The Twilight Zone at Three
Serling’s doubts as to the value of The Twilight Zone were not shared by its audience. Show magazine was just one of many publications that, in welcoming the return of The Twilight Zone for its third season, celebrated it as
one of the great favorites, and for good reasons. The show offers good scripts, impeccable choice of material, and always sound casting.
Beyond that, it often soars beyond mere fact and everyday fiction into the supernatural, depositing the viewer in a cloud-land where reality gets turned inside out. For the jaded soul, the fresh view can have remarkable restorative effects.
On another occasion, the same publication wrote glowingly of “the handsome host of the macabre and his wizard entourage of offbeat writers [who] have been consistent in scaring the wits out of a goodly portion of their audience.”
TV Guide, too, raved. Writer Gilbert Seldes, discussing The Twilight Zone and the now six-year-old supernatural anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents, remarked that “at their best, both of these programs are first-class entertainment and they are always well-made and thank heaven no one has inflated them beyond their proper length, which is half an hour. I have in recent weeks seen three hour-long dramatic shows which among them hardly contained more entertainment than a single show of either of these.”
Comics and Books in The Twilight Zone
Further evidence of the show’s ubiquity was garnered from a quick visit to the newsstand. In March 1961, Western Publishing’s Dell subsidiary—operating under a license from the CBS Marketing Department—issued the first comic book ever to feature the name of The Twilight Zone.
Issue #1173 of the less than catchily titled Dell Four Color opened the sequence with the stories “The Specter of Youth,” “The Phantom Lighthouse,” “Doom by Prediction,” “Journeys in the Twilight Zone” and “Travelers in Twilight Zone,” thirty-six pages worth of new action unrelated to the show in any way, but reaching out for its audience regardless.
It was not a monthly, or even regular, venture, but a total of four Dell comics bearing the Twilight Zone imprimatur would appear over the course of the next eighteen months, leading up to the November 1962 launch (this time by Western’s Gold Key subsidiary) of a comic titled for The Twilight Zone itself.
It was an immediate hit. In 1972, eight years after the television series ended, the comic still boasted sales approaching two hundred thousand per issue, And such was the success of the series that it would be another decade before issue #92 finally rang down the curtain on the comic—by which time a new glossy publication, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, was already under way; and John Landis’s movie was in production. An odd time, perhaps, to close the comic, but an apposite one too. The original audience had moved on, and the new fans surely wanted something different.
You are about to enter another dimension. But your sandwiches are safe in here.
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While it thrived, however, The Twilight Zone did its level best to maintain both the quality (changeable though it was) and tone of the original television series, employing talents of the caliber of Ben Oda, Frank Thorne, Andre LeBlanc, Joe Certa, Len Wein, George Evans, Alex Toth and Frank Miller—soon to become one of the defining figures in the story of Batman, but whose first professional job in comics arrived courtesy of The Twilight Zone issue #84, inking a five-page story titled “Endless Cloud.”
And today, The Twilight Zone still swirls on the comic book shelves, with a whole new library of horror and hauntings. As a single title goes, The Twilight Zone’s visibility might be episodic compared to sundry superhero comics. But more than fifty years have elapsed since the first issue, and almost as many since the show went off the air. That’s a pretty fine achievement.
Even as this particular success story was in the planning stages, Rod Serling was also busying himself as the figurehead for what became, briefly, an annual schedule of books relating to the show. April 1960 brought the first, a relatively slim (151-page) paperback simply titled Stories from the Twilight Zone, and featuring tales based on half a dozen episodes—“The Mighty Casey,” “Escape Clause,” “Walking Distance,” “The Fever,” “Where Is Everybody?” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
April 1961 brought More Stories from The Twilight Zone, a similarly sized collection including “The Lonely,” “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” “A Thing About Machines,” “The Big, Tall Wish,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “The Odyssey of Flight 33” and “Dust”; and the following May, New Stories from The Twilight Zone featured “The Whole Truth,” “The Shelter,” “Showdown with Rance McGrew,” “The Night of the Meek,” “The Midnight Sun” and “The Rip Van Winkle Caper.”
While never going close to bothering the best-seller lists of the day, all three shifted sufficient copies to reward Serling with regular royalty checks, and by the end of 1962, all three original editions had been compiled into a hardcover omnibus prosaically titled From the Twilight Zone.
