The Twilight Zone

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. The stories depicted paranormal, futuristic, dystopian, kafkaesque, or simply disturbing events; each show typically featured a surprising plot twist and usually ended with some sort of message. The series was also notable for featuring both established stars (e.g., Joan Blondell, Ann Blyth, Burgess Meredith, Ed Wynn) and younger actors who would later become famous (e.g., Robert Duvall, Mariette Hartley, Ron Howard, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, William Shatner). Rod Serling served as executive producer and head writer; he wrote or co-wrote 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.

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 tones ranging from cryptic to pithy to eloquent to unsympathetic, encapsulating how and why the main character(s) had "entered the Twilight Zone". In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" (When tree-tall aliens, called Kanamits, from another planet visit the earth claiming to be able to wipe out everything that ails our planet and its inhabitants, they are greeted with guarded optimism. When they succeed in doing just that, any suspicion that may have existed is erased. When they first land, they leave behind a book in their own language, and when the title is deciphered, it reads "To Serve Man") and "It's a Good Life" (Little Anthony Fremont controls an entire town with his ability to read minds and make people do as he wishes. Which is a real good thing) were respectively ranked #11 and #31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked No. 26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. And, in 2004 and 2007, the series was ranked 8 and 9 respectively, on TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever.

To discuss television's greatest anthology series whose title has become pop culture shorthand for the bizarre and supernatural is to immediately become like Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd in Twilight Zone: The Movie; a can-you-top-this recall of famous shocks and favorite twists. Several essential episodes hail from this season, among them, "Time Enough at Last" starring Burgess Meredith as a bespectacled bookworm who is the lone survivor of an atomic blast; "The After-Hours" starring Anne Francis as a department store shopper haunted by mannequins; and the profoundly disturbing "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which fear and prejudice turns neighbor against neighbor. From an unsettlingly persistent hitchhiker to a malevolent slot machine, The Twilight Zone's first season did plumb "the pit of man's fears." One forgets how moving the series could be. Three of this season's most memorable and enduring episodes are the poignant and primal "stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off fantasies, "Walking Distance," "A Stop at Willougby" and "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine," in which desperate characters seek refuge in a simpler past. Serling's few stabs at comedy ("Mr. Bevis," "The Mighty Casey") have not aged well, but the series finale, "A World of His Own," starring Keenan Wynn as a playwright whose fictional characters come to life, has a brilliant capper. 

TZ's second season (1960-61) is a stand-out in the series' history thanks to its sheer number of memorable stories; among the episodes that have achieved pop culture landmark status are the chilling "Eye of the Beholder" (a disfigured woman undergoes surgery to appear more "normal") and "The Silence" (Franchot Tone wagers that Liam Sullivan cannot silent for a year); "The Invaders" (Agnes Moorhead is pitted against tiny space travelers), "Long Distance Call" (Lost in Space's Billy Mumy converses with a deceased relative on his toy phone), and the more light-hearted "Night of the Meek," in which department store Santa Claus Art Carney gets a chance to fulfill the real St. Nick's duties. As always, the combination of sharp, intelligent scripting (mostly by Serling, but with notable contributions by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and George Clayton Johnson) and superb casting (guest stars include Cliff Robertson, Dennis Weaver, Burgess Meredith, William Shatner, John Carradine, and Don Rickles) produces television that remains as thought-provoking and entertaining today as it was over 40 years ago.

In a departure from the first two seasons, this third season of The Twilight Zone opens with a story not from the mind of Mr. Serling, and adding to its uniqueness it is not only written by Montgomery Pittman but directed by him as well. "Two" stars Charles Bronson (fresh from The Magnificent Seven) and a young Elizabeth Montgomery (just a few years before Bewitched). 5 years after what seems to be a devastating world war, two soldiers from opposing forces find themselves alone in a destroyed world and must find a way to survive together. "The Shelter" continues the theme of nuclear fear (disguised as an alien attack), starring Larry Gates as a small town's beloved family doctor and the only one on the street who had the forethought to build a bomb shelter. When attack seems imminent, the neighbors become like wild animals fighting amongst one another to find sanctuary in the single shelter. 

