by The series died the year before I was born, and it hardly mattered, because the reruns never stopped. On summer nights in Nebraska in the early seventies, on the only signal that reached my grandfather’s corner of the state, a man in a narrow black suit would step into the frame and speak to me as if the two of us had an appointment. He promised a fifth dimension, called it “the middle ground between light and shadow,” and stood aside to let the story convict somebody. As a boy I thought I was watching monsters. The show was running trials.
Sixteen years ago I hung a charge on the show’s own name. In a 2010 piece called The Twilight Zone Effect and Tricksy Audience Endings, I used the title as shorthand for the amateur’s favorite crime: the surprise ending that pays for nothing, the red herring dressed as depth, the whole school of writers who scream Boo at minute eighty-nine because they never learned what to do with minutes one through eighty-eight. The charge was sound; the filing was sloppy. A crime deserves prosecution, and the name on the warrant should belong to the imitators, because the original series, at its best, ran the machinery in the opposite direction. What follows is the correction, the appreciation, and the argument, all overdue.
Rodman Edward Serling was born in Syracuse on Christmas Day, 1924, and raised an hour south in Binghamton, where his father ran a grocery. He enlisted at eighteen, jumped with the 511th Parachute Infantry into the Philippines, boxed for the regiment at five feet four, fought through Leyte and Luzon, and carried shrapnel out of Manila in his wrist and his knee. He came home limping and furious and wrote to drain the fury, first for radio, then for the young medium that paid by the argument. On January 12, 1955, Kraft Television Theatre broadcast his boardroom knife-fight “Patterns,” and he woke up famous. “Requiem for a Heavyweight” followed on Playhouse 90 in 1956, “The Comedian” in 1957, and he held three Emmys by thirty-three with three more coming. The press called him the angry young man of television, and the anger had an address: the sponsor’s memo.
The fury had a specific defeat behind it. In 1955 the murder of Emmett Till, and the acquittal that followed, put Serling at the typewriter with a story he already knew no network would film straight, so he armored it in advance: the victim became a Jewish pawnbroker, the town stayed small and unnamed, and the play, “Noon on Doomsday,” went to The United States Steel Hour. Then Serling said the word Till out loud in an interview, and the sanding began. Internal memos complained the play still resembled the case, so the setting moved to New England, the victim shrank to an unnamed foreigner, and the word lynch came out of the script; by Serling’s own account the purge reached the prop table, where even soda bottles read as too Southern to survive. White Citizens’ Councils and their kin mailed protests by the thousand before the April 25, 1956 broadcast, and the morning after, reading the New York Times review, Serling wrote a friend that he felt run over by a truck that then backed up to finish the job. He tried again in 1958 for Playhouse 90, and the network moved the lynching to the 1890s and turned the murdered boy into a Mexican teenager named Pancho Rivera. Serling’s verdict on the ordeal ran six words: “my script had turned to dust.” Variety praised the broadcast anyway as a fiery assault on discrimination, which tells you how much voltage survived even a gutted Serling script.
So when he built The Twilight Zone, he built it as a smuggling route. Days before the October 2, 1959 premiere, Mike Wallace pressed him on camera about abandoning serious drama, and Serling, on the record, swore off controversy for the new show. Some heard surrender that day; the five seasons that followed read as camouflage, the most productive lie of his career. A Martian, he had figured out, could say things on network television that a citizen in a suit would never be allowed to say. Newton Minow proved the camouflage worked: in the 1961 speech that condemned television as a vast wasteland, the FCC chairman singled out exactly one weekly series for praise, calling it “dramatic and moving.” The medium’s own regulator had caught the signal the sponsors kept missing. For five seasons and 156 episodes, 92 of them from his own typewriter, Serling ran sermons through customs dressed as gremlins, ghosts, and men from Mars, and the receipts all cleared.
Now the dissent, and it comes from a man I loved. My mentor, Marshall Jamison, was a golden boy of the golden age: an associate producer and director on the Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show in 1953, the executive producer of The United States Steel Hour from 1956 to 1958, later the director of That Was the Week That Was, and later still the maker of literate public television out of Nebraska, including the Mark Twain films. The first credit throws a shadow: he took the Steel Hour chair months after “Noon on Doomsday” went out, sanded and unrecognizable, under that program’s banner. Marshall knew what that machine did to writers, from the inside. And Marshall thought little of The Twilight Zone. Everything ends in deus ex machina, he told me, and nothing is earned. He had standing to say it. He had produced live drama that stood or fell on people talking in rooms, in real time, with no spaceship available when a second act sagged.
Take the charge seriously, because it deserves it. Deus ex machina names a specific fraud, older than television by two and a half millennia. Euripides ended plays by lowering a god on the stage crane to cut knots the plot could no longer untie; Medea exits in the chariot of the sun with the bodies of her children, and no human consequence can reach her. Horace, in the Ars Poetica, laid down the rule that still governs: keep the god off the stage unless the knot deserves such an untier. The complaint, translated to a writing room, goes like this: the writer ties a knot he cannot untie, lowers a god in the last minute to cut it, and sends the audience home holding two loose ends and a program. When Marshall said nothing was earned, that is the fraud he was naming.
