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That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn, I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow TryThis Right Now, wherever you're listening.
Seriously, try it. Toe Ina. We all know that water is life. An average American household consumes over 300 gallons daily. 40% of Navajo families residing on a reservation the size of West Virginia struggle to survive on less than 10 gallons of water per day.
Yearly St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School delivers over 1.5 million gallons of clean water to these families. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. This is Danielle Fischel from Pod Meets World.
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Learn more at Motts.com. And we continue with our American stories. Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer. in American television. As creator, host, and primary writer, For the Twilight Zone, Serling became something more.
an American icon. Here to tell the story is the author of Rod Serling, His Life, Work and imagination. Let's take a listen. Hey, I'm Nick Parisi. I'm the author of Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination.
And I'm also the current president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. We are a 501c3 charity that's based in Binghamton, New York. Which is Rod Serling's hometown. The Rod Sterling Memorial Foundation was founded by a group of Rod Serling's colleagues and friends. In 1985, and they were a group of people who were passionate about the idea that Rod Ceroni's work was not forgotten.
And it hasn't been. Brad Strowling was a Christmas baby born on December 25th, 1924. He was born in Syracuse, New York. But he and his family moved to Bingington when Rod was maybe 18 months old. And he always looked back on his time in Bingington, his childhood in Bingington.
As being particularly idyllic. This is something that came up in his work over and over again. His love for his hometown and his desire to go back to his childhood. And this certainly came up later in the Twilight Zone as well as outside of the Twilight Zone.
So When he was 18 years old, he volunteered to serve in the Army. This was not too long after Pearl Harbor. He was barely 18 years old. He weighed about 114 pounds. He was 5'5.
He was a little guy. But he had this. Desire to serve, and he had this desire to do what he thought was right, which was fight the Nazis. He was born into a Jewish family. and he was very proud of his Jewish heritage.
And he became a paratrooper. He served with the 11th Airborne, 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. And it's you know, should be said that this is something that It's not something they just gave you. You know, it's not that he wanted to be a paratrooper and they said, okay, you can be a paratrooper. He had to literally earn his wings, so he had to do the jumps.
and survive the jumps.
So Probably to his dismay, maybe, he was not sent to fight Nazis, but he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight the Japanese. and his Munis mission was they were sent to Lady the Philippines. Their mission was to take back the island from the Japanese and The American forces and Filipino guerrillas had pretty much cleared the island. By the time Rod's Regiments arrived.
However, the Japanese had all retreated to the Mayanag Mountains in the middle of. the islands.
So their mission was to cross those mountains. and essentially kill anything that they saw on the way and just make it across. And every man that served in this mission remembered it as 30 days of hell. And by the time Rod Serling uh and the rest of those guys got across that mountain, They were different people. Rod Sterling was certainly a different person.
He saw some terrible things. He saw some major combat. He saw lots of his buddies get killed. And it scarred him, it scarred him for life. And when he came back from the military, He carried that with him, as every other veteran did.
But Rod Sterling He turned it into writing. He very explicitly said that he turned to writing as a form of therapy to get all of this war trauma out of his gut and onto the page. I was traumatized into writing by war events. by going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of a terrible need for some sort of therapy. Get it out of my gut, write it down.
This is the way it began for me.
So, when he first came back from serving, he enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and he immediately began writing. Everything that he wrote at that point was war influenced. and his writing teacher at the time, a man named Nolan Biller, encouraged them to get all this stuff out. And he did. And now we're talking about the late 40s when Rod is going to college.
He graduated in 1950. And this of course is the very beginning of television.
So Rod Sterling initially was writing for radio. because that was the only game in town, so he began writing radio scripts. He wrote them for the college radio station and he also sent them out to every radio station across the country and they were all rejected over and over again. All of his scripts were rejected. At one point he said he collected about 40 rejection slips in a row, but he was very persistent.
So he honed his craft writing for radio. And when television came along, He was one of the guys who saw immediately that television was the way to go. It's hard to imagine now, but back then, You know, television, there was a lot of people who looked down their nose at television, or they would call it just radio with pictures. And they thought maybe it was a fad and it wouldn't and you know, it wouldn't last. And Rod Sterling was one of the ones.
No, he he knew that this was the way to go. And he also saw the the potential in it as a message deliverer, a message delivery system. He believed that his writing was meant to entertain, but it was also meant to give some sort of a message. And for Rod, it was the things that he was passionate about.
