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The Twilight Zone is a television series created by Rod Serling. This article traces the history of the show in its original broadcast form, from 1959 to 1964 on CBS.
Series history
Development
By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was not a new name to 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 occurences, 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 the Kimberly-Clark Corporation) 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. Many of the first season's episodes proved to be among the series' most celebrated, including Time Enough at Last, 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 for the first time to present his opening narration surrounded by the scenery he was describing.
A new sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive, replaced the previous year's Kimberly-Clark Corporation 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 if it was a small number of dollars".
In a push to keep 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)
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.
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…. 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. Beaumont’s input diminished 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 best of the season. 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.
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. 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 the only television show in history 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% 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.
Trivia
- Rod Serling was not the original choice for narrator. Orson Welles was considered, but the producers felt he asked for too much money. The original version of the Twilight Zone pilot Where Is Everybody? featured Westbrook Van Voorhis as the narrator.
- Except for the season's final episode, Serling's narrations during the first season, were off-camera voiceovers—he only appeared on-camera at the end of each show to introduce previews of the next episode.
See also
- The Twilight Zone
- List of The Twilight Zone episodes
- Night Gallery
- The Outer Limits
- The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney theme parks
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).
External links
- Twilight Zone Cafe A Twilight Zone Message Board