A man with a stern expression and a shock of slick black hair, wearing a crisp black suit, cigarette in hand, approaches the camera. In his clipped, precise patter, he\u2019s about to welcome you \u2026 to The Twilight Zone.<\/p>\n
Creator Rod Serling opened every episode of the long-running show. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n
This is how each episode of The Twilight Zone typically began, with its creator, Rod Serling, delivering a brief, cryptic opening monologue before throwing to a stand-alone story.<\/p>\n
Running for five scintillating seasons from 1959 to 1964, the show told stories about the human condition in a world much like this one, but running on a parallel track. The supernatural often \u2013 but not always \u2013 played a role but, as we learned each week, human nature was the unnatural interloper, the cause of The Twilight Zone\u2019s many trademark ironic twists.<\/p>\n
There were no season-long, overarching plots, no recurring characters. Each week viewers were treated to a single unsettling tale. In this way, writers were able to go wild in a cordoned-off playground, with an incredible level of freedom to experiment.<\/p>\n
Before The Twilight Zone, Serling \u2013 a passionate political thinker \u2013 had been turning out plays to great acclaim. But he had big ideas. He kept running up against network censorship, not to mention TV\u2019s increasing reliance on advertisers.<\/p>\n
He said it was hard to make good television<\/a> \u201cwhen every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper\u201d. He realised he was going to have to think laterally if he was going to write about the big issues. He\u2019d need a Trojan horse.<\/p>\n William Shatner as Robert Wilson in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n By the time The Twilight Zone began airing in 1959, the Trojan horse was inside the city gates. The show swiftly began stretching its creative legs. Serling, who served as executive producer and writer, or co-writer, of 92 of its staggering 156 episodes, was unafraid to take viewers well and truly off the beaten track. With a tight-knit group of other writers he went on to redefine the speculative anthology genre with some truly trailblazing stories.<\/p>\n In the third episode of the fifth season, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, William Shatner plays Robert Wilson, a man flying home after spending six months in a sanatorium due to a nervous breakdown. Already fragile and harried, Robert, mid-flight, sees something on the wing of the plane. Something terrifying. The episode is a brilliant portrait of fear, mania and a (potentially) unreliable narrator. Today\u2019s audiences may recognise its hilarious Treehouse of Horror parody, too, from The Simpsons.<\/p>\n Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis in Time Enough at Last. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n The British Film Institute once highlighted The Twilight Zone\u2019s yen for tackling \u201cthe cruel indifference and implacability of fate, and the irony of poetic justice\u201d. In Time Enough at Last, an avid reader, Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith), has a wife who hounds him and a job he hates. All Henry wants is time to read his books in peace. Fate, Henry soon finds out, is not without a sense of irony.<\/p>\n double quotation markThe writer\u2019s role is to be a menacer of the public\u2019s conscience, he must have a position, a point of viewRod Serling<\/p>\n But The Twilight Zone wasn\u2019t nihilistic \u2013 it could be sentimental, too. The Changing of the Guard, for example, follows an elderly teacher, Prof Fowler (Donald Pleasance), forced to retire from a prestigious boys school after 51 years. Returning to the school at night and at the end of his wits, the professor is confronted with the ghosts of his past. The episode gives viewers, and Fowler, an emotional payoff reminiscent of Dead Poets Society.<\/p>\n One for the Angels further proves that The Twilight Zone hums with an undercurrent of profound optimism. A salesman, Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn), encounters Mr Death (Murray Hamilton). Lou, who could sell ice cubes in a snowstorm, robs Death of his prize with a compelling sales pitch. But Death isn\u2019t having it. It\u2019s the kind of premise that would have made a brilliant feature film, but no movie could have pulled it off as deftly.<\/p>\n Serling, who was Jewish and a decorated paratrooper in the second world war, wasn\u2019t afraid to mine his personal traumas. In The Purple Testament a lieutenant fighting in the Philippines finds out he\u2019s gained a strange, unearthly power: he knows which of his men will live and which of them will die.<\/p>\n This impulse to speak truth to power was always on the cards for Serling. In 1955, a 14-year-old black child, Emmett Till, was tortured and murdered. His body was dumped in a river. Serling wanted to tell this story. To avoid censorship, he changed key details, pitching a version showing the lynching of a Jewish pawnbroker for the critically acclaimed anthology series The United States Steel Hour, and it was approved.<\/p>\n But years later, once The Twilight Zone was up and running, Serling dispensed with any vagaries. In I Am the Night \u2013 Color Me Black, he told the story in its most fearless iteration.<\/p>\n Throughout its five seasons, The Twilight Zone was never afraid to challenge and confront. \u201cThe writer\u2019s role is to be a menacer of the public\u2019s conscience, he must have a position, a point of view,\u201d Serling once said<\/a>. \u201cHe must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.\u201d<\/p>\n For a generation of TV viewers, their first exposure to The Twilight Zone was probably via a parody. Since it debuted almost 70 years ago, it has been referenced, spoofed and outright copied. But when it debuted, nothing like it had been seen before and, despite its litany of imitators, nothing like it has been seen since. Black Mirror tried but it simply can\u2019t match The Twilight Zone\u2019s peerless cinematic artistry. Nor could Jordan Peele, whose 2020 reboot failed to take off<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perhaps there was something on the wing.<\/p>\n The Twilight Zone is available via Foxtel in Australia and via Legend in the UK. It\u2019s available to rent or buy via Apple TV in Australia, the UK and the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man with a stern expression and a shock of slick black hair, wearing a crisp black suit,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-943120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}