LESSONS FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE: SUBMITTED FOR YOUR IMPROVEMENT
When the signpost up ahead indicated that my daughter, Becky, was about to turn fifteen, I figured it was time to introduce her to that “wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.” Her next stop—The Twilight Zone, the classic 1959–1964 fantasy anthology series created by Rod Serling.
This was in the spring of 2011. She had been carefully prepared for this journey into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. She wasn’t quite a child of television, but she was the child of a television critic. She had learned to be her own programmer, breaking open those magical box sets and discovering the black-and-white joys of classic television shows. You might call this a classical education. Becky loved Lucy. She loved spending time with Andy and Barney in Mayberry. She loved hanging with Rob, Buddy, and Sally in the writers’ room of The Alan Brady Show, the fictional show within The Dick Van Dyke Show. The joke around our house was, “Someday, this kid is going to be shocked to find out they’re making TV in color.”
That joke hit its expiration date when Becky tore through all forty-five of the original Columbo mysteries and the box sets for Night Gallery, the 1969 TV movie and 1970–1973 horror anthology series that featured Twilight Zone creator, host, producer, and principal writer Rod Serling as host and contributing writer. I could sense Rod standing behind me. I could hear his voice. “It is time.”
Picture a man sharing the televised delights of his childhood with a delighted child. The flickering images on the screen by any standard cover an enormous amount of territory, touching on the past, the present, and, yes, the future. And they’ll soon discover this territory truly is as vast as space and as timeless as infinity—because these images are being beamed directly from the Twilight Zone.
We made this trip in strict chronological order, starting with the first episode aired in 1959 (“Where Is Everybody?’’), then letting Rod guide us from story to story. Becky was more than willing to be guided. In addition to being a regular visitor to Rod’s Night Gallery, she was a great fan of fantasy literature. She was well acquainted with such magical landscapes as Oz, Narnia, Hogwarts, and Ray Bradbury’s Martian terrain. A memorable third-season episode penned by Richard Matheson is titled “Little Girl Lost.” Becky soon became little girl lost in the Twilight Zone … make that happily lost in the Twilight Zone.
It quickly became a family ritual: two episodes a night, two parents, one fascinated teenager. Part of this ritual developed at the conclusion of the sixth episode, “Escape Clause,” originally aired on November 6, 1959. For those that don’t immediately recognize the title, here’s the quick rundown. David Wayne plays cranky Walter Bedeker, a hypochondriac afraid of “death, disease, other people, germs, drafts and everything else.” A certain Mr. Cadwallader (Thomas Gomez) shows up with a devilishly seductive offer. If Bedeker signs the contract, he’ll be granted immortality and indestructibility. The catch? Should Bedeker for some reason choose to leave this mortal plane, he will relinquish his soul to Cadwallader. Before he leaves, Cadwallader tells Bedeker that the contract contains an escape clause. If he should ever tire of life, he need only summon Cadwallader and, uh, give the Devil his due.
Well, this is The Twilight Zone, folks, so you know that no good can come from making bargains signed with an unmistakable whiff of brimstone in the air. Cadwallader realizes this. The audience realizes this. The only person who doesn’t seem to realize this is the blindly overconfident Walter Bedeker, who does, of course, ultimately exercise the escape clause.
When the episode penned by Serling was over, I turned to Becky and playfully admonished her with a wagging finger: “Let that be a lesson to you. Always read through a contract, looking for loopholes. Never sign anything without considering the consequences. Consider the case of one Walter Bedeker.”
She chuckled. I chuckled. Then I thought about the mortgage crisis and about how many people actually signed contracts, not reading them through, not knowing the ramifications of what they’d signed. Would our nation be in such a deep financial hole if we’d all profited from the case of one Walter Bedeker? Talk about your deals with the Devil. So, after a pause, I turned to Becky and added, “No, really.”