Serling’s fourth book, 1963’s The Twilight Zone (aka Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Chilling Stories from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone), was a collection of thirteen ghost stories penned not by Serling, or even for The Twilight Zone; rather, they were the work of Walter B. Gibson, the creator and author of The Shadow pulp magazines. This 207-page hardcover book included eleven originals and two adaptations of Serling tales, “Back There” and “Judgment Night.” The Twilight Zone would be followed in 1964 by Twilight Zone Revisited, another collection of Gibson originals, bolstered by adaptations of “A Hundred Yards over the Rim,” “Mirror Image,” “The Purple Testament” and “The Man in the Bottle.”
The . . . or, at Least, an . . . End Is Nigh
Despite so much activity, and such extracurricular successes, Serling’s restlessness remained in the foreground. He told the New York Morning Telegraph that, far from preparing for a third season, he felt as though the show had been running for ten or eleven. But he was unable to quit. CBS half-owned The Twilight Zone, and as long as there were sponsors willing to pay for it, the network would not let the show drop.
Burnout was a part of his problem. Although he was looking further and further afield for scripts, the fact remained that The Twilight Zone was a demanding mistress. Interviewed by author Charles E. Fritch, Serling explained how his original contract insisted he write 80 percent of the first two season’s shows, “[and] the grind was more than I’d bargained for. As exec producer as well as writer I had to sweat out all kinds of stuff—ratings, set costs, casting, locations, budgets . . . Time was a luxury. If I dropped a pencil and stooped to pick it up I was five minutes behind schedule.
“If only I could take off for about six months and replenish the well,” he continued in that Morning Telegraph interview, he might regain his enthusiasm, and at least he was being handsomely remunerated for his efforts.
Comparing his lifestyle and reputation today with that he had enjoyed just five years previous, he knew he was in an enviable position; that there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of scriptwriters out there who would give their right arm to be in his position, even if it meant they had to type all their stories up one-handedly.
But he had ambitions now that went beyond scriptwriting—he saw himself moving into teaching, and even as the third season ran its course, he was negotiating the post of “writer in residence” at his former college, Antioch, a role that would preclude any involvement in the day-to-day life of a television series.
Just as the third season of The Twilight Zone concluded with “The Changing of the Guard,” an episode that ended with its tired protagonist contemplating a whole new lease on life, so Mr. and Mrs. Serling, too, were preparing for a new life.
Talking to Vernon Scott, a columnist for UPI, Serling explained, “[wife] Carol and I graduated from Antioch and we’re anxious to get back to small town living.” In September, he would be joining the Antioch College faculty for five months lecturing on playwriting and the history of mass media, radio and television.
“I have three reasons,” Serling continued. “First is extreme fatigue. Secondly, I’m desperate for a change of scene, and third, is a chance to exhale with the opportunity for picking up a little knowledge instead of trying to spew it out . . . I might die in limbo from lack of activity. But if I don’t take this step now I never will.”
He admitted that his “perspective [was] shot,” a harsh diagnoses that he nevertheless backed up by remarking on “the lack of quality in some of the Twilight Zone scripts.” Frankly, he said, if he was going to be broadcast, then he wanted only his best work to be broadcast, rather than be forced to screen substandard efforts simply to satisfy a network schedule.
Viewing figures, too, had sagged, although Serling was not quite ready to bury the show. He admitted that he was talking with CBS about perhaps reviving The Twilight Zone once he was finished with his teaching, possibly with an hour-long remit, but also with a shortened season.
Neither was he to be wholly removed from the screens. Beginning on September 27, 1962, Serling popped up as the host of 10 O’Clock Theater, a series of old movies being shown on WBNS-TV in Columbus. Writing scripts based on research provided by one Dave Parker, Serling introduced movies as far afield as Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. and Force of Arms (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), I Confess (1953), Young at Heart (1954) and East of Eden (1955); while movies occupied his time, too, as he toyed with the idea of adapting “The Time Element” for the big screen, with Kurt Douglas starring and John Frankenheimer directing.
Yet for all his hopes, his tenure in teaching was not to prove a life-changing exercise. As wife Carol explained in a 1987 interview with Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, “He had mixed feelings about teaching. He wasn’t sure he was offering anything of any great value.”
Serling’s half a year working as a full-time writer in residence fell into what she called “a fairly political climate. He felt he was relating better in his evening courses, which were adult courses, than he was with the day students. Because he thought the students must be thinking: ‘What’s this Hollywood fat-cat doing here on the campus? What does he really know? He’s sold out to the Establishment.’ He really wanted to teach drama and creative writing. That was where his strengths were and that was where he really belonged.”