Here is my answer, sixteen years late. Serling runs Euripides’ machine in reverse. The god arrives early. Put a stopwatch on the strong episodes and the impossible thing is announced inside the first two minutes, usually by the author himself, standing in the frame like counsel reading a stipulation into the record: grant me one ghost, one gremlin, one talking doll, and everything that follows will be human. The ending, when it comes, is a verdict computed from the characters’ own choices under that single stipulated pressure. Horace survives intact, because when the last minute arrives, the knot gets untied by the people who tied it. The crane lowers the god at the top of the show, in plain sight, with a signature attached, and then the crane goes home.
Exhibit one: “The Obsolete Man,” June 2, 1961, closing the second season. The state has abolished books and abolished God, and Burgess Meredith’s Romney Wordsworth, a librarian, stands in an expressionist courtroom being sentenced to death for the crime of being himself. Fritz Weaver’s Chancellor bellows the state’s logic from a lectern built like a cliff. Wordsworth makes his conditions: only he and his executioner will know the method, the hour will be midnight, and the execution will run on live television. Then he invites the Chancellor to visit, locks the door, and mentions the bomb. Every beat that follows grows from the first scene’s own rules: the state that broadcast his death must watch its officer beg, and a state that worships strength has no procedure for mercy, so it declares the begging Chancellor obsolete and devours him. No crane. No god. The trap was built out of the state’s own sentence by the man it condemned. If Marshall wanted earned, here is earned, with an itemized receipt.
Exhibit two, offered against myself: “Time Enough at Last,” November 20, 1959. Henry Bemis, Meredith again, the bank teller who wants only to read, survives the bomb inside the vault, finds the library steps, arranges his years of books, stoops, and breaks his glasses. Here Marshall’s charge lands clean, and I will hold his coat while it does: the shattering is chance, a cruelty pulled from a lottery drum, and viewers have been appealing the sentence for sixty-six years. Yet even this episode banks most of its debt honestly. The bomb Bemis survives was on the front page he was reading in the vault; the world that mocked a reading man ended on that world’s own schedule, by that world’s own hand; only the stumble on the steps came out of the drum. Call it the exception that maps the boundary: when the Zone cheats, it cheats with the universe, and when it earns, it earns with character, and the second column in that ledger runs far longer than the first.
Meredith was the show’s favorite instrument for a reason. He led four episodes, a record shared only with Jack Klugman, and Serling started the streak the moment he saw the first rushes and began writing parts to fit him. Meredith remembered those roles late in life with a working actor’s plain gratitude: “every one of them was extraordinary.” The range tells its own story: Bemis the meek, sentenced by luck; Luther Dingle, the vacuum-cleaner salesman handed impossible strength by a visiting Martian as an experiment and stripped of it the moment he preens; Wordsworth, the librarian who out-stares a state. Then Charles Beaumont, the show’s other great pen, flipped the coin for the hour-long “Printer’s Devil” and cast Meredith as the Devil himself, running a small-town newspaper’s linotype, and the meek little man wore damnation just as comfortably. Television in those years paid character actors by the pound; the Zone handed them arias: twenty-five minutes, one soul, full orchestra.
Dennis Hopper’s episode makes the strongest modern case. “He’s Alive” aired January 24, 1963, in the hour-long fourth season, six years before Easy Rider, and Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, a street-corner fascist whose audiences laugh, walk, or throw punches. Then a coach arrives who keeps to the shadows and teaches the entire trade in one seminar: join the mob before you claim to lead it, speak its fears back to it in its own accent, hand it objects for its anger, and when the room cools, make a martyr. Vollmer follows the syllabus, orders the useful death of one of his own men, packs his rallies, and finally demands to see his benefactor’s face. The coach steps into the light and is Adolf Hitler. Serling ranked the script among the best he wrote for the series; the mailroom disagreed in the thousands, and the ugliest letters in the pile were the fan mail from actual hate groups, which proved the aim even while contesting it. Critics have called the hour preachy ever since, and it is preachy the way a fire bell is loud. The ending stays entirely on the ground: Vollmer murders Ernst Ganz, the Dachau survivor who raised him, runs from the police, takes a bullet, and the shadow peels off the brick wall and walks on without him. Earned, every inch of it, because the ghost never forces a hand; he only ever offers Vollmer the thing Vollmer is already reaching for. Play those coaching scenes tonight and they land like a transcription with the date scraped off.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” belongs in this argument for a different reason: it shows the editor inside the author. Season five ran over budget with thirty-five of its thirty-six ordered episodes delivered, and producer William Froug proposed a solution from outside the building entirely: a black-and-white French short, La Rivière du hibou, which Robert Enrico had shot in 1961 from the Ambrose Bierce story and which took the short-film prize at Cannes in 1962. The rights cost $20,000. The re-edit down to twenty-five American minutes cost $5,000 more. An in-house episode ran about $65,000, so for once the accountants and the artists shook hands. On February 28, 1964, Serling sat before the camera, dropped his riddling entrance, and told the audience plainly that for the first time in five years the program would present a film made by others. Then he kept quiet for twenty-five nearly wordless minutes, which for Rod Serling was a performance of its own.