Serling returns with "It's a Good Life", an average script made hauntingly creepy by some truly fantastic performances from Cloris Leachman and John Larch. Bill Mumy (previously the creepy kid in "Long Distance Call") returns as another creepy kid, this time one who has the power to make objects and people disappear from existence with a simple thought. Nearly everyone and everything is gone with the exception of a few remaining townsfolk, and they have all learned how to act in such a way that will not upset little Anthony Fremont. The story is solid, and Mumy's performance is good for his age, but the strength of this episode stems from the amazing supporting performances from a group of people who live in sheer terror every moment of their lives, trying desperately to think positive thoughts and reinforce Anthony's horrible actions as "good" in order to avoid his wrath.  Serling continues his run with a surprisingly good episode entitled "The Midnight Sun". Nevermind how, but Earth is moving closer to the sun with each passing day, and nearly everyone has fled north in search of cooler temperatures. Two women remain, however, in a now abandoned apartment, and their emotional struggle with the impending situation makes for some great dramatic content. Lois Nettleton and Betty Garde give nuanced and convincing performances in what is largely a character study of two individuals facing an impossible future. Anton Leader (previously the director of "Long Live Walter Jameson") returns to the show and once again captures a wonderfully unique special effect on camera. With help from a powerful score by frequent contributor Van Cleave, the sense of dread and fear are palpable, and as a viewer you can almost feel the intense heat through the television screen. Frequent writer Richard Matheson follows with his own first entry of the season, "Once Upon a Time". Unlike any episode of The Twilight Zone before it or since, "Once Upon a Time" stars the legendary Buster Keaton in a role that only he could play. The story is simple, almost intentionally so to maintain the humor. Mulligan (Keaton) is a bitter janitor for two young inventors in the year 1890. Unhappy with the modern inconveniences, he borrows the inventors' "time helmet" and travels to 1962. With the help of his new friend Rollo (Stanley Adams), he soon realizes that the grass is always greener in the other time. Matheson proved he could do comedy with the first season's "A World of His Own", and this episode follows in that tradition. Most notably, all the scenes from 1890 are presented in the style of a classic silent film, complete with dialog cards and saloon piano accompaniment. It is a silly slapstick piece, but it makes for a fun departure from the standard formula.

Adding a much needed sentimental touch, George Clayton Johnson's story "Nothing in the Dark" stars Gladys Cooper as an old woman running from "Mr. Death" and an incredibly green Robert Redford as the man she fears has arrived to take her life. The first of many episodes this season that would tackle the subject of aging, "Nothing in the Dark" is a moving story about our inherent human fear of the unknown, the greatest of which is death. Redford's work is surprisingly stiff, but Gladys Cooper's performance is so strong that it overshadows any other negatives, and it's the type of sentimental Twilight Zone episode only George Clayton Johnson could provide. Noted British actor Barry Morse (later to star as Lt. Gerard on The Fugitive and Professor Bergman on Space: 1999) plays the role of a theater critic who stumbles upon a player piano that will reveal the "inner self" of an unsuspecting bystander. Quite possibly the most famous closing line of a Twilight Zone episode appears in Serling's next effort, an adaptation of Damon Knight's short story, "To Serve Man". In a slight departure for the show, the episode begins with a narration from one of the characters, Chambers (Lloyd Bochner), an irritated and defeated man aboard some form of spaceship. He proceeds to tell the story of how he came to this particular circumstance and just what it was like when the Kanamits arrived from another planet to provide peace and prosperity to the human race. "The Trade-Ins" is a touching tale about a married couple of 50 years who come upon the "New Life Corporation" and investigate the promise of having their spirits be transplanted to young and healthy new bodies. Joseph Schildkraut (previously in "Deaths-Head Revisited") and Alma Platt give beautiful performances as a loving twosome who are not ready to face their own mortality but are unwilling to live without each other. It's a story of love and companionship and is a reminder that when Serling focuses intently on his characters and not so much on gimmick endings or preachy messages, beautiful episodes are the result.

In the anomalous fourth (half-) season of early to mid-1963, the year Twilight Zone briefly switched from a 30-minute show to a 60-minute one, just as Alfred Hitchcock Presents had become The Alfred Hitchcock Hour a few months before. Both the network, CBS, and (as documented in Martin Grams, Jr.'s exhaustive book about the series) creator Rod Serling had for several years wanted to expand the critically acclaimed anthology, but when they did the results were disappointing for a variety of reasons. Twilight Zone switched back to a half-hour form for its fifth and final season, with the hour shows tucked away in the closet like unwanted Christmas presents. In the decades that followed, watching syndicated episodes of The Twilight Zone really meant watching seasons one, two, and three, and most of season five. Some shows, mainly from the fifth season, had been pulled for legal reasons, while the hour episodes weren't shown at all, at least not in most major television markets. This was true even where local stations ran two half-hour shows back-to-back in a one-hour slot, a timeslot that could easily have accommodated the hour-long shows. In 1984 one of the hour-long episodes, "Miniature," turned up in a television special that also included several long-lost fifth season episodes heretofore pulled from syndication. A short time later the remaining season fourth season shows began turning up as well.  Looking at it again, The Twilight Zone - Season Four has almost as many high points as low ones. There are several outstanding episodes as good as any produced before or since, and a few heretofore unjustly maligned episodes worth reappraisal. At its best and sometimes its worst, the hour Twilight Zones took a slightly different approach. Shows like "In His Image" and "Valley of the Shadow" adjusted to the new format by piling on one surprise after another, while other shows like "Jess-Belle," "The Incredible World of Horace Ford," and "On Thursday We Leave for Home," downplayed or dispensed with the whole twist-ending idea, focusing their energies on the more richly-developed, character-driven drama Serling hoped to cultivate, a shift away from the breezy short story to the novella.