So, yes, the war, of course, was one of the issues that he wrote about, but other social issues, like prejudice, like scapegoating. Like The fear of the other. The purpose of a dramatic show, which is used as a vehicle of social criticism, is to involve an audience, to show them wherein their guilt lies, or at least indeed their association. But when you're talking about a bunch of cavalrymen knocking off a bunch of poor Redskins and putting them into a reservation, The audience needs to have no association, certainly no guilt. How many Indians have they pushed into a reservation?
But if indeed you talk about a denial of a man putting his garbage can next to yours, Whether he's fought in Vietnam or wherever, by virtue of his color, now you're getting into a universal guilt, which they should feel, or at least in part understand. These were issues that were very, very important to Rod Sterling and the. Irony, of course, is that you really couldn't talk about these things on television at the time. and he would always run up against problems with the sensors. and the advertising agencies.
So Rod would have to make his points in other ways. But What happened was Well the first thing that happened was he became a star. He became a star long before the Twilight Zone, and this is something that maybe people don't really realize: Rod Sterling was. the most prestigious writer in television before the Twilight Zone. and it began in nineteen fifty five very specifically with a show called Patterns.
He wrote a show called Patterns that aired on the Kraft Theater. It was a one-hour live performance. In January of 1955, And after that show aired, It got reviews like nothing on television had ever gotten before. And this is something that Will sound like an exaggeration. People will think that it's not the way it was.
But the critic for the New York Times, Jack Gould, said it was the best thing he'd ever seen on television. From a standpoint of writing, directing, acting, and production, it was the best thing he'd ever seen on television. Name your terms. All terms are negotiable. I don't think so.
Not mine. All right. I'd just as soon not waste any time doing trading. As of now, your salary is doubled. Your stock option is doubled right on the line.
Your expense account is whatever you make it. Add to that a new title, Vice President. I want a lot more than that. You're not gonna take me on as just another vice president, you can push around. You'll take me as someone who hates you down to the bare nerve.
Nothing in the world will ever change that. I'll argue with you, contradict you, fight you in every way I know how. I'll do everything in my power to push you out and take your place myself. Go ahead and try it. Mr.
Staples. You have yourself a deal. Have it drawn up. Of course, television had only been around about five or six years at that point, but still, it was seen as a real watershed, a landmark for live television. And the next day, Rod Sterling said, the moment that that show went off the air, my phone started ringing and it never stopped.
And you've been listening to Nick Parisi. The author of Rod Serling, His Life, Work, and Imagination. You've also been listening to Rod Serling himself, and we love to do that in our pieces. Born on Christmas in Binghamton, New York, he described his childhood. is idyllic.
But at 18, right after Pearl Harbor, he joins the army. He's Jewish. He's proud of it. and he wants to kill Nazis. Only he ends up in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese instead.
Another brand of virulent racists at the time, what the Japanese did to the Chinese. and everybody else around them made them almost as bad as Nazis. And then when he comes back from the war, writing becomes his therapy. And boy, he goes in deep first to college. then writing for radio, and then up pops this new medium, television.
When we come back, more of Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. and in the end the story of a television prophet. Here on Our American Stories. Let's be real. Life happens.
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It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mis-proof sofa. Visit washablefas.com today and save. That's washablefas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangry.
That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn, I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Try this right now wherever you're listening.
Seriously, try it. Toe Ina. We all know that water is life. An average American household consumes over 300 gallons daily. 40% of Navajo families residing on a reservation the size of West Virginia struggle to survive on less than 10 gallons of water per day.
Yearly St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School delivers over 1.5 million gallons of clean water to these families. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. I bet you've probably been to the doctor's office in the past few months.
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Terms apply. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
I'm a smah in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London and this is the Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with Our American Stories and with author Nick Parisi.
Sharing with us the story of Rod Serling, and you're going to be hearing from Rod Serling. as well And we were just talking about patterns, a 1956 boardroom television drama. There was a huge hit. The screenplay was written by Rod Serling. and it got great critical reviews.
Let's return to the story. Here again. is Nick Parisi. And that show made him a star overnight. and it gave one of his first Emmy Award for Best Dramatic Writing.
And the following year, He won his second Best Dramatic Writing Emmy Award for Requiem for a Heavyweight, which was maybe even better reviewed than Patterns had been. And now that validated Requiem for a Heavyweight validated him as the most prestigious writer in television. And so he started to have Enough Power. He started to get. Ambitious about telling those stories he wanted to tell about racism, about prejudice, about anti-Semitism, about cowardice and bravery.
