Rod Serling - Creator of The Twilight Zone

Rod Serling 1924-1975

“You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, The Twilight Zone.”

You heard his voice, didn’t you?  His sharp, crisp consonants, that rapid downward glissando on the word ‘mind’, and the eerie way he backs off ‘The Twilight Zone’ as if too much emphasis will spoil the surprise to come - and there was always a surprise to come!

William Shatner in "Terror at 20,000 feet"

Rod Serling is best known as the creator of The Twilight Zone, an anthology television series that ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964.   Of the 156 Twilight Zone episodes, Serling wrote 92 of them himself.  Most Twilight Zone’s stories are science fiction or have a supernatural element to them but they range in tone from horror, to psychological drama, to comedy.  The best episodes have an ironic twist at the end which must have made them unique in the era of Leave it to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show.  Twilight Zone had an amazing host of fine actors over the years including newcomers like William Shatner, Peter Falk, Charles Bronson, Burgess Meredith, Julie Newmar, Martin Landau, and Robert Redford and old hands like Buster Keaton, Art Carney, William Demarest, Mickey Rooney, Andy Devine, and Ed Winn.  The show was critically acclaimed and had a small but loyal fan base.  However, it spent most of its run on the verge of cancellation (and was cancelled three times) because it never drew a large audience.  Nonetheless, Twilight Zone lives on and on in syndication where new generations discover it.  Today, it is considered one of the best TV series of all time.

Agnes Moorhead in "The Invaders"

The genius of Twilight Zone doesn’t lie in its science fiction settings or twist endings.  After all, Outer Limits had cool SciFi stories and Alfred Hitchcock Presents usually ended with a surprise twist but these shows are seldom seen or mentioned today.   What makes Twilight Zone episodes so memorable is that, wrapped inside their SciFi and supernatural trappings, they are serious dramas about the human condition. While we tune in for the former, it was the latter than leaves an impression.  The secret to this alchemy can be found in Rod Serling’s personal story.

Rod Edward Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1924 in Syracuse, New York.  He was a happy, extroverted kid who loved to talk.  With the coming of WWII, Serling enlisted in the U.S. Army 11^th Airborne Division the day after graduating from High School.  In 1944, he found himself fighting in Leyte in the Phillipines.  He was transferred to the 511^th demolition platoon, known as “The Death Squad.”  While in Leyte, he encountered death daily including its peculiar randomness.  One day, as the platoon rested under a palm tree, a crate of supplies fell out of the tree and decapitated one of his friends.  In 1945, in a grueling effort to take Manila, Serling’s regiment had over 50% casualties.  By the end of war, Serling was “bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service.  I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest.”  He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio on the G.I. Bill.

Burgess Meredith in "Time Enough At Last"

While still in college, Serling began to sell radio scripts.  As the television age dawned in the early 50’s, Serling sold scripts to Hallmark Hall of Fame, Lux Video Theatre, and Kraft Television Theater.    On January 12, 1955, Kraft Theater aired Serling’s 72^nd television script “Patterns” to enormous praise and success.  “Requiem for a Heavyweight” starring Jack Palance, “The Comedian” with Mickey Rooney, and “The Dark Side of the Earth” about the failed Hungarian Revolution soon followed.  By the late 50’s, Serling was one of the few successful writers of live television drama.    But he was frustrated with the networks and advertisers who insisted on watering down his scripts so as not to offend.  The Chrysler Building was removed from a view of New York City because Ford was the show’s sponsor.  There were so many changes made to a script based on a true Mississippi murder case that what finally aired was unrecognizable and meaningless.  How could an earnest, idealistic writer of human dramas express his views on the issues of the day without the interference of corporate networks and sponsors?  Disguise ‘em.  In 1957, Serling submitted a half-hour fantasy time-travel script called “The Time Element” to CBS which aired on the Desilu Playhouse as a pilot for the new science fiction series entitled “The Twilight Zone.”   He signed a contract with CBS to produce a season of The Twilight Zone which stipulated that Serling would write 80% of the scripts.  The premiere episode, “Where is Everybody?” aired October 2, 1959.

A failure in "The Eye of the Beholder"

The best of The Twilight Zone episodes have rich thematic elements of human weakness: fear, loneliness, pride, prejudice, greed, paranoia, and our desire to conform.  (The following episodes were written by Rod Serling unless otherwise noted.)  In “Time Enough At Last”, Burgess Meredith’s Henry Bemis loves to read to the exclusion of all other social interaction.  When the city is destroyed in a nuclear attack, Henry is ecstatic because he can now read as much he wants.  Fate, of course, has other plans.  In “The Invaders” (written by Richard Matheson), Agnes Moorhead plays a woman terrorized by tiny alien invaders – who turn out to be us.  “The Eye of the Beholder” a woman waits to see if surgery has corrected her grotesque appearance so that she can join her society’s glorious conformity.  The surgery is a failure; her gorgeous features (to us) are still repulsive to the pig-faced populace around her.  In “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” (by Matheson), William Shatner’s Bob Wilson, recently released from a sanitarium, thinks he’s having another breakdown when he sees a gremlin on the wing of his plane tearing back the cowling.   Is he crazy, or not?  “To Serve Man” is the title of a book left behind at the U.N. by a Kanamit, one of a race of aliens that have come to earth to benefit us all.  As earthlings eagerly board a Kanamit space ship, the book is revealed to be … a cookbook.  In “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” a major, a clown, a ballerina, a tramp, and a bagpiper struggle to find their identity … and a way out of a circular room with no door.  In “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, neighbors turns on each other when confronted with an electrical phenomena they don’t understand.  The invading aliens manipulating the electricity know that’s all they have to do – fear and prejudice will take care of the rest.

Richard Kiel in "To Serve Man"

After Twilight Zone was cancelled, Rod Serling went on to other series including the short-lived Night Gallery.  On June 28, 1975, Rod Serling died of complications of a coronary bypass operation. He was 50 years old.  But Twilight Zone lived on.  In the 80’s, holiday marathons of Twilight Zone kept  VCR’s humming.  Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983) featured four stories directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller.  In the 90’s, Disney’s Tower of Terror drop-ride had a Twilight Zone- like backstory introduced by Rod Serling himself.  Today, the old show can be found on cable channels, streaming on the Internet, and on DVD (including the handful of episodes that were never syndicated).  Fifty years old, The Twilight Zone is still very much alive in our pop-cultural conscience.   


Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. 2nd Ed,. Siman-James Press, 1989.

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