The Twilight Zone
is an America
anthology television
series created by Rod Serling, which
ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964
and remains syndicated to
this day. The show consisted of unrelated vignettes
depicting
paranormal,
futuristic,
dystopian,
or simply disturbing events, usually brought to closure with some
sort of
moral. Rod Serling served as
executive producer and
head writer, having written 92 of the
show's 156 episodes. He was also the show's
host, delivering on-or-off-screen
monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. During the
first season, except for the season's final episode, Serling's
narrations were off-camera voiceovers; he only appeared on-camera
at the end of each show to promote the next episode (footage that
was removed from syndicated versions but restored for DVD release,
although some of these promotions exist today only in audio
format).
The "twilight zone" itself is not presented as being a
tangible plane, but rather a metaphor for the
strange circumstances befalling the
protagonists. Serling's opening and closing
narrations usually summarized the episode's events in a cryptic,
dramatized manner, thus demonstrating how the episode's main
character had "entered the Twilight Zone."
Series history
Development
By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a regular name in
television. His successful teleplays
included
Patterns (for
Kraft Television Theater) and
Requiem for a
Heavyweight (for
Playhouse
90), but constant
changes and
edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling, who
decided that creating his own show was the best way to get around
these obstacles. He thought that behind a
television series with
robots,
aliens
and other
supernatural occurrences, he
could also express his political views in a more subtle
fashion.
"The Time
Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels
back to Honolulu
in 1941 and
unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl
Harbor
. The script, however, was rejected and
shelved for a year until
Bert Granet
discovered and produced it as an episode of
Desilu Playhouse in 1958. The show
was a huge success and enabled Serling to finally begin production
on his anthology series,
The Twilight Zone.
Season 1 (1959-1960)
The Twilight Zone premiered the night of October 2, 1959
to rave reviews. "
...Twilight Zone is about the only show on
the air that I actually look forward to seeing. It's the
one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said
Terry Turner for the
Chicago
Daily News. Others agreed, the
Daily Variety ranking it with "
the
best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed
television" and the
New
York Herald Tribune finding it to be "
certainly the
best and most original anthology series of the year."
Even as the show proved popular to television's critics, it
struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS
was banking on a
rating of at least
21 or 22, but its initial numbers were much worse. The series'
future was jeopardized when its third episode, "
Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned an
abysmal 16.3 rating. The show attracted a large enough audience to
survive a brief hiatus in November, during which it finally
surpassed its competition on
ABC and
NBC
and convinced its sponsors (
General Foods and
Kimberly-Clark) to stay on until the end of
the season.
With one exception ("
The
Chaser"), the first season featured only scripts written by Rod
Serling,
Charles Beaumont and
Richard Matheson, a team that was
eventually responsible for 127 of the show's 156 episodes.
Additionally, with one exception ("
A
World of His Own"), Serling never appeared on camera except to
announce the next episode, instead doing voice-over narrations.
Many of the first season's episodes proved to be among the series'
most celebrated, including "
Time
Enough at Last", "
The Monsters Are Due on
Maple Street", "
Walking
Distance" and "
The After Hours".
The first season won Serling an unprecedented fourth
Emmy for dramatic writing, a Producers Guild Award for
Serling's creative partner
Buck
Houghton and the
Hugo Award for best
dramatic presentation.
Season 2 (1960-1961)
The second season premiered on September 30, 1960 with "
King Nine Will Not
Return", Serling's fresh take on the pilot episode "
Where Is Everybody?". The familiarity of
this first story stood in stark contrast to the novelty of the
show's new packaging:
Bernard
Herrmann's original theme had been replaced by
Marius Constant's guitar-and-bongo riff, the
Daliesque landscapes of the
original opening were replaced by an even more surreal introduction
inspired by the new images in Serling's narration ("
That's the
signpost up ahead"), and Serling himself stepped in front of
the cameras to present his opening narration, rather than being
only a voice-over narrator (as in the first season).