And by this point Rod Sterling was the most outspoken. Whenever he was interfered with by the censors, he would go to the media and tell them exactly what happened. Not just because he wanted his own work to be as he wanted it to be, but he believed that television. Had the potential to tell these stories, to send these messages to millions of people. And remember, this is a time when there were only three networks.
So there were 18 million people, 20 million people would watch one particular show at any given time. And he saw the power in that and said, we have a responsibility to educate the public. about these issues. when they gave him the chance to make to create his own show, he went back to something that was very dear to him, which was science fiction and fantasy.
Well the Twilight Zone is in essence an imaginative itinerary of storytelling in which we utilize spaces of fantasy, science fiction, the occult. Extrasensory perception, anything that is imaginative, wild, or as in the States we call it kooky, in normal earthbound drama, if a man is on top of a building and it's burning. of necessity he has to crawl down either a ladder, or go through a skylight. or is rescued by a helicopter. In the twilight zone, he grows wings and he flies off.
But as I say, this is a program of imaginative storytelling. and utilizing the idea of going back in time or forward in time, this has provided considerable bases of storytelling in our particular series. I'm the kind of a guy who is now in that aging late thirty, early forty bracket In which suddenly there is a a tremendous, bittersweet, poignant feeling about wanting to go back to another time. In my case, it would be the pre-war, early teens time, which were particularly happy for me. And on occasion I will go back to my old hometown.
and walk through the streets and the places that I grew up in, and feel the sense of great loss that I wish I could recapture it. And I think the answer is you simply cannot go home again. It's quite impossible. He always loved science fiction and fantasy. Even when he was a kid, I mean, he read the pulps, he read amazing stories.
One of his favorite all-time movies was the original King Kong. He loved fantasy and monsters and things like that. And he said to himself, you know, if I do that science fiction show that I've always wanted to do anyway, Maybe I can get away with some of these messages that I've been trying to do in straight drama. And I can put it in the guise of fantasy and science fiction. and get away with it.
You're traveling 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. And he very famously said that: I found that in the Twilight Zone, I could have a Martian say things that I couldn't have a Republican or a Democrat say.
And that's the way he did it. If you put the words in the mouths of robots or the mouths of aliens on another planet, or you set the story in the future, then all of a sudden it has enough distance. for the network not to be so nervous about it. and he found that he was able to do that. You walk into this room at your own risk.
because it leads to the future. Not a future that will be, but one that might be. This is not a new world. It is simply an extension of What began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping embrace.
Of a boot on the pages of history. It's just the beginning of time. It has refinements. Technological advances and a more sophisticated approach. to the destruction of human freedom.
But like every one of the super states that preceded it, It has one iron rule. Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. Please. Please, I'm not absolutely. I have a function, I have a purpose, please.
It's I want to serve the state, please. Please go! And that obscillate. No no, I'm please, please, I'm not I'm not absolute, no! I want to serve the state.
The Chancellor, the late Chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the state, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man. That state is obsolete.
A case to be filed under M from Mankind. in the Twilight Zone.
So he was able to do things like The Monsters of Dew on Maple Street, which is as blatant a social commentary as Rod Terring ever wrote. And yet he got away with it with no no problems from the networks, no problem from the sponsors. Why? Because it was science fiction. And because not only was it cloaked in this allegory.
But it was also just the fact that science fiction was kind of looked down upon at the time, especially in television. It was looked at as something for six-year-olds or eight-year-olds. It wasn't looked at as an important thing like Playhouse 90 was.
So the networks to some extent were just saying, well, you know, Rod's over there in his playgrounds. He's got his half-hour show on Friday night at 10 o'clock. It's not, don't worry about it. It's okay. Nobody's paying attention to it anyway.
And they let him get away with these things. I think in its best run, Twilight Zone got roughly a 31 or a 32 share. which in television terms says that it is a mild success. It is not a runaway hit, it's not gun smoke, and it's a very questionable item as to whether or not we'll renew it, if indeed something else comes along that looks much more publicly acceptable.
Now what that 31 share meant was approximately 25 million people watching. which is a fair-sized audience. That's more than what Shakespeare you know, during the first hundred years. But in the strange arithmetic of television, This was not considered a major show. Oddly enough, the show became more popular after it went off the air in terms of the name Twilight Zone being kind of interchangeable with strange little witticisms throughout our language.
it became a funny little uh colloquialism that people used. Again, you have to put yourself in the time frame. This is 1959 when this show aired. Science fiction and fantasy, the general public, the general television viewing public, were not familiar. With the tropes of science fiction and fantasy, even things like time travel, just simple things, things that we think now are very simple and straightforward, were confusing to the audience at the time.
