Twilight Of The Twilight Zone

Just finished working my way through the fifth and final DVD boxset of the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone, and though the quality isn't quite as high as in previous seasons, it's still been damn fine viewing.

Highlights included 'The Masks', one I can remember scaring the hell out of me as a kid, in which greedy relatives are told that to stay in an old man's will they must agree to wear hideously ugly masks (that reflect their inner natures) until the midnight of Mardi Gras. The pay-off is predictable to followers of the show (or anyone familiar with the show's twist-legacy), yet no less disturbing for that.

Then there's the Shatner-starring classic, 'Nightmare At 20,000 Feet', written and directed by Richards Matheson and Donner, which I've written about before; 'Living Doll' in which Telly Savalas is driven to madness by the malicious 'Talky Tina'; 'You Drive' in which a hit & run driver is stalked by his own guilty car; and 'The Jeopardy Room' in which Russian agent Martin Landau is trapped in a hotel room with a bomb that's rigged to go off if he exits, or fails to find and disarm it. (Another predictable twist from today's perspective, but Landau's performance carries it.)

Other notable actors to appear in the final season include Lee Marvin ('Steel', about a robot boxer), Mickey Rooney (a great performance as a jockey who wants to be a big man), James Coburn ('The Old Man In The Cave' - yet another computer paranoia episode), and the return of both Jack Klugman and Bill Mumy ('In Praise Of Pip', a typically sympathetic role for the man who will be Quincy).

Although guest writers like Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and future Waltons man Earl Hamner Jr. all do strong work, the true voice of The Twilight Zone will always be Rod Serling. After watching all five seasons over the past few years, I can now tell a Serling episode just by listening to the dialogue. There's a certain rhythm that becomes unmistakable. Of course, it helps that you hear his voice every show in the intro/outro segments(always Serling scripted, no matter who wrote the episode in question). Classic examples of the Serling idiom follow...

"Portrait of a losing side, proof positive that you can't outpunch machinery."

"The name is Grady, five-feet short in stockings and boots, a slightly distorted offshoot of a good breed of humans who race horses."

"The major ingredient of any recipe for fear is the unknown. And here are two characters about to partake of the meal..."

"It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears. Case in point: the scene you're watching. This is not a hospital, not a morgue, not a mausoleum, not an undertaker's parlour of the future. What it is is the belly of a spaceship."

It's beautiful writing for all kinds of reasons. It establishes scene and characters with the minimum fuss, and yet it does so with a polite, formal tone - perhaps quaintly old-fashioned or even longwinded to contemporary ears, although contemporary ears would be wrong. There's an intelligence to the word choice, and a respect for the intellect of the audience that would be rare these days. And then there's that unbeatable Serling rhythm - this is writing designed to be spoken, and spoken well.

But as Marc Scott Zicree reveals in The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling's success came at the height the Golden Age of Television, and by the time his show ended in 1964, the business had already become more about selling toothpaste than capturing the imagination of its audience. (The DVD features episodes completely uncut - so they include Serling's own built-in cigarette advertisements, spookily ironic when you consider how chainsmoking contributed to his early death.)

Serling's next pitch was rejected as too smart by studio bosses who instead tried to get him to commit to a show called 'Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves'. But like Bradbury and Dahl, Serling was always more interested in using speculative fiction to probe the human condition - rather than just churn out another 'spook of the week'. "I don't mind my show being supernatural," he famously remarked to Variety, "but I don't want to be hooked into the graveyard every week".

Though he continued to enjoy a successful career in television (and film), Serling would never again achieve the acclaim of The Twilight Zone. Years later, in his final interview, when asked how he'd like to go down in history, Serling answered with typical modesty:

I don't care. I just want them to remember me... I don't care that they're not able to quote any single line that I've written. But just that they can say, "Oh, he was a writer." That's sufficiently an honored position for me.

Rod Serling died in 1975, just 50 years of age. I like to think that by then he had some inkling of just how influential his work had been to subsequent generations of writers and filmmakers... but that influence has only grown in the years since his death. Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, M Knight Shymalan, Joss Whedon, JJ Abrams... just a few who owe their careers to the man, and his land of both shadow and substance - surely one of the best-loved and most-referenced TV shows ever aired.

I myself didn't watch my first Twilight Zone till the early 80's, but Serling has been an undeniable influence on my own limited shots of creativity. He's as much a hero to me as Stan Lee or Stephen King, Bruce Springsteen or Morrissey. One of the highlights of the final DVD boxset is a series of interviews with surviving TZ writers like Matheson, Clayton Johnson, and Hamner Jr, each recalling the generous, easy-going, and hugely encouraging writer's champion they worked under. Also included is an unmissable pair of Writers Workshops, held by Serling, and filmed at New York's Ithaca College. He's a warm and genial presence throughout, chatting informally with a small group of students about the nature of storytelling, and encouraging them to use their imaginations. There's one notable sequence where Serling explains that the most important part of any story is the conclusion. You can have the greatest premise in the world - but if it doesn't go anywhere, if it doesn't pay off - then you've failed the audience. But, he explains, coming up with an original and surprising ending is always the hardest part of a writer's job. Anyone can force a character into a corner - it takes a true writer to get them out again. Using an old TZ premise as an example, he then challenges his students to come up with an original denouement. One particular know-it-all suggests there are "hundreds" of potential outcomes. Serling asks him to name just one but the student just blusters arrogant vagaries in reply. Imagine being in a workshop with a writer of Serling's calibre and trying to prove yourself his better! What an imbecile.

To his credit though, Serling doesn't once put the student down, he just smiles like the gentleman he is and moves on to other matters. If I could have admired and respected him any more than I already did, I would have. Some things though, they just aren't possible... not even in The Twilight Zone.