"In His Image" by Charles Beaumont - Season four's best episode was also the first to air: An ordinary man, Alan Talbot (George Grizzard), develops strange, murderous urges and with new girlfriend Jessica (Gail Kobe) finds that his hometown isn't quite as he had remembered it. This fine episode takes a sci-fi chestnut and infuses it with fresh ideas and an unusual approach as a tender love story. Jessica is a lonely, old-maid type who stands by her new beau even as he thinks he's going mad. An extremely intelligent show with many clever touches, especially the immensely satisfying and logical conclusion, "In His Image" is among Twilight Zone's finest. Grizzard and especially Kobe are excellent. "On Thursday We Leave for Home" by Rod Serling - Positively epic episode about space settlers stranded for thirty years on V9-Gamma, a hostile and desolate planet continually bombarded with meteorites. If not for their totalitarian leader, Captain Benteen (James Whitmore), who regales those too young to remember anything about the green and wondrous Earth left behind, the expedition clearly would never have lasted this long. What happens next unfolds in disturbing and unexpected ways. While Serling's script is above average, the production itself is the real star. This was an expensive show and it looks it, crammed with incredible images that look even more spectacular in high definition. "Jess-Belle" by Earl Hamner, Jr. - Val Lewton by way of Walton's Mountain. Backwoods free-spirit Jess-Belle (Anne Francis, unexpectedly alluring in a jet-black wig) unwisely bargains with local witch Granny Hart (Jeanette Nolan, who was to these sorts of parts what June Foray is to cartoons) to win the love of Billy-Ben Turner (James Best). But there's a catch to Granny's magic: Jess-Belle will get her man, alright, but from midnight until dawn she turns into a leopard.  "Printer's Devil" by Charles Beaumont - Wry variation of The Devil and Daniel Webster has suicidal newspaper publisher-editor Douglas Winter (Robert Sterling) ready to pack it in until one "Mr. Smith" (Burgess Meredith, in his fourth and final Twilight Zone appearance) comes to the rescue and then some. As the paper's new (and only) reporter and Linotype operator, Smith scoops the other papers with fantastic headlines that miraculously street minutes after the fact.  "Miniature" by Charles Beaumont - The final result doesn't quite live up to the original concept - but what a concept! Odd duck Charley Parkes (Robert Duvall) becomes fascinated with a female figure in a museum dollhouse that, eventually, becomes alive, albeit to his eyes alone. Beaumont's script - among the last he wrote before succumbing to a mysterious aging/Alzheimer's-like illness, possibly the result of aluminum poisoning from Bromo-Seltzer - is aided by Robert Duvall's almost too understated but nonetheless memorable performance. "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" by Rod Serling - The crew of a U.S. Navy destroyer stumble upon an American submarine sunk in the early days of World War II. And yet a strange tapping sound implies that someone might just be alive down there. Meanwhile, a normally dedicated sailor (Mike Kellin) seems to be going crazy. Though most viewers find this episode padded and uninteresting, it tells a familiar story in unexpected ways (ghosts in broad daylight, a military setting) while sustaining its mystery and atmosphere for almost the entire episode. Kellin's breakdown is unusually convincing, and character actor stalwart Simon Oakland, as the destroyer's captain, is the story's anchor. 
"Death Ship" by Richard Matheson - Reminiscent of both Ray Bradbury's Mars is Heaven! and an earlier Zone, Season One's "Elegy," "Death Ship" has space travelers Jack Klugman, Ross Martin, and Frederick Beir stumbling upon a crashed spaceship identical to their own - and which contains lifeless duplicates of themselves. The episode has an interesting concept - souls trapped in afterlife limbo because one in their party steadfastly refuses to accept the obvious - but Klugman, the go-to guy for urban working-class losers, is fatally miscast as the by-the-book commander of a spaceship. His performance, in turn, prompts Martin and Beir to chew the scenery even more than Klugman, resulting in an overacted mess of an episode. 
"Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" is a pact-with-the-devil episode, this time featuring Albert Salmi as a boorish industrial tycoon and Julie Newmar as "Miss Devlin." Her sexiness in a part that's like a warm-up to her role as Catwoman on Batman redeems the show. "He's Alive", features neo-Nazi Dennis Hopper inspired by the puppet-mastering of Adolph Hitler's ghost.