He was educating the television viewing public on these tropes of science fiction and fantasy as he went along. He was teaching them about time travel, about alternate dimensions, about Doppelgangers about all these things that are science fiction tropes that the general public didn't know about these things.
So he was really teaching the public about these things and that. knocked down some doors for science fiction writers who came afterward. And you've been listening to Nick Parisi tell the story of Rod Serling, and what a story indeed. Requiem for a heavyweight. The T V version, it would become a terrific movie too.
Put them on the map. as a force in television writing, production and directing. And then he wanted to, well... comment on social matters and social issues. And he gives birth to the Twilight Zone.
It's science fiction, yes. But within it he could Well, he could encode messages. He could say things through characters like a Martian that he couldn't say as human Republicans or human Democrats. Moreover, it was sort of a side thing for the TV networks. He had just enough popularity to survive.
But not enough to have the focus on him from the networks. And of course, science fiction.
Well, it just wasn't taken as seriously. And when we come back, more of the story of Rod Serling. Here. on our American stories. Life's messy.
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If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangry. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn. I host Try This.
Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow Try This right now wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it. To e Ina. We all know that water is life.
An average American household consumes over 300 gallons daily. 40% of Navajo families residing on a reservation the size of West Virginia struggle to survive on less than 10 gallons of water per day. Yearly, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School delivers over 1.5 million gallons of clean water to these families. You can help support St.
Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. I bet you've probably been to the doctor's office in the past few months. I bet you had to hand over personal info, like your insurance, your ID, maybe even your social security number. And I bet you weren't thinking about how your doctor is just one of many places that has your personal information. If any one of them isn't careful, it's a good bet they could accidentally expose your details to hackers and identity theft, putting you at risk.
Fortunately, Lifelock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock US-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back, with plans covering up to $3 million for stolen funds and expenses. Don't take chances with your personal info. Help protect it even when it's out of your hands. Save up to 40% your first year with promo code iHeart.
Call 1-800-Lifelock and use promo code iHeart or go to lifelock.com/slash iHeart for 40% off. Terms apply. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval.
It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we continue with Our American Stories and with author Nick Parisi. His book Rod Serling, His Life, Work, and Imagination. It is a must-read. Pick one up for yourself, the family, wherever you get your books. Let's pick up where we last left off with Serling himself.
Talking about why he did what he did. and how he did it. Star Trek did not start very long after the Twilight Zone ended, and Gene Roddenberry would credit Rod Sterling and say, I couldn't have done this without Rod Sterling. because again the concepts in this in Star Trek Were you know outlandish for the time, but Rod Sterling had warmed them up, had warmed up the audience.
So they now you understood a lot of these things that Gene Roddenberry was trying to get across in Star Trek.
So it just went on from there. I mean, the Outer Limits came a little bit after Twilight Zone. And again, every science fiction series that came afterward owes some. Debt. To the Twilight Zone, to Rod Sterling, and to Star Trek afterward, but it just was standing on the shoulders of giants.
That's where it began, and Rod Sterling was the one. who knocked down those doors.
So Rod Sterling went from being the most prestigious writer in television and probably the most Recognizable to being a television star. In the second season of The Twilight Zone, that's when he started appearing on camera to do his introductions.
So, in the five seasons of The Twilight Zone that ran from 1959 to 1964, Rod won two more Emmy Awards. He had won three before the Twilight Zone, now he won two for the Twilight Zone. And he ended up with six, he won one after the Twilight Zone. and which is uh a record for best dramatic writing. And he created this show that is among, if not the, most influential series in television history.
And the amazing thing also about Rod Sterling is that it doesn't end with science fiction and fantasy. If you ask any of the showrunners and writers, From the most famous dramas of the last 15 years, things like Breaking Bad, Mad Men. the sopranos people who created those shows, David Chase, Vince Gilligan. These people worship Rod Sterling. They see Rod Sterling as the gold standard.
They see him as the original showrunner. He was the first writer. to really take the reins of a series. and make it to be his vision. Very often I find that within the framework of the science fiction or fantasy genre, The use of traveling back in time is a very effective way.
of producing contrasts. of producing a kind of a freewheeling storytelling device. which is why I used going back in time. And there's another reason. which very much relates to any discussion of creativity.