It became a running gag at our house. When an excursion through The Twilight Zone was completed, I’d turn to Becky and say, “Let that be a lesson to you.” That lasted for about four months (about how long it took us to get through all five seasons), but, hey, I can run a running gag into the ground with the best of them. Let that be a lesson to you.
Still, from the running gag we’d inevitably stroll into an actual discussion of what was going on behind all the fun fantasy and delicious irony.
This kind of evening lesson became a ritual for us after each episode, until the penny dropped. If that penny had been dropped into the tabletop fortune-telling machine featured in Richard Matheson’s second-season episode “Nick of Time,” it would have produced a card that read, “You’ve got a book on your hands, stupid.” I realized there truly is a wonderful set of life rules here. Not only could you live your life according to the precepts and parables of The Twilight Zone, maybe you should.
Most of the original 156 Twilight Zone episodes (ninety-two of them written by Serling) were, after all, little morality plays. There was no grand, minutely defined philosophy at work here, but there was a strong social conscience, framed by a deep sense of justice and ethics. There was an ongoing search for self-awareness, as individuals and as a race. And there were the cautionary tales, the wake-up calls, and the words of warning, courtesy of Serling, Matheson, and the other writers.
The characters who took it in the shorts on The Twilight Zone usually were asking for it (boy, were they asking for it). The characters who followed their hearts were, at the very least, rewarded with a dose of enlightenment. The characters who irrevocably lost their way typically were undone by greed, prejudice, anger, spite, envy, intolerance, cruelty, ignorance, hate, resentment, and cynicism. The characters who found some measure of contentment shunned these corrosive things that eat you alive from the inside.
Good people tended to get a second chance in The Twilight Zone. Mean, petty, bigoted people tended to be on the receiving end of some terrible form of cosmic justice. Make no mistake: the irony cut both ways in the ol’ fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.
Think of the number of times Rod closed his narration with something like, “Tonight’s lesson … in the Twilight Zone.”
When a word to the wise was sufficient, travelers to the Twilight Zone could move on, move up, or move past the problem condemning them to a life of more shadow and less substance. When danger signals failed to be heeded, then, yes, the moral of a Twilight Zone story could have quite a nasty sting in its tail.
When you take it all right back down home, it comes to this. You’d be a better person if you took to heart the principles at work in The Twilight Zone. It would be a better world if we all lived according to the rules and precepts of The Twilight Zone. Perhaps that’s because Rod Serling so deeply believed in that better world.
Best of all, the object lesson was camouflaged by a magical sense of wonder. The storytelling was so delectable on The Twilight Zone, you didn’t even notice the taste of medicine. The show is one of the few that continues to jump generation to generation, and remains seductively entertaining fun. The balance between escapism and morality is what keeps Serling and The Twilight Zone alive. Mark Twain observed, “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” The same could be said of fantasy and its close literary cousins, horror and science fiction.
Not to diminish or dismiss anyone else’s dose of self-help inspiration, but kindergarten just didn’t provide enough basic intel for me. I definitely required a good deal of postgraduate work after moving on from the land of finger-painting and A-B-C blocks. Some of us are just slow learners, I suppose. Some of us need more. Some of us need extended stays in the Twilight Zone. Hence the playful yet absolutely sincere title on the cover of the book you’re holding.
One of television’s angry young men during the golden age of the live anthology series, Rod Serling made his name with such powerful and profound dramas as Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight. He was thirty-five when he moved lock, stock, and typewriter into The Twilight Zone as host, narrator, creator, executive producer, and lead writer. This was widely viewed as abdicating his place as an important writer and taking a spot at the pop-culture equivalent of the children’s table. About the time The Twilight Zone premiered, Mike Wallace famously remarked to Serling that working on the fantasy show meant, “in essence, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?”
Given the amount of irony that ran through the five seasons of The Twilight Zone, it was a marvelously wrongheaded assumption to hang over the program’s debut. Wallace would soon discover what Rod already knew from reading such horror masters as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. He knew what terror titans Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker had proved in the nineteenth century—that fantasy stories are the ideal metaphoric vehicles for exploring life-and-death issues, colossal themes, societal woes, or secrets of the human heart.
