The Most Influential TV Show
Evil aliens come to Earth claiming peace. A seemingly harmless doll comes to life and tries to commit murder. A woman haunted by ghosts comes to realize she's dead too. Adam Sandler learns how to control time using an innocuous household item. Sound familiar? By this point, they should all seem like cliches to you, tired old plotlines recycled by Hollywood time and again to feed the mindless masses. But these themes were all used at one point, creating a landmark show in television history, one that still reverberates within the pop culture lexicon, and holds influence over nearly everything that came after it to this very day.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Past the infant period of television, the 1950s brought forward a more sophisticated line of television shows that ranged from comedies such as I Love Lucy, talk shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show, family-oriented programming, such as Leave It To Beaver, and notably, anthologies. Perhaps the most famous giants of the time were Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Twilight Zone. But while Hitchcock focused his efforts more on mysteries concerning the human nature, creator Rod Serling took a different approach.
"You're traveling through another dimension," Serling states, accompanied by the show's signature eerie theme. "A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination."
Next stop: the Twilight Zone.
The series kicked off in 1959 with the episode Where Is Everybody? which told the tale of a man waking up to find himself in a deserted town. Played by Earl Holliman, best known for his Golden-Globe winning performance in The Rainmaker, Holliman earned praise for his role while The Twilight Zone went on to become one of the most unique, innovative, influential and groundbreaking series in television history.
Hosted by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone introduced audiences to a world of the bizzare. The Twilight Zone is not a place; it not a time; it is not a portal; for every week during its run, the American public was introduced to a show that transcended labels - often times spooky and unnerving, the Twilight Zone was also renown for its ability to evoke the emotions of its viewers.
"The Twilight Zone was my favourite show growing up," says director J.J. Abrams. "As a kid it spoke to me almost unnaturally. Walking Distance is maybe the show's best episode. It's about a businessman. He goes to the gas station to get his car fixed and he realizes that he grew up very close to where they are. And it's just this beautiful story of a guy who, as an adult, wants to go back to his young self, and tell himself to be aware of what it is to be alive, to be young, and to enjoy that. It's a beautiful demonstration of the burden of adulthood, told in The Twilight Zone, which everyone thinks is a scary show, but it's actually a beautiful show. The Twilight Zone at its best is better than anything else I've ever seen on television."
"I was a complete obsessive compulsive Twilight Zone follower," Steven Spielberg offers.
In fact, Spielberg was the driving force behind the Twilight Zone movie, lending his name alongside his talents by producing the movie and directing one of the segments.
Twilight Zone: The Movie received varying reviews, generally attributed to the fact the movie was comprised of several shorts, each with its own individual cast and crew. The movie remade three highly-rated episodes from the original series, Kick The Can, It's A Good Life, and perhaps most notably, Nightmare At 20,000 Feet, a story about a man who spies a gremlin on the wing of an airplane through his window. The original starred William Shatner while the movie version had John Lithgow. Shatner and Lithgow would make reference to this working together on 3rd Rock From The Sun.
The film also included narration by Burgess Meredith, who, by the end of the show's run, had appeared in The Twilight Zone four times, the first season episode Time Enough At Last, in which Meredith portrays a timid bank teller whose greatest wish is to have more time to read his books in peace finds himself the only survivor in a world devastated by nuclear war and with nothing but books for company, being one of the most popular episode in the show's catalog. Meredith would later go on to portray The Penguin in the 1960's Batman series, and Rocky Balboa's trainer in the Rocky franchise.
Perhaps the greatest aspect of Rod Serling's anthology series was it's ability to revisit familiar themes without recycling previous storylines. The Twilight Zone. One-part science fiction, two-parts human drama, The Twilight Zone skillfully melded themes of space, robotics, aliens, supernatural encounters, nuclear war, the Old West, the future, death, life, God and the Devil along with a degree of depth and vulnerability that surrounds the characters so that each separate episode would leave viewers gleaning a new message.
Pictured here is a still from the episode A Passage For Trumpet, starring Jack Klugman, who was previously best known as Juror #5 in the film 12 Angry Men, and later on for his role in The Odd Couple. Klugman plays a down-on-his-luck trumpet player who's ready to give up after an unsuccessful life, only to meet the archangel Gabriel who persuades him to keep playing his music.
A new generation of up-and-coming talent - including a young Ray Bradbury, and Charles Beaumont - kept the series fresh, and should you find yourself thinking the show was falling into a rut, the revolving door of writers certainly ensured you wouldn't see the next one coming. Often times unpredictable, the show shifted gears between spooky, creepy, weird, comedic, to heartwrenching. The Season 3 episode, The Changing Of The Guard, is often regarded as one of the finest episodes to display the show's ability to touch the soul.
