Sometime in 1962, a little girl called Anne, who was seven or eight years old, was teased by a mean boy at her school in Pacific Palisades, southern California. “Are you something out of The Twilight Zone?” he taunted her.
“Needless to say, I had no idea what he was talking about, but asked my dad later when I got home and we were watching The Flintstones together,” recalls Anne. “My father told me he wrote a show that was on every week. He said there were other writers too and that it was called The Twilight Zone. He explained some of the episodes were too old for me and that some were a little scary.”
Anne’s father was Rod Serling, the debonair creator and host (and writer of many episodes) of The Twilight Zone, the anthology series that ran from 1959 to 1964 featuring half-hour stories of the fantastic, with stings in their tails.
Serling was born a century ago on Christmas Day 1924 but has now been dead as long as he lived, passing at the age of 50 after a life fuelled by ambition and cigarettes, the former seemingly boundless, the latter at one point numbering as many as four packs a day.
Serling could often be seen smoking in the introductions to each episode of The Twilight Zone, in which he would wander into the scene, unnoticed by the characters, a sharp-suited, one-man Greek chorus, letting us know what was about to unfold. (“Twelve o’clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in a day’s routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death…”)
His appearances at the beginning of each story, and teasing the following week’s episode at the end, made him feel like an intimate friend of the viewer, someone sharing this crazy half-hour journey they were about to go on, and gave him a measure of fame beyond what most TV writers and producers had at the time.
In fact, says Nick Parisi, president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, he was pretty much TV’s first showrunner. “It is almost impossible to overstate Rod Serling’s influence on television. He is one of the pioneers,” says Parisi. “With The Twilight Zone, Serling became essentially the first writer to have ultimate control over the direction of a television series. Talk to virtually any showrunner today—including Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, David Chase, David Simon—and they will tell you that Serling is their gold standard.”
‘It is almost impossible to overstate Rod Serling’s influence on television’
Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, the youngest of two boys, to Sam and Esther Serling. When he was two, the family moved a little south in the state to Binghampton, where he grew up and was schooled. He was an outgoing child and loved to be the centre of attention. Joel Engels, in his 1989 biography Last Stop: The Twilight Zone, writes, “By the time he was six, his soliloquies and monologues had obtained almost legendary status in the Serling family.” And then he discovered cinema; writes Engels, “it is clear from his later works that Serling’s imagination was greatly shaped by the countless hours he spent in the movies… actors were the centre of attention, as Rod wanted and needed to be.”
During the Second World War, Serling trained as a paratrooper with the 11th Airborne Division and saw action in the Philippines and at the end of the war as part of the Japan occupation force. It was after the war, and after resuming his studies, that Serling entered the media, first radio and then television as a writer, and it was 1955 when his big break came, on the anthology program Kraft Television Theatre, which produced an episode from Serling’s script, “Patterns”.
Parisi says, “His first major critical success, ‘Patterns’ on the Kraft Television Theatre, is considered a touchstone in television’s evolution to being a respectable art form, particularly for writers. After Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight” was performed on Playhouse 90 [in 1956], the head of CBS, William Paley, called the control room to tell the crew, ‘That play just advanced television by ten years.’”
The following year, when Anne Serling was three years old, the family moved to California from Greenwich, Connecticut, to further Serling’s TV career. Anne, who wrote a memoir entitled As I Knew Him: My Dad Rod Serling, recalls of her childhood, “It was so much more normal than you could imagine. When I was writing my memoir, I read an article that mentioned my father worked 12 hours a day, but I never felt that he wasn’t accessible. He had an office in the back yard and, for years, when I came home from school, we would play basketball together. He was always there at the dinner table and usually the conversations were silly.”
The Twilight Zone was born from a script that Serling sold to CBS but was shelved until the producer of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse—another popular anthology show run by Des Arnaz and Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame)—picked it up. “The Time Element” was a sci-fi tale with a twist at its end and proved a hit with audiences, paving the way for CBS to offer Serling what would become The Twilight Zone.
“At the time that Rod Serling announced that he would be leaving the prestigious world of live television to do a weekly, filmed science fiction series, people thought he had lost his mind,” says Parisi. “In that sense, it is a surprise that it was so successful. The fact that it has endured for more than 60 years now is both surprising and easily explained—it has lasted because it was so good. Rod Serling didn’t approach the science fiction and fantasy genres as if they were intended for six-year-olds.”
The Twilight Zone enthralled audiences with science fiction and fantasy stories served up with a healthy dollop of social commentary. Sterling’s older brother, Bob, told Engels for his biography that “The Twilight Zone sprang from his frequent insomniac nights, when his active imagination—fed by his lifelong love of horror films, his war experiences and the stories of such writers as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and HP Lovecraft—contrived fantastical plots that seemed somehow plausible in the predawn.”
A thread running through The Twilight Zone’s five seasons is Serling’s abhorrence of injustice in all its forms. Episodes such as “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “The Shelter” developed the classic trope of man’s inhumanity to man—and how we, not the feared things in the dark, are the true monsters.
‘Bias and prejudice make me angry… more than anything’
Anne says, “I knew from an early age that racism enraged my dad. There is a quote where he said, ‘Bias and prejudice make me angry… more than anything’. In the late 1960s, when [Alabama governor] George Wallace was running for president, my dad said, ‘If that racist son-of-a- bitch prevails, we’re moving out of the country’.
“He was also distraught about the Vietnam War. When I was about 12, I refused to say the pledge of allegiance at school. It was not at an original idea of mine, but rather, hearing my dad, it was my statement in protest over the war. The teacher sent me home with a ridiculous assignment: I was to write 100 times that I would say the pledge of allegiance, and this would be signed by a parent. I took the paper out to my dad and he quickly signed it. He smiled, we had a brief discussion, and I know he was proud of me.”
Parisi adds, “Rod’s personal beliefs and politics were integral to his identity as an artist. He wanted to convey those beliefs in his work, not just because they were so important to him, but because he believed that doing so was simply part of the writer’s job.
“While teaching at Ithaca College, he told a group of students, ‘I’m not suggesting that there has to be a message in everything you write, but I believe that if a person has an opinion, a point of view, then it’s incumbent upon him as an artist to so state it, to so produce it.’ To Serling, art must, by definition, ‘say something about something’.”
The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation was set up in 1985, ten years after his untimely death, by a group of Serling’s friends and colleagues, including Helen Foley, who taught him in high school and became one of his first mentors. They felt that Serling’s work was artistically and socially important and deserved to be preserved and promoted—something he was not convinced of in his own lifetime. In September this year, the foundation erected a statue of Serling in his hometown of Binghampton.
Anne says that Serling would be “deeply honoured and humbled”, adding, “My father didn’t think he would be remembered. He was quoted as saying, ‘My writing is momentarily adequate, nothing that would stand the test of time.’ He was so wrong. I hear from many, many people who tell me how his work influenced them. Students who had him as a teacher, and many who say they had tumultuous childhoods and think of my dad as their father.”
With his closing monologues on each episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling always had the last word. He should have it now, from the end of the episode “I Am The Night—Color Me Black”, in which a man is to be hanged after being wrongly convicted of killing a bigot.
“A sickness known as hate,” he intones over the closing scenes. “Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ—but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in The Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”