Getting the message across had been getting tougher and tougher in commercial television. But the sponsors and censors and networks guardians saw only the spaceships and robots on The Twilight Zone, not the messages they were delivering. Rod and such key Twilight Zone writers as Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and Earl Hamner Jr. could have their say on almost any subject. Writing fantasy didn’t restrain them. It freed them, allowing for extraordinary flexibility in tone and topic.
“Rod was an incredibly nice man—very caring, very dedicated, very solicitous of other writers,” Matheson told me during one of many discussions of The Twilight Zone. “He was great company, whether you were talking over story ideas or having dinner. Being a writer, he understood writers, and that made The Twilight Zone a wonderful place to work. Chuck [Beaumont] and I weren’t established as TV writers, but we did have credits in the fantasy field. We were established writers in fantasy and science fiction, and that’s what Rod wanted for The Twilight Zone. He wanted the top writers in the field, and Chuck and I were the ones that worked out.”
It didn’t hurt that Beaumont was one of Matheson’s dearest friends.
“Chuck Beaumont was the one I was closest to,” Matheson said. “He and his wife had four children. We had four children. They were all about the same age. So we saw them quite a bit. Chuck and I also had a bit of a friendly rivalry. One of us would make a sale to a magazine, then the other one would make a sale. One of us would sell a novel, then the other would sell a novel. One of us would sell a TV script, then the other would sell a TV script. We sort of pushed each other.”
If Poe and Lovecraft showed the way for Serling, then Serling showed the way for the TV writer-producers who would follow him into the fantasy field: Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek), Chris Carter (The X-Files), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel), Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica), J. J. Abrams (Lost), and Alan Ball (True Blood). In fact, it would be difficult to find a writer on any current fantasy, horror, or science-fiction series who doesn’t count himself or herself as a proud descendant of the creator, host, and principal writer of The Twilight Zone. Carter, Whedon, Moore, and Abrams are quick to acknowledge this influence, as you might expect, but so are many leading TV writer-producers outside the fantasy genres, including David Chase (The Sopranos), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad). It’s a stirring tribute to the heroic influence of Serling that, more than fifty-five years after The Twilight Zone debuted, so many television writers of all kinds cite him and his wondrous land as inspirations. They couldn’t have better role models. The Twilight Zone not only was a series with a strong social conscience, it was television that believed there was intelligent life on the other side of the television screen.
The enduring wisdom of The Twilight Zone also has been acknowledged as a profound influence by such directors as Steven Spielberg and Wes Craven and such writers as George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman. They are writers of wonder, and they’ve been touched, each and every one, by this wondrous land.
No wonder. Although it premiered in 1959, The Twilight Zone perfectly embodied the spirit of activism and altruism that would fuel so many movements in the 1960s. For all its dark corners, the series relentlessly shed light on all aspects of human nature. And behind the futuristic settings and creepy concepts, the viewer could sense that here was a show illuminated by hope, optimism, and faith.
Let’s return for a second to the notion of The Twilight Zone jumping from generation to generation. That’s important. Since the spring of 2009, I’ve been teaching two classes each semester at Kent State University. Every few months, I notice more and more movies and television shows slipping out of the pop-culture consciousness. With very few exceptions, my students no longer recognize stars and titles that were almost basic rites of passage for previous generations. They don’t know the Marx Brothers, Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy. On the television front, they don’t know The Honeymooners or (and this hurts to say it, folks) The Andy Griffith Show or any of the shows that introduced archetypal characters as common reference points. They’re pretty much all gone. In 2009, I could say someone was a real Barney Fife, and maybe half of the class would get the reference. Today, blank stares. Nobody gets it.
