’t its muddy targets, though, it’s Serling’s purple preaching: a key and consistent crime in this season, more so than usual, is his seeming need to hammer the message home in final dialogue. When Goldsmith looks over the entirely dead town and speaks over French’s lifeless body and says, “When we talked about the ways men could die, we forgot the chief method of execution – faithlessness…Maybe this has to be the destiny of man,” then you know it’s time Serling hired an editor.

NIGHT CALL (2/7/64, Matheson)

If you’re going to tell a ghost story, why not get the best storyteller? The great director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie) lends his considerable skills to the story of Elva Keene (Gladys Cooper), an old woman living alone with her memories. After a heavy storm, she begins receiving phone calls, but there’s only static on the other end. Calls to the phone company are no help, as others have complained of downed lines and poor service – repairs will take time. But by the time the static turns to plaintive moans and mournful “hello”s, Tourneur has brought his gifts to bear. The use of closeups, deadened quiet, and strategic shadows in the night (strategies learned from early producer-mentor Val Lewton) are all par for the course for his brand of minimalist horror. Cooper is perfect in her growing fright, never playing it from a position of frail concession, but from a lifetime of strength stifled by the limits of age – a big difference. We never once get the elderly damsel in distress, but we do share with her that frozen chill one gets when a nightmare renders you immobile. In so many ways, the episode feels like an apology to season two’s “Long Distance Call”, a fair enough story about a boy receiving calls from his dead grandmother on a toy phone, but fairly demotable by its being recorded on videotape instead of film. Matheson’s story, taken from his own short story, is so pure and straightforward, with zero story fat, and only one unfortunate mood gaffe: the unnecessary cutaways to the operator at the phone company, the only shots that take us out of Elva’s fully claustrophobic world – even the shots at the cemetery are bound up inside her head as she tells the gruesome story of her fiancé’s demise. The episode’s twist comes in that cemetery, but the gut-punch is the realization of Elva’s final life lesson, that the rules she’d set for herself and for others will bring her no peace in the end.

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE (2/28/64, Robert Enrico)

Season five was over budget, but producer William Froug had an idea. He convinced CBS to pay for the rights to a French short film that had just won a prize at Cannes, one that he and Serling both felt had a certain kinship to the universe of the show. The film is based on American writer Ambrose Bierce’s story of a Confederate soldier’s escape from a Union hanging, his desperate return to his wife and children, and his sudden realization that he’s only dreamed it and is indeed hanging from a rope. Serling appears at the front of the show to explain what would follow, but anyone tuning in to this episode in 1964, or running through the series on disc or online, would immediately note its difference to all that had come before. With its slow, deliberate dollies, its much more naturalistically-shot exteriors, its poetic attention to detail, its supreme focus on sound effects, its underwater photography, and its lack of dialogue, all of it contributing to a haunting, dreamlike mood, the effect is truly like being in a twilight zone inside The Twilight Zone. By the time it aired, the short had already been nominated for an Academy Award in the short films category, which it won at the Oscar ceremony two months later, making it, oddly, the most celebrated “Twilight Zone episode” ever. The show wasn’t part of any syndication package for legal reasons, but for my money, it’s just as well. No question the film is moving and definitely worth seeing, but it’s too far an aberration from the brand of the show, tonally, and simply not as thought-or-imagination-provoking as even most of the lesser episodes. I’d call it “similar but not” but must defer to Serling himself, in his closing narration for the entry: “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in two forms, as it was dreamed and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination. The ingredients of the Twilight Zone.”

THE BEWITCHIN’ POOL (6/19/64, Hamner)

The most charitable thing to say about this episode is that it’s an inauspicious final episode. If it wasn’t so conspicuously placed at the very end of the last season, it might be better to forget it altogether. On one hand this story of a brother and sister who jump into a world beneath their family swimming pool to escape their parents’ loudly crumbling marriage is, on paper, a worthy culmination of one of writer Earl Hamner Jr.’s main themes – namely the superiority of country life, and one of the series’ overarching truths, the idyllic nature of pure childhood – Hamner would go on to create the nigh-on apotheosis of “country is better”, The Waltons. The problem is the low quality of virtually all aspects of the production. While the two main children are not terrible, their performances are nearly destroyed by a technical snafu (noisy exterior location shooting) that required them to be completely redubbed – the girl’s new voice, especially grating, is by adult voice actor June Foray, a respected talent but so ill-fitting here that there’s no way to believe anything that happens around it – which is an especially egregious demerit when the girl in question is Mary Badham, whose showing as Scout in the previous year’s To Kill a Mockingbird garnered her an Oscar nomination. Meanwhile, there are acting issues with all three prominent adult actors, each one forced to recite some of the most on-the-nose dialogue of the series – the parents’ arguments are cookie-cutter divorce chatter, overplayed as if on stage, and the grandmotherly custodian of the secret world is all treacly bromides delivered with a haltingly unsure vacancy, rather than with a sweet and sincere “Earth-mother” quality Hamner intended. You half expect the set walls to slide away to reveal…absolutely no one on the crew paying attention. It wasn’t the last episode produced, but it was the last one aired for the public, so it can never escape the patina of finality, and, sadly, on such a clinker of a note.

III. Wrap-up/Final thoughts

By the time “The Bewitchin’ Pool” aired, Serling, et al, already knew the show had not been picked up for another season. For Serling, this was the relief he’d needed for at least two years. He split time between teaching writing at Ithaca College, an hour away from his still-beloved hometown of Binghamton, and the Sherman Oaks Experimental College when he was back in L.A. He’d already been writing screenplays for pay, among them the great Seven Days in May (1964) and, later, his draft (with on-screen credit) for the original Planet of the Apes (1968). His draft was set in a more futuristic ape society, per the original book, but there are unmistakable Serling touches throughout the final film: the first half hour of the astronauts bickering as they negotiate the dusty hills in search of life can only be compared to any of a half-dozen such scenarios in The Twilight Zone (season one’s “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air” and “Elegy” come immediately to mind), and of course the final music-less shot is the mother of all Twilight Zoney twists. But before Night Gallery would be his modest-then-disappointing comeback, there was an off-beat, existential western called The Loner, starring Lloyd Bridges in twenty-six episodes, some scant clips of which can be found on Youtube.

Then came his long and strange second career as a pitch man for products inconsequential and forgotten, a detour that seems on the front of it to be a gobsmacking affront to the anti-commercializing, pre-Twilight Zone incarnation of Rod Serling, but on the back of it is just as he declares it – paraphrasing: “I can make more for a day of shooting an ad than I can for a year of writing a feature script.” You can’t argue with the bizzaro-world economics of Hollywood. But it’s rather needless to say, though I’m saying it here, the uppermost, shining legacy of the man is the five-year stretch of 156 individual stories of the strange and unsettling and utterly relatable, the timbre and measure and humanism of which will likely never be seen again.

By way of acknowledgement, let me say that Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion was a crucial guide to this essay, as was Gordon Sander’s thorough biography Serling, along with the copious extras on my faithful DVD box set of the complete series, and of course my own memories from a lifetime of loving the show.