Serling reminded his audience every week that the Twilight Zone is, after all, “a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” As I’ve suggested, we might interpret this to refer to the tension between the televisual medium as commercial spectacle on the one hand (“sight and sound”) and as socially conscious art (“mind”) on the other and to refer to The Twilight Zone itself as a battleground where this conflict was waged. Serling’s uneasy relationship with sponsors and the formulaic nature of commercial television, which he at once resisted and exploited, is evident in The Twilight Zone, a show that reveals the tensions between artistic ambition and commercial capitulation at a pivotal point in the history of the medium. Like Serling himself, The Twilight Zone was caught in a twilight zone, a liminal “middle ground” between opposing forces.
Serling remained ambivalent about the medium of television. In 1956 he said that “of all the media, TV lends itself most beautifully to presenting a controversy. You can just take part of a controversy and, using just a small number of people, get your point across”; four years later he wrote that “the half-hour film has always been an imitative, doggy, telegraphed, insipid, assembly-line product since its inception eleven years ago” (qtd. in Boddy 1984, 100–101). According to William Boddy, Serling alternately depicted his work on the show “as a capitulation in his struggles as industry reformer or the logical outcome of his battles for serious television drama” (105). Perhaps this ambivalence was inevitable given Serling’s ambitions just at the crossroads of the medium’s transition from the period of live anthology drama to the more standardized series format.
In one of the series’ last episodes, “What’s in the Box,” the home TV of taxi driver Joe Britt (William Demerest) plays his own unhappy life story, including his future, which then advances into the near future to show him killing his wife in a domestic rage. Of course, trying to prevent the tragedy from becoming a reality, Britt causes it to happen. Serling introduces the episode by saying, “Mr. Britt is going to watch a really big shew” in the manner of Ed Sullivan—an intertextual reference to the extremely popular Sunday-night variety show (CBS, 1948–71) that newspaper-columnist Sullivan hosted for many years on “most of these same stations.” In the Twilight Zone episode, a doctor (Herbert Lytton) diagnoses Britt as being bewildered about distinguishing between reality and illusion because of his immersion in the atemporal flow of television. The doctor concludes that Britt is suffering from a delusion brought about by being a TV addict, apparently lured into the vast wasteland by identifying too much with the characters in the shows he watches. Television has turned his mind to “oatmeal,” as Ed Lindsay had prophesized in “Static.”
Nevertheless, Serling remained adamant that, as he told Mike Wallace, “this is my medium and I understand it. I’m a dramatist for television. This is the area I know. I’ve been trained for it.” With The Twilight Zone he perfected the structure of the half-hour “semi-anthology drama” (Kraszewski, 348), dangling an opening hook with a fantastic premise, expanding upon that premise for two acts with a new hook in the middle before the commercial break, and then following with the twist and denouement (“whoosh, up over, and whammo!” as Carling [Edward Andrews] blithely describes atomic war in “Third from the Sun”). As Gary Hoppenstand observes, The Twilight Zone demonstrates that Rod Serling “fully understood the potential of the television medium” (562).
Certainly, Serling’s awareness of the televisual medium suffused The Twilight Zone like the shifting fog in the series’ original opening. Already in the pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?,” the presence of television is significant, as Ferris is secretly being monitored by scientists on closed-circuit TV throughout his isolation ordeal. In other episodes television is similarly associated with surveillance and the dark side of technology. “Black Leather Jackets” offers a visual joke about The Twilight Zone’s own network: the one-eye logo of the intergalactic television sets through which the advance scouts of the alien invasion force communicate resembles the logo of CBS. The role of television in the fascist future of “The Obsolete Man” is significant and complex: on the one hand, it provides a propaganda outlet for the state, as it does in “Eye of the Beholder,” while on the other, it permits a form of resistance when the appropriately named librarian Wordsworth (Burgess Meredith) entraps the Chancellor into imploring an “obsolete” God to spare him during Wordsworth’s own televised death (hints of the first Black Mirror episode, “The National Anthem” [2011], here). Television also figures prominently in “A Thing About Machines,” about Bartlett Finchley (Richard Haydn), a man who despises everything mechanical and then suffers the wrath of his household appliances and devices, including the performer on his television screen, who speaks to him directly. In his introduction to the episode, Serling appears inside a television screen from where he introduces us to Finchley, “a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century” and then adds tantalizingly, “and who in just a moment will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley—the Twilight Zone.” On this television screen inside a console, speaking of a character who loses a battle against modernity and the mechanical, we may think of Serling as immersed in the medium or a prisoner of it, the image’s ambiguity consistent with his ambivalence toward the medium.