Each semester I show a film with Boris Karloff and ask if anybody knows who that is. Nobody does. They don’t know he was the Frankenstein monster. They don’t know such classic Karloff films as The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead. It may seem monstrous, but it’s the truth. So, rather than wait for the penny to drop halfway through the film, I tell them that, while they don’t recognize Karloff’s name and won’t recognize his face, they will recognize his voice. Count on it. That’s completely due to two things they do know quite well: the 1962 novelty hit played endlessly every Halloween, “The Monster Mash” (with Bobby “Boris” Pickett doing a dead-on Karloff impression), and the 1966 animated special repeated every holiday season, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (with Karloff as narrator and the voice of the Grinch). I slip into a quick Karloff impression of my own, and the heads immediately start bobbing with recognition.
Why? Because unlike The Honeymooners and The Andy Griffith Show, “The Monster Mash” and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! are two little items that continue to jump generation to generation. They are constantly reintroduced into the pop culture. There’s not much, when you come to keep score. Musically, you’ve got the Beatles and Elvis. You can be assured of almost every student getting them on some level. With films, you can’t go wrong referencing Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (notice the enduring power of fantasy there). And television? Most of my students have a built-in resistance to anything in black and white. There are only two black-and-white series that keep making the jump, even as so many others are left by the pop-culture roadside: I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone. You want proof? For casual evidence, ask my students. I get to test this theory on a semiannual basis. My students no longer know bus driver Ralph Kramden, deputy Barney Fife, or comedy writer Rob Petrie. But they still have spent some time with the Ricardos and in Serling’s “middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.” The resistance to black and white is there, yet The Twilight Zone breaks down that resistance. The magic that worked then, works now. Or, as astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson observed in a contribution for this book, “The Twilight Zone, as filmed, would not have succeeded in color. Exploiting the mystery and suspense of shifting people and objects in and out of shadows, the directors clearly knew the cinematic value of light and darkness on film.”
An even surer sign is how these two shows are used for merchandise targeted to teens and young adults. There even has been a Twilight Zone Tower of Terror thrill ride at Disney theme parks in California and Florida, for crying out loud (or should that be, for screaming out loud?). There’s also a semiannual holiday marathon of Twilight Zone episodes—a New Year’s and Fourth of July tradition on cable’s Syfy channel. And in April 2016, CBS announced that it was partnering with a video production company to make an interactive live-action version that will be a cross between a video game and a movie.
Still more proof? In 2013, the Writers Guild of America polled its members and came up with a list of the one hundred best-written shows in television history. David Chase’s The Sopranos was in the top spot, followed by Seinfeld. And there was nothing wrong with that. Let’s face it, The Sopranos always will rank among the best dramas of all time. Seinfeld always will be lurking near the top of the great comedies list. There’s nothing surprising about that either. Both shows premiered in the 1990s, enjoying long and celebrated runs well within the consciousness and lifetimes of most WGA members. That last item is important, though. Recent series tend to have a formidable edge on these kinds of lists, being far fresher in fickle pop-culture memories. That’s the case with these lists, whether they are being assembled by the Entertainment Weekly staff or a Yahoo! entertainment writer. Could you argue about it? Well, come on, one of the primary goals of these lists is to start arguments. But now look at the show that was lurking in the number 3 position: The Twilight Zone. Let me just say this outright: a black-and-white anthology series that premiered during the Eisenhower administration was number 3. So, when you handicap the top three and adjust for short Hollywood attention spans, that is practically saying The Twilight Zone is in a dimension all its own—way far beyond the number 1 spot. And it is. No irony here. No comment. Just a simple acknowledgment of the obvious: this, ladies and gentlemen, is the real winner of that Writers Guild poll. You certainly could read the results that way.
“The reason people liked them and continue to like them, and the reason they go down easily is because you don’t have to know who the characters are,” David Chase says of The Twilight Zone. “You’re going to find out. In other words, you’ve got to know who Rockford is on The Rockford Files. And you do find out, but you’ve got to be into Rockford before you can start watching The Rockford Files. You have to know about his father and all these set pieces that are played over and over. The Twilight Zone presented little plays or movies. And so you were given all the information you needed in a half hour, so that the whole drama played out perfectly. That’s why they were so great. Oh, it’s my favorite show. It really is. And I can watch them over and over again.”
