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The Twilight Zone

American TV anthology series (1959–1964)

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  • 9 chapters

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The series featured both established stars and younger actors who became much better known later. 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 and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode, and typically appeared on-screen to address the audience directly during the opening scene. Serling's opening and closing narrations usually summarize the episode's events, encapsulating how and why the main characters have entered the Twilight Zone. Walt Disney World has a large-size drop tower, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, themed from the program.

Development

By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a prominent name in American television. His successful television plays included "Patterns" (for Kraft Television Theatre) and "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (for Playhouse 90), but he was frustrated by constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors. In "Requiem", the line "Got a match?" had to be cut because the sponsor sold lighters; other programs had similar striking of words that might remind viewers of competitors to the sponsor, including one case in which the sponsor, Ford Motor Company, had the Chrysler Building removed from a picture of the New York City skyline.

According to comments in his 1957 anthology Patterns, Serling had been trying to delve into material more controversial than his works of the early 1950s. This led to Noon on Doomsday for the United States Steel Hour in 1956, a commentary by Serling on the defensiveness and total lack of repentance he saw in the Mississippi town where the murder of Emmett Till took place. His original script closely paralleled the Till case, then was moved out of the South and the victim changed to a Jewish pawnbroker, and eventually became just a foreigner in an unnamed town.

Serling thought that a science fiction setting would give him more freedom and less interference in expressing controversial ideas than more realistic settings. "The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who goes back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script was rejected and shelved until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958. The show was a great success and enabled Serling to begin production on The Twilight Zone. Per the BFI Film Classics library, "the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice" were motifs for Serling.

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