Why ‘The Twilight Zone’ Left a Lasting Legacy Like No Other TV Series

We see a starry night-time sky, and we hear ominous but familiar music — that unmistakable combination of dissonant guitars and clattering bongos. All of a sudden, we hear a low male voice speaking in a much-imitated monotone: “Picture if you will: a young and talented screenwriter who has a remarkable gift for telling hard-hitting stories about the way in which we live today, illuminating the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary human society, both what we’re doing right and where there’s room for improvement. He is one of the first masters of the infant medium called television, but commercial TV comes with a downside, mainly in that networks and sponsors discouraged anything that might be considered thought-provoking or, even worse, controversial. ‘Madison Avenue,’ as Nat King Cole famously put it, ‘is afraid of the dark.’ “Even though this young writer is not necessarily predisposed towards science fiction, fantasy, or horror, it eventually occurs to him that he can use those genres to make a statement about the current state of the world. The show he creates is amazingly successful and still well known to subsequent generations, and the larger message is clear, that the most effective way to present us with our fears and our foibles, the stellar heights of our knowledge and the deep pits of our ignorance, to hold a mirror up to society, is by doing so in … The Twilight Zone.”“The Twilight Zone,” which launched in October 1959 and continued through June 1964, is, alongside “Star Trek,” almost undisputedly the most influential and well-remembered dramatic show of the 1960s. The two shows have more in common than the obvious point that many episodes of the former concern themselves with the future of humanity, particularly in terms of space travel and our interactions with extraterrestrial races. And then, famously, William Shatner, later known to history as Captain Kirk, starred in two of the “Twilight Zone”’s most famous episodes, and another presents Leonard Nimoy in an early cameo. But TZ creator and head writer Rod Serling bequeathed much more to Trek majordomo Gene Roddenberry, most importantly the conceit of making us take a cold hard look at mid-twentieth century problems by dressing them up in space suits. The “Trek” episode that most directly confronts racial prejudice, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” could be described as the most-”Twilight Zone”-influenced of the entire series.‘The Five Themes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ by Arlen Schumer. BearManor MediaIn a valuable new book, author, illustrator, and designer Arlen Schumer makes the point that there are essentially five different themes to the show. First, he starts by splitting the entire series — all 156 individual episodes — almost neatly in two, contending that there are 68 shows worth watching. He then discusses them in terms of these specific categories, starting with a memorable phrase from Serling’s famous intro, “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition…” As Mr. Schumer explains, Serling seems to have a mistrust of both; the first gives us rockets that either fail to get us where we’re supposed to be going, or, worse, deliver us hungry aliens who want to put us in zoos or on the menu. Superstition puts us face to face with the vengeful dead and even the devil himself. Earlier tonight, Mr. Schumer delivered a presentation at the National Arts Club, on Gramercy Park, about how ‘The Twilight Zone’ anticipated the effects of technology on mankind. “Suburban Nightmares” is a particularly prescient category, in which Serling hit us rather literally right where we live. The Eisenhower years were a near-decade of total conformity, in which everybody was supposed to look, act, and behave like everybody else. In episodes like “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “The Shelter,” Serling shows us how easily this stiflingly tight-knit society can completely unravel, even as it eventually would, not because of communists or aliens, but under the weight of its own repression. “A Question of Identity” dissects those episodes where Serling creates, in the words of contemporary novelist Jonathan Lethem, “a homegrown vernacular of alienation, identity slippage, and paranoia,” where you’re not sure who you really are and even what reality itself is. “The Time Element” delineates how knowing when you are is a vital factor in terms of knowing who you are. In a particularly daring episode, “He’s Alive,” the young Dennis Hopper plays a Neo-Nazi whose speeches are, disturbingly, much aligned with the political rhetoric of our own time. Dennis Hopper as Peter Vollmer in ‘He’s Alive,’ a 1963 episode of ‘The Twilight Zone.’ CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“The Obsolete Man” looks at humanity himself, even as Serling echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum, “The most concerned ask today: ‘How is man to be preserved?’ But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: ‘How is man to be overcome?'” These episodes give us living dummies and dolls, and a beleaguered commuter escaping from the button-down rat race into a small town past that doesn’t actually exist. Alas for Serling, the parallels between the long-term success of “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek” end there. Where there have been fully a dozen Trek spinoffs over the last 60 years, most of them even more successful than the original, none of the post-1964 attempts to revive Mr. Serling’s concept, even by the creator himself, have had any traction. The “Twilight Zone,” unlike “Star Trek,” never became a proper franchise. ‘Twilight Zone’ creator Rod Serling. Wikimedia CommonsSerling himself died at the relatively young age of 50 in 1975, but not before he had done more than anyone to establish the primacy of the writer in television, making him the equivalent of what the director is in cinema; not only Gene Roddenberry, but Aaron Sorkin, Shonda Rhimes, and David Simon are all his children. Mr. Schumer, in a well-argued thesis, contends that Serling’s legacy extends far beyond TV to have influenced thought paradigms proposed by David Lynch, Stephen King, M. Night Shyamalan and many others, including Stephen Sondheim, whose 1966 “Evening Primrose” might be subtitled “Twilight Zone: The Musical.” As for me, I can’t even listen to “Once in a Lifetime,” my favorite song by the Talking Heads, without hearing the voice of Rod Serling. It’s the same as it ever was, in the twilight zone.

Why ‘The Twilight Zone’ Left a Lasting Legacy Like No Other TV Series

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