As The Twilight Zone jumps from generation to generation, therefore, so do the morality plays. The lessons get reintroduced, and a millennial in 2016 finds them every bit as compelling and relevant as a baby boomer did in 1959. It’s something you discover about Rod Serling’s writing before, during, and after The Twilight Zone. Turns out, it truly is as “timeless as infinity.”
Some writers seem dated because of themes and settings. Some seem dated because of style and vernacular. Very few remain of their time, yet timeless. Very few leave behind stories that speak to us today as forcefully as they did when first written. Very few transcend eras and fashions. Rod Serling is in that select company. It’s another parallel with Twain, who so often seems to be talking about the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth. The lessons first penned for The Twilight Zone during the Eisenhower administration were valuable to a generation that didn’t know an Internet, home computers, and smart phones. They’re valuable today. And they’ll be valuable when we’re colonizing Mars and wary of aliens dropping by with cookbooks.
What follows, then, is a self-help book courtesy of The Twilight Zone. Admittedly, the approach is somewhat lighthearted throughout, following the pattern of the first observed lesson that followed Becky’s introduction to Walter Bedeker in “Escape Clause.” But as tongue in cheek as many of these chapter headings might seem at first blush, there is a “no, really” element to each. Lurking in almost every episode of The Twilight Zone is at least one guiding rule, one life lesson, one stirring reminder of a basic right or wrong taught to us as children. There are lessons for individuals. There are lessons for our society. There are lessons for our planet.
They also are lessons you can carry through your entire life. When I was about ten years old and sampling Twilight Zone episodes for the first time, I positively delighted in that eerie, unnerving feeling that ran through these stories (and me) like an electric charge. Call it the spook-out factor. There’s something in the human animal that revels in it. It’s what lured me in, no doubt; but, once lured, the magic started to work on me in all kinds of subtle and overt ways. The magic is one of realization: the awareness that you could open a closed door, wander through it, and end up … well, anywhere your imagination might take you. What I was thrilling to and submitting to was the power of great storytelling. At first, it is just about the spookout. As you get older, and the magic has its way with you, you understand and appreciate the parables.
You gain this understanding and appreciation while grappling with the lessons in that middle ground between light and shadow. Isn’t that where most of us live our lives, struggling toward the light while coping with the shadows that threaten to overwhelm us? Influenced by everything from Poe’s tales of psychological terror to the light-and-shadow metaphor Robert Louis Stevenson employed so intriguingly in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Twilight Zone used this middle ground as a kind of existential playing field. The snap endings often invited comparisons with the short stories of O. Henry, but the endings are just a way of getting us started. A Twilight Zone tale doesn’t suggest O. Henry as much as it suggests a collaboration between O. Henry and Poe. While that’s a generalization, it’s a useful one when discussing the tone, structure, and mood at play in the middle ground. It’s incredibly fertile territory for life lessons, big and small.
Along the way, you’ll stumble on quite a bit of information about Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. As Mark Twain said of one of his books: “Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much, but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally.… The more I caulk up the sources … the more I leak wisdom.”
And about now, you’re probably thinking, “What’s with all of the Twain references?” You might as well get used to it. Okay, full disclosure time. In another part of my life, I fall somewhere on the scale between Twain scholar and fanatic (Twainiac is the term we like to use), and this vantage point has allowed me to see the many parallels between these two distinctly American writers. Those parallels will be more clearly delineated in the opening paragraphs of the next item on the table of contents—the profile of Rod Serling.