All of that was still some months away, though. For now, however, he had a show to do.
Season Three at a Glance
|
Episode |
Director |
Writer |
Broadcast |
|
“Two” |
Montgomery Pittman |
Montgomery Pittman |
September 15, 1961 |
|
“The Arrival” |
Boris Sagal |
Rod Serling |
September 22, 1961 |
|
“The Shelter” |
Lamont Johnson |
Rod Serling |
September 29, 1961 |
|
“The Passersby” |
Elliot Silverstein |
Rod Serling |
October 6, 1961 |
|
“A Game of Pool” |
Buzz Kulik |
George Clayton Johnson |
October 13, 1961 |
|
“The Mirror” |
Don Medford |
Rod Serling |
October 20, 1961 |
|
“The Grave” |
Montgomery Pittman |
Montgomery Pittman |
October 27, 1961 |
|
“It’s a Good Life” |
James Sheldon |
Rod Serling, based on a short story by Jerome Bixby |
November 3, 1961 |
|
“Deaths-Head Revisited” |
Don Medford |
Rod Serling |
November 10, 1961 |
|
“The Midnight Sun” |
Anton Leader |
Rod Serling |
November 17, 1961 |
|
“Still Valley” |
James Sheldon |
Rod Serling, based on a short story by Manly Wade Wellman |
November 24, 1961 |
|
“The Jungle” |
William Claxton |
Charles Beaumont |
December 1, 1961 |
|
“Once Upon a Time” |
Norman Z. McLeod |
Richard Matheson |
December 15, 1961 |
|
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” |
Lamont Johnson |
Rod Serling, based on a short story by Marvin Petal |
December 22, 1961 |
|
“A Quality of Mercy” |
Buzz Kulik |
Rod Serling, based on an idea by Sam Rolfe |
December 29, 1961 |
|
“Nothing in the Dark” |
Lamont Johnson |
George Clayton Johnson |
January 5, 1962 |
|
“One More Pallbearer” |
Lamont Johnson |
Rod Serling |
January 12, 1962 |
|
“Dead Man’s Shoes” |
Montgomery Pittman |
Charles Beaumont |
January 19, 1962 |
|
“The Hunt” |
Harold Schuster |
Earl Hamner |
January 26, 1962 |
|
“Showdown with Rance McGrew” |
Christian Nyby |
Rod Serling, based on an idea by Frederic L. Fox |
February 2, 1962 |
|
“Kick the Can” |
Lamont Johnson |
George Clayton Johnson |
February 9, 1962 |
|
“A Piano in the House” |
David Greene |
Earl Hamner |
February 16, 1962 |
|
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” |
Montgomery Pittman |
Montgomery Pittman |
February 23, 1962 |
|
“To Serve Man” |
Richard L. Bare |
Rod Serling, based on a story by Damon Knight |
March 2, 1962 |
|
“The Fugitive” |
Richard L. Bare |
Charles Beaumont |
March 9, 1962 |
|
“Little Girl Lost” |
Paul Stewart |
Richard Matheson |
March 16, 1962 |
|
“Person or Persons Unknown” |
John Brahm |
Charles Beaumont |
March 23, 1962 |
|
“The Little People” |
William Claxton |
Rod Serling |
March 30, 1962 |
|
“Four O’Clock” |
Lamont Johnson |
Rod Serling, based on a short story by Price Day |
April 6, 1962 |
|
“Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” |
Lamont Johnson |
Rod Serling, based on a story by Frederic Louis Fox |
April 13, 1962 |
|
“The Trade-Ins” |
Elliot Silverstein |
Rod Serling |
April 20, 1962 |
|
“The Gift” |
Allen H. Miner |
Rod Serling |
April 27, 1962 |
|
“The Dummy” |
Abner Biberman |
Rod Serling, based on a story by Lee Polk |
May 4, 1962 |
|
“Young Man’s Fancy” |
John Brahm |
Richard Matheson |
May 11, 1962 |
|
“I Sing the Body Electric” |
William Claxton and James Sheldon |
Ray Bradbury |
May 18, 1962 |
|
“Cavender Is Coming” |
Christian Nyby |
Rod Serling |
May 25, 1962 |
|
“The Changing of the Guard” |
Robert Ellis Miller |
Rod Serling |
June 1, 1962 |