Button designed by the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. Sketch by B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart.
On September 13, 1950, a short-lived television series, Stars over Hollywood, aired a forgettable episode, “Grady Everett for the People.” It starred Bert Freed as a politician whose ambitions are derailed after the media discover a skeleton in his closet. The teleplay for this half-hour melodrama was credited to Oliver Crawford, who went on to write for dozens of television series, including The Fugitive, Star Trek, and The Outer Limits. More notably, story credit went to a twenty-five-year-old World War II combat veteran named Rod Serling. It was Serling’s first sale to a national television program.
Over the next twenty-five years, more than 250 of Serling’s teleplays and screenplays were produced, and he won an unmatched six Emmy Awards for outstanding dramatic writing for four different series. The plays that earned him the first two of these awards, Kraft Theatre’s “Patterns” and Playhouse 90’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” stand as landmarks in television’s evolution, and both were later produced as feature films. The mantle in Serling’s Pacific Palisades office eventually became crowded with Writers Guild Awards, Christopher Awards, Sylvania Awards, and the first ever Peabody Award given to a television writer. While earning these accolades, Serling also earned a reputation as a fighter thanks to several well-publicized battles with skittish sponsors and timid network executives over the issue of censorship in television.
“The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling once said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”1 When he attempted to fulfill this role by dramatizing virtually any socially relevant issue, the powers that be interfered. When they interfered, Serling fought back. The sponsors and network executives always won these battles, but Serling always went down fighting. In the process, he earned a nickname: Television’s Angry Young Man. When Rod Serling died on June 28, 1975, at the age of fifty, he was television’s most honored, most recognizable, most outspoken, and likely most prolific writer.
And in the middle of his extraordinary career, he created one of the most influential series in television history.
Asked for his thoughts on Serling’s legacy, writer Richard Matheson once said, “Well, it’s a shame if it’s The Twilight Zone.”2 Though it may overstate the case, Matheson’s point is valid: The Twilight Zone could be overshadowed by the rest of Serling’s career almost as easily as vice versa. This fact alone makes Serling’s career unusual if not unique. Few other writers—and certainly no other television writer—produced a body of work that can be weighed in quite the way that Serling’s can. Few other writers can place on one side of a scale a creation as weighty as The Twilight Zone and place on the other side of that scale a body of work as significant as the rest of Serling’s output.
The fact that Serling is identified almost solely in relation to The Twilight Zone testifies to the gigantic imprint the series has made on the pop culture landscape. The Twilight Zone aired its final original episode on June 19, 1964. Over the next five decades, the series spawned a feature film, two revival television series, novels, short story collections, multiple comic book series, a long-running magazine, and several lengthy scholarly analyses. Offering superlatives to describe The Twilight Zone would be superfluous. Serling created and hosted the series, served as its executive producer, wrote a seemingly impossible 92 of the series’s 156 episodes, and won two of his six Emmy Awards for his work on the show. If The Twilight Zone were the only thing Serling accomplished in his career, his legacy would be a brilliant one.
As monumental as The Twilight Zone is, however, one reason it has dominated Serling’s oeuvre is merely a fluke of timing, a by-product of television’s ephemeral nature during the era in which Serling did much of his best work. This era is commonly known as the Golden Age of Live Television.
To write for television during this Golden Age was often like writing in sand at the shoreline before the tide rushes in. During the early 1950s, when Serling was a regular contributor to dramatic anthologies such as Studio One, Kraft Theatre, and Playhouse 90, live broadcasts were seldom preserved. And if a live performance were preserved by the kinescope process (by filming a video monitor during the performance), this kinescope was often discarded after it had served its purpose. One Serling contemporary, writer Paddy Chayefsky, called the teleplay “the most perishable item known to man.”3 By this definition, it is almost certain that no man’s work perished more than Rod Serling’s. Many of the shows produced from Serling’s scripts no longer exist on film.
Dozens of Serling’s lesser-known shows do exist, but most are available only as viewing copies at broadcasting museums and film archives. Outside of The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and a handful of feature films (including the original Planet of the Apes), relatively little of Serling’s work has been released commercially, and most has rarely, if ever, aired on television since the initial broadcasts. For even the most devoted fan, at least half of Serling’s work is either unseen or impossible to see. To expect these shows to compete for attention with a television series that airs in twenty-four-hour marathons every New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July would be unfair.
This is not to imply that Serling’s non–Twilight Zone work was uniformly brilliant—the truth is far from that. But reading or viewing all of the available Serling biographical material might create the equally unjustified perception that “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” are the only worthwhile shows Serling wrote outside of The Twilight Zone. “Patterns,” Serling’s still-relevant portrait of cutthroat corporate America, made him a star in 1955. The following year, “Requiem,” the heartrending story of a broken-down fighter struggling to maintain his dignity at the end of his boxing career, confirmed Serling’s lofty status. Both of these shows are justifiably acclaimed. But just as The Twilight Zone overshadows the rest of Serling’s career, these two shows have come to disproportionately dominate any discussion of Serling’s non–Twilight Zone output.
Given the number of lost episodes and the relative scarcity of Serling-scripted productions that have been commercially released, the picture of Rod Serling’s career has been unavoidably incomplete. But it has also been more incomplete than necessary. This volume is presented as remedy.