{"id":529588,"date":"2026-03-17T22:29:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T22:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/529588\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T22:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T22:29:11","slug":"a-worthwhile-if-somewhat-shallow-rod-serling-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/529588\/","title":{"rendered":"A Worthwhile if Somewhat Shallow Rod Serling Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJonah Tulis\u2019 Serling<\/a>, a new 98-minute documentary about The Twilight Zone<\/a> creator Rod Serling<\/a>, is good, but it\u2019s mostly a good shell.<\/p>\n

\n\tPersuasively showing that Rod Serling was one of the medium\u2019s true prophets, a prolific thinker capable of seeing the world around him and using it as a prism to look both backward and forward, Serling proves less deft in examining Rod Serling as a man. Despite interviews with Serling\u2019s wife and daughters, as well as several collaborators, this remains a portrait of the artist as a very wise fortune cookie instead of a flesh-and-blood storyteller whose work still thrills us in a way that countless contemporaries, however acclaimed, never achieved.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSerling\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA worthwhile if somewhat shallow dive into a deep man.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: SXSW Film Festival (Documentary Spotlight)
Director: Jonah Tulis
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 38 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of Tulis\u2019 central aesthetic conceits is a bunch of re-enactments in which Serling is featured either as a blurred face, a smoking profile or a silhouette, and that\u2019s how he ultimately comes across in the film. He\u2019s a suit and a cigarette and an impeccable hair-do, rarely a person.<\/p>\n

\n\tWatching Serling made me want to binge The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, but more than that, it made me crave a four-hour documentary capable of a greater level of humanizing and specificity.<\/p>\n

\n\tI learned some things from Serling, but the primary thing I learned is that Rod Serling loved a dictaphone.<\/p>\n

\n\tSerling apparently dictated letters and scripts and general observations on the industry he helped shape, providing what, in Tulis\u2019 hands, evolves into the voluminous narration that guides the documentary.<\/p>\n

\n\tTulis had so much of Serling\u2019s voice that he was able to do Serling as a documentary told primarily through the perspective of its subject, eschewing expert outside observers and avoiding talking heads. Instead, Serling\u2019s recordings, as well as a wealth of in-depth television interviews over the years, steer the film, with audio from interviews with his wife Carol and daughters filling in personal gaps. On the professional side, Tulis has interviews with several Twilight Zone writers and producers, but it\u2019s never clear which of those interviews were conducted for this film and which existed from earlier untold provenance.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou can take the \u201call archival\/no talking heads\u201d approach to documentary storytelling if you have the visual footage necessary to hang all of that talking on. Tulis has all those TV interviews, a decent cache of home movies \u2014 the Serling family\u2019s house in Pacific Palisades and lake house in Interlaken, N.Y. both look like nice places to have raised a family \u2014 and lots and lots of clips, usually disseminated in lengthy montages, from Serling\u2019s various TV shows.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it isn\u2019t enough, and the documentary\u2019s over-reliance on black-and-white re-enactments is a flaw. It isn\u2019t just that the re-enactments don\u2019t seem to have been made with a cohesive sense of perspective; they\u2019re also shot in a black-and-white digital style that, while pretty, in no way matches the rich tones that the best of 1950s and 1960s TV was able to achieve. The result here is that every transition from period footage to newly shot imagery feels slightly jarring. Since presumably this approach was intended to avoid having cutaways to talking heads, which themselves would have felt jarring, I wonder why nobody attempted to doctor the re-enactments to tone down the hard lighting and crisp edges. Everybody in the re-enactments wears nice suits and smokes, but otherwise nothing is really evoked.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps actually seeing Carol and the daughters would have helped bring the human side of Serling to the foreground? I came away with no sense of who he was at home, other than \u201cextremely busy,\u201d nor who he was in a writers room or boardroom. The things that shaped his perspective are either discussed in the most generic of terms \u2014 his time in World War II was formative, but bland \u2014 or ignored entirely. It doesn\u2019t matter if Serling was a practicing Jew in his adult life \u2014 the Internet suggests he was not \u2014 but so much of his worldview, including his thoughts on civil rights and the initial lure of fighting in WWII in the first place, comes from at least a secular Jewish place. Eliding it entirely erases something that is, at least to me, important.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhatever its origins, Serling\u2019s dogmatic and argumentative spirit is the thing that the documentary captures best. Tulis shows how Serling\u2019s passion for civil rights and later opposition to the Vietnam War colored so much of what he wrote, and so much of what he believed that television, as a medium, was capable of accomplishing. Tulis isn\u2019t always able to give enough depth on specific Serling scripts and how they fit into his worldview, but there are brief nods to Twilight Zone episodes like \u201cThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,\u201d \u201cThe Invaders\u201d and \u201cTime Enough at Last\u201d as installments that realized his aspirations. And he\u2019s able to trace how the advertiser-driven focus of television homogenized scripts like the teleplay Noon on Doomsday, initially intended as a commentary on the murder of Emmett Till before being moved geographically and topically.<\/p>\n

\n\tSerling takes on its greatest prescience in breaking down the end of The Twilight Zone, doomed at least in part because CBS executives had ties to Republican politicians who didn\u2019t like the show\u2019s liberal inflections. It does not take an imagination like that of Rod Serling to envision something similar occurring today (it does, apparently, take a great imagination to know what Serling thought about his own movie career, which was lucrative but remains barely a footnote here).<\/p>\n

\n\tWhatever limitations Serling has as a documentary or as an overall profile of its subject, it underlines Serling\u2019s reputation as one of those visionaries whose thoughts on the medium are eternally relevant, doing its part to negate Serling\u2019s self-effacing quote, \u201cI don\u2019t think, truly, that\u2019s there\u2019s anything I\u2019ve written that\u2019ll last, that\u2019ll stand the test of time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonah Tulis\u2019 Serling, a new 98-minute documentary about The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, is good, but it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206,238137,238138,234893,66422,234894,234895,89252],"class_list":["post-529588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-rod-serling","tag-serling","tag-south-by-southwest","tag-sxsw","tag-sxsw-2026","tag-sxsw-reviews","tag-the-twilight-zone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}