A new sponsor,
Colgate-Palmolive,
replaced the previous year's
Kimberly-Clark (as
Liggett & Myers would succeed
General Foods, in April 1961), and a
new network executive,
James
Aubrey, took over CBS. "
Jim Aubrey was a very, very
difficult problem for the show", said associate producer
Del Reisman. "
He was particularly
tough on The Twilight Zone because for its time it was a
particularly costly half hour show....Aubrey was real tough on [the
show's budget] even when it was a small number of
dollars."
In a push to keep
The Twilight Zone's expenses down,
Aubrey ordered that seven fewer episodes be produced than last
season and that six of those being produced would be shot on
videotape rather than film.
The second season saw the production of many of the series' most
acclaimed episodes, including "
The Eye of the Beholder" and
"
The Invaders". The
trio of Serling, Matheson and Beaumont began to admit new writers,
and this season saw the television debut of
George Clayton Johnson. Emmys were
won by Serling (his fifth) for dramatic writing and by director of
photography
George T. Clemens and, for the second year in a row,
the series won the
Hugo Award for best
dramatic presentation. It also earned the Unity Award for
"Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations" and an Emmy
nomination for "Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of
Drama".
Season 3 (1961-1962)
In his third year as executive producer, host, narrator and primary
writer for
The Twilight Zone, Serling was beginning to
feel exhausted. "
I've never felt quite so drained of ideas as I
do at this moment", said the 37-year old playwright at the
time. In the first two seasons he contributed 48 scripts, or 73% of
the show's total output. He contributed only 56% of the third
season's. "
The show now seems to be feeding off itself",
said a
Variety reviewer
of the season's second episode, who couldn't understand Serling's
endless and exhaustive treatment of themes, "
Twilight Zone
seems to be running dry of inspiration."
Despite his avowed weariness, Serling again managed to produce
several teleplays that are widely regarded as classics, including
"
It's a Good
Life", "
To Serve
Man", and "
Five
Characters in Search of an Exit". Scripts by
Montgomery Pittman and
Earl Hamner Jr. supplemented Matheson and
Beaumont's output, and George Clayton Johnson submitted three
teleplays that examined complex themes. The episode "
I Sing the Body
Electric" could boast: "
Written by Ray Bradbury." By the end of the third
season, the series had reached over 100 episodes.
The Twilight Zone received two Emmy nominations (for
cinematography and art design), but was awarded neither. It again
received the
Hugo Award for "Best
Dramatic Presentation", making it the only three-time recipient
until it was tied by
Doctor Who
in 2008.
In spring 1962,
The Twilight Zone was late in finding a
sponsor for its fourth season and was replaced on CBS' fall
schedule with a new hour-long situation comedy called
Fair Exchange. In the confusion that
followed this apparent cancellation, producer Buck Houghton left
the series for a position at
Four
Star Productions.
Serling meanwhile accepted a teaching post at
Antioch
College
, his alma mater. Though the series was
eventually renewed, Serling's contribution as executive producer
decreased in its final seasons.
Season 4 (1963)
In November 1962 CBS contracted
Twilight Zone (now sans
the
The) as a
mid-season
January replacement for
Fair Exchange, the very show
that replaced it in the September 1962 schedule. In order to fill
Fair Exchange's timeslot each episode had to be expanded
to an hour, an idea which did not sit well with the production
crew. “
Ours is the perfect half-hour show”, said Serling
just a few years earlier. “
If we went to an hour, we’d have to
fleshen our stories, soap opera
style. Viewers could watch fifteen minutes without knowing
whether they were in a Twilight Zone or Desilu
Playhouse."
Herbert Hirschman was hired to
replace long-time producer Buck Houghton. One of Hirschman's first
decisions was to direct a new opening sequence, this one
illustrating a door, eye, window and other objects suspended
Magritte-like in space. His
second task was to find and produce quality scripts.