Weeks after the broadcast, the film won the Academy Award for best live-action short, making it the only Twilight Zone with an Oscar attached. The contract bought one airing and one repeat, so the film fell out of the syndication package and into legend as one of the Lost Five, and those of us raised on the reruns chased it for decades before home video paid the ransom. My memory always filed that night as the film’s American debut; the strict record says the Oscar’s qualifying run had already put it before a few Los Angeles art-house seats, so the honest phrasing is this: February 28, 1964 was its American television debut, the night it reached the actual country. And it answers Marshall from a third direction, because the twist is Bierce’s, set down in 1890, sixty-nine years before the series drew breath. The rope was always going to hold. When Serling met a perfect ending he had no hand in writing, he did what an author with taste and power does: he paid cash, cut his own voice down to one honest introduction, and let the dead man run for his life.
So the charge I filed in 2010 stands, with the name corrected on the warrant. My four measurements still read true. “The Sixth Sense” earns its reversal because every scene replays honest the second time through; the clues were on the table, and we chose the boy’s salvation over our own eyes. “The Usual Suspects” earns it through a performance that was itself the con. “Donnie Darko” dissolves into a mind with no floor beneath it, so nothing binds and nothing costs. And Scorsese, distrusting the material of “Shutter Island,” bolted one explaining line onto the ending and bled the picture out through the hole. One test sorts all four, and sorts the Zone besides: does the middle pay for the end. The best of Serling’s series passes the test with interest. The worst of its imitators built a school for cheating on it, photocopying the last minute of a Serling episode while skipping the twenty-four that bought it. That school is the Twilight Zone Effect, and the founder’s name does not belong on it.
Name the genius plainly, then. Serling owned an ear trained in radio, so his people spoke in arias and his narrations scanned like verse recited under oath. A stopwatch came next: the twenty-five-minute form taught him an economy the prestige ninety-minute stage never demanded, one pressure applied to one soul until the bill printed. The smuggler’s route he surveyed in blood at the Steel Hour and Playhouse 90 carried contraband morality past the sponsors in alien costume for five straight seasons. And he signed everything with his body, stepping into the frame each week so the audience always knew that a particular wounded moralist from Binghamton stood behind the verdicts. Authorship on American television has never again been that naked, and I say that as a man who has spent his life arguing that the writer must hold the whole power or none of it.
Then the fight ended in a draw and he did what tired men do with a draw: he sold. CBS bought out his share of the series, a transaction his family spent decades regretting as the reruns minted money without him. ABC dangled a sixth season retooled as weekly gothic horror and he walked away from it. Night Gallery, in 1970, gave him back a gallery and kept the keys; he wrote nearly a third of the segments and held no veto over the rest, a host in his own house. The face that had signed the great American anthology went to work selling cars and cigarettes on camera and hosting a game show, and the angry young man aged into a familiar voice with diminishing arguments. The classroom held what the screen was losing: from 1967 until the end he taught at Ithaca College, and by every account his students got the real man. In May of 1975 his heart failed twice inside a month, the second time at the cottage on Cayuga Lake. On June 26 the surgeons in Rochester opened his chest for ten hours; a third attack took him on the table, and on June 28 he was dead at fifty, the son of a father whose heart had quit at fifty-two, himself a three-to-four-pack-a-day man since the war. His last interview ruled against his own shelf, insisting that among thirty years of work “very damn little is important.”
What might have happened to that talent with more years on the clock is a guess, and I will label it one. Take him at his tired word and you get the first road: he said near the end that he had emptied himself out, and on that road the extra years buy more commercials, a softer chair at Ithaca, a lifetime-achievement montage. The calendar argues for a second road, and the calendar is persuasive. Roots aired eighteen months after his funeral and proved that a mass American audience would sit still for moral history told at length; the miniseries decade opened, then cable, then the subscription screen where a writer with a name could own a series outright, and then an anthology revival that names him in its every press release. The forms built for Rod Serling pulled into the station as his train was leaving. And the strongest evidence sits in his filing cabinet: he told the Emmett Till story twice and watched the networks sand it into New England and into the 1890s, and the uncut “Noon on Doomsday” had to wait until 2008 for its first full public reading, at the college where he taught, thirty-three years after his death. Talent for insight does the opposite of retiring; it compounds, and what ran out on Serling first was the market, and the market was about to turn. Hand that man 1977, a miniseries order, and no sponsor in the room, and I believe the third telling gets made at full length under his own name. That, I would guess, is the bill for the table in Rochester: the third telling, unwritten.
The reruns are still running. Somewhere tonight a signal crosses dark farmland to a house with one working channel, and a child who came for monsters is about to sit through a trial instead. The man in the narrow suit steps into the frame, fifty-one years dead, and reads the stipulation one more time. He is still standing where he told us he would be, in the middle ground, holding the door, and the door still opens, because he cut the key from character, and character keeps no expiration date.
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