Twilight Zone came back to CBS for a fifth and final year during the 1963-64 television season. It is the show's weakest, though a handful of episodes are outstanding. The overall tone of the scripts in season five disturbingly shifted away from the archetypal Twilight Zone - of small-time losers or harried white-collar executives finding validation or getting a second shot at life (as in "Walking Distance," "Passage for a Trumpet," etc.) - toward unappetizing tales of cosmic justice meted-out to loudmouths, lonely old widows, greedy adult children, boozy couples and the like. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" by Richard Matheson - Season five's best show - William Shatner plays a man newly released from a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown. This version is all about trying to repress the irrepressible, to not scream like a banshee amid all the normalcy around him. He vainly struggles to maintain his composure lest he be recommitted, in a postwar world ignorant and intolerant of mental illnesses. Shatner, at the peak of his anthology show era talents, is nothing less than superb. Writer Matheson always felt the show was ruined by William Tuttle's absurd monster - a panda with a scary face - but its very oddness adds to the episode's creepiness, at least for those willing to suspend a modicum of disbelief.  "Night Call" by Richard Matheson - Though more appropriate to Thriller than Twilight Zone this one is marvelously frightening - maybe Twilight Zone's all-time scariest. During and following a storm, a lonely if haughty spinster (Gladys Cooper) begins receiving strange, anonymous phone calls with an otherworldly voice on the other end of the line. And what a creepy voice it is! Echoes of the great Val Lewton-produced horror-fantasies of the 1940 make sense when one considers its director: Jacques Tourneur, who helmed Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie.  "Living Doll" by Jerry Sohl, though credited to Charles Beaumont - It's part of the pop culture lexicon now. Who doesn't know the "I'm Talky Tina and I'm going to kill you!" doll taunting abusive stepfather Telly Savalas into an early grave? It was even creepier back in 1963 when it was obvious Talky Tina was inspired by Chatty Cathy, a talking doll from Mattel that, as in the Twilight Zone episode, was voiced by the great June Foray. Savalas's casting was ingenious; he wasn't even a character star at this point yet his casual cruelty and, later, his fear-driven need to destroy his step-daughter's innocent-looking doll, is unique among Twilight Zone episodes. The show is marred by a needless mini-twist at the end, when the doll warns the Savalas's utterly innocent wife (Mary LaRoche) that she'd better watch her step, too. Or maybe Sohl was cleverly holding the wife culpable for not getting her daughter out of harm's way. Regardless, a classic show. Beaumont's health had deteriorated so profoundly that all three season five shows credited to him were written by others. "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" by John Tomerlin, based on a story by Charles Beaumont - In a seemingly utopian future society, all young adults can hardly wait to go through "the Transformation," in which their faces and bodies, chosen from a limited selection of models, are made "beautiful." For them it's idyllic, the chance to look just like one's best friend, or a mother to look as young as her daughter. However, Plain Jane Marilyn Cuberle (freckly redhead Collin Wilcox) doesn't want the procedure, seeing it as pointless and counterproductive, an attitude no one else can understand. It's a genuinely disturbing show about conformity and the pressures of society to be conventionally attractive, and its wrap-out is uniquely horrifying.  "The Old Man in the Cave" by Rod Serling, based on a story by Henry Slesar - Though it's let down by a disappointing Big Reveal, this post-apocalyptic tale of a small town barely hanging on ten years after a civilization-ending nuclear war, its community kept alive by the smarts of a mysterious old man in a nearby cave, has many attributes. Its depiction of a post-nuclear America is unusually realistic for '60s television and the show ends on a horribly bleak, appropriately pessimistic note. Character actor John Anderson, in his last of four Twilight Zone appearances, is very good as the town's spokesman with James Coburn excellent as the rabble-rouser threatening all.  "The Masks" by Rod Serling -  has crotchety dying millionaire (Robert Keith) forcing his family of losers (Milton Selzer, Virginia Gregg, Brooke Hayward, and Alan Sues) to don grotesque Cajun-crafted masks until midnight lest they lose out on their inheritance.  "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was an award-winning French short film directed by Robert Enrico. Based on the famous short story by Ambrose Bierce, it takes place during the American Civil War. Union soldiers prepare to hang a Confederate spy (Peyton Farquhar) over the Owl Creek Bridge, but as he is dropped the rope snaps and the man desperately swims and runs away, ultimately hoping to reach his wife and child. Because of the American setting and the lack of significant dialogue, producer William Froug purchased television rights and the film was broadcast as a money-saving Zone. Serling introduces the film and there's a commercial break halfway through, but otherwise it's pretty much an unaltered version of the original short. It's really excellent, visually stunning with its dream-like imagery and its conclusion is genuinely devastating, even for those who remember Bierce's story from High School English class.