This season of
Twilight Zone once again turned to the
reliable trio of Serling, Matheson and Beaumont.
However, Serling’s
input was limited this season; he still provided the lion’s-share
of the teleplays, but as executive producer he was virtually absent
and as host, his artful narrations had to be shot back-to-back
against a gray background during his infrequent trips to Los Angeles
. Due to complications from a developing
brain disease, Beaumont’s input also began to diminish
significantly. Additional scripts were commissioned from
Earl Hamner, Jr. and
Reginald Rose to fill in the gap.
With five episodes left in the season, Hirschman received an offer
to work on a new
NBC series called
Espionage and was replaced by
Bert Granet, who had previously produced
"The Time Element". Among Granet’s first assignments was "
On Thursday We
Leave for Home", which Serling considered the season's most
effective episode. There was an Emmy nomination for cinematography,
and a nomination for the
Hugo Award. The
show returned to its half-hour format for the fall schedule.
Season 5 (1963-1964)
Serling later claimed, "
I was writing so much, I felt I had
begun to lose my perspective on what was good and what was
bad." By the end of this final season, he had contributed 92
scripts in five years.
This season, the new alternate sponsors were
American
Tobacco
and Procter &
Gamble.
Beaumont was now out of the picture entirely, contributing scripts
only through the ghostwriters
Jerry Sohl
and John Tomerlin, and after producing only thirteen episodes, Bert
Granet left and was replaced by
William
Froug, with whom Serling had worked on
Playhouse 90.
Froug made a number of unpopular decisions, first by shelving
several scripts purchased under Granet's term (including Matheson’s
The Doll, which was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award
when finally produced in 1986 on
Amazing Stories).
Secondly, Froug alienated George Clayton Johnson when he hired
Richard deRoy to completely rewrite
Johnson’s teleplay
Tick of Time, eventually produced as
"
Ninety Years
Without Slumbering". "
It makes the plot trivial",
complained Johnson of the resulting script, insisting he be given
screen credit for the final version of the episode as "Johnson
Smith".
Tick of Time became Johnson’s final submission to
The Twilight Zone.
Even under these conditions, several episodes were produced that
are generally remembered, including "
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet",
"
A Kind of a
Stopwatch" and "
Living Doll". Although this
season received no
Emmy recognition, episode
number 142, "
An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" — a French-produced short film
— received the
Academy Award for
best short
film, making
Twilight Zone one of only two television
series in history (the other being the Canadian news/documentary
series,
The Fifth Estate)
to win both an Emmy and an Oscar.
In late January 1964, CBS announced
Twilight Zone's
cancellation. "
For one reason or other, Jim Aubrey decided he
was sick of the show", explained Froug. "
He claimed that
it was too far over budget and that the ratings weren't good
enough." Serling countered by telling the
Daily Variety that he had "
decided to
cancel the network."
ABC showed interest in
bringing the show over to their network under the new name
Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves, but Serling wasn't
impressed. "
[The network executives seem] to prefer weekly
ghouls, and we have what appears to be a considerable difference in
opinion. I don't mind my show being supernatural, but I
don't want to be booked into a graveyard every week." Shortly
afterwards Serling sold his 40 percent share in
The Twilight
Zone to CBS, leaving the show and indeed all projects
involving the supernatural behind him until 1969 and the debut of
Night Gallery.
Music
Besides the legendary
Bernard
Herrmann, other contributors to the music were
Jerry Goldsmith,
Nathan Van Cleave,
Leonard Rosenman,
Fred Steiner, and
Franz
Waxman. The first season featured an orchestral title theme by
Herrmann, who also wrote original scores for 7 of the episodes
including the premier "Where Is Everybody". The iconic atonal
guitar theme most associated with the show was written by the
French avant-garde composer Marius Constant as part of a series of
short cues commissioned by CBS as library music for the series. The
theme as aired was a splicing together of two of these library cues
"Etrange 3 (Strange No. 3)" and "Milieu 2 (Middle No. 2)".