The show offered plenty of drama behind the scenes as well.
Charles Beaumont was making the rounds as one of the most prominent writers in the genre of the macabre by the time The Twilight Zone launched in 1959. He was one of the triad that comprised of Rod Serling, Richard Matheson and Beaumont himself who were with show since its inception. The teleplays for the first season was scripted entirely by the trio, but it wasn't long before the writing cast expanded as the show continued to succeed. Beaumont's credits include episodes such as The Howling Man, Elegy, Long Distance Call, Living Doll and Printer's Devil. His short story, Black Country, is widely credited as being the first work of fiction to be published in Playboy magazine.
As the series progressed, Beaumont's career began to suffer as his health went on the decline.
While in his thirties, Charles Beaumont began to suffer from the effects of what was dubbed "a mysterious brain disease". Having made his fortune through selling his short stories to various publications along with writing for the show, Beaumont's debilitating disease left him relying upon the aid of ghostwriters. Though Rod Serling kept him on roll call for The Twilight Zone, by the show's fifth and final season, Beaumont had grown to be nothing but a phantom presence.
"Initially we all thought he was drinking too much, but it turned out that wasn’t the problem. He was becoming ill," Twilight Zone collaborator Richard Matheson recounts, "For a long time nobody had any idea of what was wrong with him. Finally the doctors diagnosed him as having either Alzheimer’s or Picks disease." Matheson and Beaumont also collaborated on outside projects, including writing the screenplay for the film Burn, Witch, Burn.
Other symptoms of the disease presented themselves in the form of slower speech, loss of concentration and, most alarmingly, rapid premature aging. While chronologically in his thirties, Beaumont began to take on the appearance of a man well into his seventies.
On February 21, 1967, Charles Beaumont passed away at the age of 38.
Rod Serling began experiencing a toll on his health as the show went on as well. Initially, Serling merely recorded his narration over the scenes as they played, but due to the popularity over his cameo in the final episode of the first season, A World Of His Own, Serling started appearing at the beginning and end of most of the episodes in subsequent seasons. Additionally, the fourth season of The Twilight Zone was extended from its regular half-hour time slot to one hour, resulting in the fewest number of episodes in the series history but also the longest, as individual episodes were drawn out to fit the newly allocated running time. This move was famously opposed by Serling, who believed his show to have been designed to fit
a half-hour time slot spefically.
The extended fourth season did allow for writers to spread their wings, however. Pictured above is the episode He's Alive, written by Serling himself. The episode, depicting a young neo-Nazi who begins his own cult through the contributions of a mysterious benefactor, starred a young Dennis Hopper and is lauded with being one of the most complex examinations of human nature depicted in the series, exploring the issues of what happens when prejudice and intolerance is allowed to run unchecked.
Pictured right is a promotional still of Serling with props from the episode The New Exhibit, in which a museum employee brings home the wax figures of notorious murderers for storage, only to find his loved ones meeting fatal ends. For a show noticeably free of blood and gore, The New Exhibit stands as one of the most violent entires into The Twilight Zone.
As the show progressed, Serling began to tire from the level of attention his series demanded. By the time the series ended, Serling had contributed approximately 92 scripts over the show's 156 episodes.
Serling went on to produce and host another anthology series, Night Gallery, that was seen as the spiritual sequel to The Twilight Zone.
On June 28, 1975, Rod Serling passed away at the age of 50.
The Season 5 episode, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, originally aired as a film in France titled La Rivière du hibou (Owl River). It was purchased by producer William Froug, for $25,000, and was only allowed to be aired twice in America. The film won at the 1963 Academy Award for Live Action short Film, making The Twilight Zone the only American show in history to win both an Emmy and an Oscar..
Serling himself garnered a total of 6 Emmy awards, more than any other individual in the history of the awards. The Twilight Zone was responsible for two of his wins, along with another award to George T. Clemens for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for Television.
The Twilight Zone was not an overnight sensation, and even at its peak, the show was troubled by politics and frequently sought for funding, being sponsored by companies like Kimberley-Clark, General Foods and Colgate-Palmolive. American Tobacco often required Serling to close the show with a cigarette in hand, which may have contributed to his ailing health.
So what is it that has helped the Twilight Zone stand the test of time?