For all the information contained in the book, it might be instructive to state here and now what it isn’t. It isn’t an episode guide or a history of the series. There are some mighty good ones out there, including Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion. It was the dream of my youth to write the first major history of The Twilight Zone. Marc beat me to it in 1982, and, as I’ve told him, I couldn’t even be angry about it. He did pioneering work—better than I ever would have. Indeed, soon after, when I started writing the history of a television series (Columbo, starring Peter Falk as the rumpled detective), my goal was to get somewhere near the lofty standard set by The Twilight Zone Companion. Any temptation to add to the historical record was put to rest by the publication of Martin Grams’s comprehensive work, The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. I was approached by a publisher in the mid-eighties about writing a biography of Rod Serling, but the contract offer was contingent on the promise to deliver a dark feet-of-clay portrait of a deeply flawed genius tortured by personal failings and murky psychological complexes. Mind you, the acquisitions editor knew next to nothing about Rod Serling. She had just heard about my interest in him and believed that such a biography could be written as ordered … about any artist. I was reasonably certain that Serling was human and had failings (thank goodness), but I thought the demand for a certain tone and content was more than a bit presumptuous, particularly before the research got rolling. I turned it down. What was surprising to me was that the editor was surprised. Then, knowing I was writing a book about Columbo, she happily chirped, “How about that kind of biography of Peter Falk?” There are moments in your life when you’re quite certain you’ve landed in the Twilight Zone. You’ve probably guessed that the dark-side-of-genius biography of Peter Falk wasn’t written, either.
But, deep down, silly as it may sound, I have always felt I was “owed” a Twilight Zone book. That feeling persisted over the decades, even as so many dedicated enthusiasts contributed more worthy volumes to the shelf devoted to Serling’s iconic series. And now here we are, you and I. The right door finally presented itself. You open that door with the key of imagination. It was my way into the Twilight Zone. There’s another lesson for you, although this one was memorably articulated by Hannibal Lecter: “All good things to those who wait.”
Something else you won’t find in this book is any of that The Twilight Zone versus The Outer Limits stuff, or any other such us-versus-them construct. In the first place, it’s not in keeping with the spirit of Serling’s stories. In the second place, I’ve rarely been able to take part in these one-versus-the-other arguments. I love both The Munsters and The Addams Family, for instance, and I never saw any need to side with one family over the other. Similarly, I love The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits … and Thriller … and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. When fans start splitting up into camps, it’s time to gather them in one big room and make them watch Rod’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
Still, for the sake of classification, it’s worth pointing out that The Twilight Zone was at the forefront of a golden age for black-and-white anthology shows. Serling, therefore, glided from one golden age (the live anthology drama) to another (the filmed anthology). CBS’s The Twilight Zone, although often mentioned in the genre, wasn’t quite science fiction. That was ABC’s The Outer Limits. The Twilight Zone also wasn’t really a horror show. That was NBC’s Thriller (at least at its frightening best). And The Twilight Zone wasn’t a mystery program. That was Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Laying claim to the more general category of fantasy (or maybe what we today call speculative fiction), The Twilight Zone was big enough to encompass science fiction, horror, mystery, and a good deal more. Each of these three elements fits comfortably in the expansive, broadly defined universe of The Twilight Zone.
So this isn’t a slice of TV history. It isn’t a biography. It isn’t an analytical scholarly treatise dissecting the philosophical and sociological underpinnings of The Twilight Zone. It isn’t a pop-culture polemic. It is, however, in its own way, very much a heartfelt tribute to Serling and The Twilight Zone … wrapped in a self-help book.
On one level, it’s intended as a fun celebration of what Rod Serling started more than fifty-five years ago. On another level, though, this is a kind of fifth-dimension inspirational volume, with each life lesson supported by those morality tales, parables, and homilies told so enchantingly by Rod and his writers. Most are presented humorously, but then, in keeping with the show’s design, there’s that little serious snap at the tail end. Because these are the ground rules … in The Twilight Zone.
Copyright © 2017, 2020 by Mark Dawidziak
Foreword copyright © 2017 by Anne Serling