Guest stars
Being an anthology series, with no recurring characters,
The
Twilight Zone featured a wide array of guest stars for each
episode. Among others,
Jack Klugman,
Martin Milner,
Burgess Meredith,
James Best,
Cliff
Robertson,
Lee Marvin,
Telly Savalas, and
William Shatner appeared in multiple
episodes. Several episodes feature early career performances of
actors who later became quite famous, such as
Peter Falk,
Leonard
Nimoy,
George Takei,
Carol Burnett,
Robert
Duvall,
Robert Redford,
Elizabeth Montgomery,
Dick York,
Telly
Savalas,
Dennis Hopper,
Burt Reynolds, and
Charles Bronson. Other episodes feature late
career performances by such stars as
Franchot Tone,
Dana
Andrews,
Mickey Rooney,
Andy Devine,
Agnes
Moorehead,
Cedric Hardwicke,
Buster Keaton,
Ida Lupino,
Gladys
Cooper, and
Ed Wynn. Many talented
character actors who made successful careers out of guest roles on
television programs also were featured on the show, like
Albert Salmi,
Harold
J. Stone,
Vito Scotti,
Nehemiah Persoff,
Nancy Kulp and
John Anderson.
Current availability
The Twilight Zone episodes continue to be broadcast in
syndication, are available on DVD, and can be streamed
online.
Syfy channel
Episodes are broadcast most weeknights on the
SyFy in the United States. On every
Fourth of July and
New Year's Eve, SyFy airs a marathon
of the
The Twilight Zone.
DVD releases
The Twilight Zone was released on
Region 1 DVD for the first time
by
Image Entertainment. The
various releases include:
- 43 volumes of 3 to 4 episodes each (released December 29, 1998
- June 12, 2001)
- Five 9-disc Collection DVD sets (released December 3, 2002 -
February 25, 2003)
- Season sets: The Twilight Zone: The Definitive
Collection (Seasons One through Five) (released December 28,
2004 - December 26, 2005)
- The Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection
(released October 3, 2006)
Compilations
- Treasures of The Twilight Zone (3 episode compilation
released November 24, 1997)
- More Treasures of The Twilight Zone (3 episode
compilation released November 24, 1998)
- The Twilight Zone: 40th Anniversary Gift Pack (19
episode compilation released September 21, 1999)
Limited set
- The Twilight Zone: Gold Collection, a 49 disc set of
the entire series, released by V3 Media on December 2, 2002. Only
2,500 sets were made.
Online distribution
Some episodes of
The Twilight Zone can be seen free of
charge on the official
CBS website, but only in the US.
Effects On Popular Culture
In 1983, the Dutch rock group "Golden Earring" released a hit
single called "Twilight Zone". It spent 15 weeks in the U.S. top
40, peaking at #10.
In 1993, Midway Games released a popular
pinball machine based on the Twilight
Zone.
In July
1994, The Twilight Zone Tower of
Terror
, an accelerated free-fall ride, opened in Disney's
Hollywood Studios
park. A replica was built in the California
Adventure
park in 2004. And one opened at Disneyland
Paris in 2008.
In September 2009,
Hallmark Cards
Inc. released a holiday tree ornament commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the
Twilight Zone debut
on
CBS. The ornament features a 60's era
television with the Twilight Zone 5th season opening elements on
the screen. Upon pushing a button, the ornament plays the 5th
season closing theme minus
Rod Serling's
voice over. The ornament is fully licensed by Hallmark and
CBS-Paramount.
References
- Sander, Gordon F. Serling: The Rise and Twilight of
Television's Last Angry Man. New York: Penguin Books,
1992.
- Zicree, Marc Scott. The
Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second
edition).
- Stanyard, Stewart T. Dimensions Behind The Twilight
Zone. ECW Press, [2007].
- DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone.
Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1593931360
- Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the
Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing.
ISBN 978-0970331090
External links
See also
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