Is it due to the generation of actors whose stints on the series served as a launching pad to lifelong careers amongst the stars? The show famously showcased the talents of William Shatner, who would go on to become one of the most iconic and recognizable faces in Hollywood history; or Billy Mumy, who would later make his mark on pop culture as Will Robinson on Lost In Space; or Mary Badham, best known for her Oscar-nominated role as Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, whose famously tumultuous episode The Bewitchin' Pool closed the once-mighty series not with a bang but a whimper.
Is it due to the fact that there is likely an episode in this anthology that any person can enjoy, carefully layered to reveal a new life-lesson, through some of the most creative storytelling the industry had to offer? The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street, widely regarded as one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, deftly tailors a plot involving a quiet neighborhood town experiencing a blackout around an ominous warning against the dangers of gossiping and mob mentalities, with an overall storyline about mass hysteria reaching fever pitch.
Whatever the case, The Twilight Zone has held enduring impact on pop culture, praised for its unique stories and the high level of quality the show brought in terms of its writing, producing and acting, and has been declared to have been far ahead of its time.
Pictured above is one of the many books published by author R.L. Stine. Stine is most famous for his contributions to young adult literature, and best remembered for his own various anthologies such as Goosebumps, Fear Street and The Nightmare Room among others. Rod Serling's classic series left an obvious impact on the author and he styled many of his stories after numerous episodes. The storyline to the author's book, Say Cheese And Die!, is reminiscent of the Twilight Zone classic, A Most Unusual Camera.
In the original, two outlaws hide out in a motel room after having robbed a store and discover a camera amongst their treasures that takes pictures of unfortunate events that have yet to occur, escalating to the point where they fear foreseeing their own deaths after the camera shows their missing images. In Stine's tale, a group of children break into a house and steal a camera that prints photos of the subject experiencing an unfortunate event that has yet to occur, and inevitably does, leading the protagonists to attempt to destroy it after one of their friends inexplicably disappears after being depicted as missing in one photograph. Coincidence?
Slappy the Dummy? Chucky the Voodoo Doll? The Twilight Zone revived the concept for animated playtoys straight out of Enid Blyton's cubbie and into American homes with episodes such as The Dummy, Caesar And Me, and most notably, Living Doll, which introduced viewers to Talky Tina, one of the show's most famous characters, along with her tagline, "My name is Talky Tina - and I'm going to kill you."
Since its original run on CBS in the 1960s, The Twilight Zone has been the subject of many tributes, remakes and revivals, experiencing a renaissance in popularity in 1985 when CBS ordered a new series, and once again in 2002 when a revival aired for one season only on UPN. While the 1959 series was responsible for launching the careers of numerous Hollywood icons, the 2002 revival relied heavily on the reputations of many established stars including Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Jessica Simpson, Linda Cardellini, Christian Bale, Method Man, Hayden Christensen, Molly Sims, Penn Badgley, Jim Carrey, Frankie Muniz, and many more. The series attempted to create new episodes as well as update previously explored storylines from the original anthology.
The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street was one of the revisited plotlines in the 2002 revival. The remake, entitled The Monsters Are On Maple Street reinterpreted the original storyline of a neighborhood blaming an unexpected blackout on aliens in the 1960 airing to fit a modern 21st century outlook - namely, blaming the unexpected blackout on terrorism.
Billy Mumy, pictured right, of Lost In Space fame, signed on to the 2002 revival to resume his portrayal of Anthony Fremont, a tyrannical dictator with the near-omnipotent powers of a god. In the original series, Fremont is a ten-year-old boy who uses his reality-bending powers to remove his town from the rest of the world, effectively trapping the townspeople with him to do with as he pleases. While the young Fremont terrified his family and neighbors by forcing them to think "nice thoughts" at all times of the day or suffer the consequences, the 40-year-old monster he becomes in the 2002 revival is a sadistic manipulator who takes pleasure in watching his victims squirm before being set on fire, and regularly discards people who displease him to the 'corn fields'. Oh, and he has a daughter. Wonder if it was a happy - or even consensual - coupling.
Mumy's portrayal of Fremont has been parodied in The Simpsons and Johnny Bravo .
While the 2002 revival did not receive many favorable reviews - many noting that the remake tended to violate the original show's style of depicting horror with little to no bloodshed or gore - the relaunch did allow many current stars who grew up watching the show a chance to make their own contributions to its rich history.
So what's going on with the series now?
The Twilight Zone recently celebrated its 50th anniversary by releasing a new boxset containing all 156 episodes along with bonuses. The Twilight Zone also airs frequently on the SciFi Network in the United States.
As of now, there are discussions underway for Leonardo DiCaprio to helm a new Twilight Zone movie.
we hope you have found this an entertaining production.
as it can only be,
in the twilight zone
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