Serling survived the transition from the period of live anthology drama to the telefilm series, taking from live television drama its “small casts and modest sets” and its reliance on medium shots and close-ups while lacking “the typical series’ convention of continuing characters and settings” and the “loosely-plotted narrative structures” of the series format (Boddy 1984, 101, 107). But after five seasons of The Twilight Zone, Serling’s best work was behind him. Already the final two seasons betrayed a decided falling off of overall quality, with episodes, especially those written by Serling, recycling ideas used earlier: “He’s Alive,” for example, revisits ideas from “Death’s-Head Revisited,” while “No Time Like the Past” (4.10: March 7, 1963) reworks “Back There.”
By the time the fourth season began in January, Serling had spent the fall semester teaching writing and mass media at Antioch College, and although he would continue writing for the show, he became less involved in the details of production (Zicree, 293). He was already working on the screenplay for Seven Days in May (1964), the film version of the 1962 best-selling thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II about an attempted military coup of the American government led by a charismatic, self-righteous general who perceives the president as soft on Communism. The novel was perfectly suited to Serling’s sensibility—which is perhaps why the screenplay is so faithful to its source and the best screenplay Serling managed to produce for film. Like the movie based on it, the novel concludes with an explicit civics lesson, one to which it has been building all along: as we learn what each of the various characters is doing now that the coup has been thwarted, all are listening in different places to the president’s speech to the nation extolling the democratic process and the ongoing civic responsibilities it requires as he prepares to go abroad to negotiate a possible but contentious disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union: “Once the President and the Senate, as the responsible authorities, make a decision, then, my fellow citizens, debate and opposition among the military must come to an end . . . Any other way would mean confusion, chaos and certain defeat” (354). The film, directed by John Frankenheimer (who had directed Serling’s script for “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” with its similarly civic-minded theme), preserves the scene, with the president’s speech about responsible democratic citizenship conveniently providing the pedestal that Serling otherwise no doubt would have erected himself to remind the public about the ethics of individualism in a democratic society.
Five years after the end of The Twilight Zone Serling returned as host of Night Gallery for three seasons. Episodes of the ninety-minute weekly anthology series featured Serling in an art gallery space introducing each story in front of a usually slapdash painting minimally related to it. Serling contributed a number of scripts to the show, some original and some adaptations, but unlike the situation with The Twilight Zone, he had no creative control over Night Gallery. Nevertheless, Stephen King’s blunt assessment that it was “really a watered-down Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job” (King, 234) may be somewhat harsh. (Among its more noteworthy moments is the segment “Eyes” starring Joan Crawford from the pilot episode, which was Steven Spielberg’s first professional credit as director). Yet, however we might assess the quality of Night Gallery now, Serling’s presence alone was sufficient to provide the show with a patina of the weird.
Rod Serling was only fifty when he died in 1975 from complications following surgery after a heart attack, no doubt brought on by his heavy smoking and chronic fatigue from his intense work schedule. The Twilight Zone, his greatest achievement, stood out as a beacon of cathode light, thoughtful and artfully crafted, amid the darkness of that vast televisual wasteland. Unlike any television show before it, it addressed the anxieties of the age with tightly constructed fantastic fables that sought to engage viewers reflectively through both content and construction. If its promise of a “wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination” was ultimately another place circumscribed by dominant liberal values, the show could hardly be faulted given its context of network television at a pivotal moment in its history.
This is by no means to suggest, however, that The Twilight Zone is only of interest today for its historical significance. If that were so, we could not account for the show’s pervasive and continuing presence in popular culture, as chronicled at the beginning of this book. Serling observed in his last interview in 1975 that “there’s no room” anymore for a show like The Twilight Zone with its speculative parables because “the problems are so much with us that they have to be attacked directly” (Brevelle) rather than metaphorically. Certainly, no other mainstream television shows since have succeeded in reflecting the contemporary zeitgeist as memorably. But if there is any doubt that the show remains as relevant today, in the era of the Trump presidency, as it was in its time, let us return one last time to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Serling concludes the episode by commenting that:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own—for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to “The Twilight Zone.”
Submitted for your consideration.