Is it every writer And I don't think there are any. I can't conceive of anybody not falling into this pattern who writes. has certain special Loves. Certain special hang-ups, certain special preoccupations and predilections. In my case, it's a hunger to be young again.
A desperate hunger to go back where it all began. And I think you'll see this as a running threat through a lot of things that I write. And part of creativity, of course, is being able to have the capacity. To convey that kind of hunger, that kind of nostalgia, that kind of bittersweet feeling. to those who have never had it.
And that was it. And for the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling oversaw everything about The Twilight Zone from morning to night. He produced the show. He narrated the show. He wrote 92 of the 156 episodes of it.
He was the on-screen presence. He did all the promotion for the show. And then, after the Twilight Zone, he hosted a show called The Night Gallery, Rod Sterling's Night Gallery. He did, I would argue, some of his best writing for The Night Gallery. And on top of that, oh, by the way, he co-wrote the original Planet of the Apes.
In roughly 25 years, He wrote about 250 scripts that were produced either on television, radio, or feature films. And a lot of actors and producers and directors wanted to work with Rod Serling, and particularly actors. Actors loved. To Rod Sterling's words. They love to do his stuff.
One of the major problems with strong writers who deal in dialogue above plot. which happens to be, I think, more my fault than than plot dialogue. If you look at some of the pages of the stuff I've written, and even some of the good things, shut your eyes. You won't know who's talking because they all talk alike. And who do they talk like?
Me.
Now that's wrong. And it's something I've got to lick over the years, but it's the most common literary problem, I think. of strong dialoguists.
So The Twilight Zone, now it runs like a who's who of Hollywood stars to some extent. I mean, Robert Redford. On the Twilight Zone. Burt Reynolds was on the Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman did four Twilight Zone episodes.
Burgess Meredith did four Twilight Zone episodes. Agnes Moorhead. Carol Burnett, Telly Savalis, William Shatner starred in two very famous Twilight Zone episodes. Four members of the Starship Enterprise Bridge Crew were on the Twilight Zone: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, and James Dewan.
So there were four members of the Star Trek Bridge Crew who appeared on the Twilight Zone. And they, you know, Jack Klugman would say that when he got a script, if they were Rod Sterling, he didn't need to read it. He just said, Yeah, yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. Of course, I'll do it.
So he was able to attract these people, and he was also able to attract the other talent like the writers Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, these people who wanted to write for a show like The Twilight Zone because there wasn't anything on TV like The Twilight Zone at the time. It was the first science fiction and fantasy series that truly treated the genre. from an adult perspective. Before this, you know, it was Bug-Eyed Monsters, it was the B movies, it was that type of an idea. And Rod Sterling took his Playhouse 90s sensibility.
And brought it to the genre of science fiction and fantasy, and he put that same level of care. Into these 30-minute filmed science fiction episodes as he did to his 90-minute live dramas. And that made all the difference in the world because now it really was quality. And Charles Beaumont, one of the writers, When he read the first script for the Twilight Zone, which is the pilot episode called Where Is Everybody?
Now, this is an episode about a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia. He wakes up or he's wandering through a deserted town. He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't know how he got there. And Charles Beaumont, when he read this script, he said this was not nothing earth shaking in terms of the idea. This idea of Last Man on Earth kind of thing had been done in science fiction plenty of times.
But he said what separated this from everything else was quality. Quality in the scene setup, quality in the dialogue, or in this case, monologues because there's only one person speaking. And the quality jumped off the page. You said, and that's what made this different. And that's a lot of times the Twilight Zone is seen now as this.
This, you know, these great ideas, these amazing ideas, where did these ideas come from? But if you look at it now, it really was more about the quality. It could have been a simple idea, it could have been an idea that could have been cliched, but Rod Sterling wrote it with so much more care that it elevated it. into something else. Most television fiction that I watch has very little relevance.
I think it's one thing to say we will now have a program called Mod Squad Say. and we will have one black man and one Oriental. and one Hawaiian. To show this marvelous melting pot concept. But I think that's altogether phony.
I don't think that's, I think at best condescension and at worst exploitation. Uh the fact is that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over the years by making every black man a banjo player and the village idiot and the coward that suddenly we're going to reverse switch. He is now a brain scientist or an atomic scientist. Or anyone of unequal distortion at the other end. Needless to say, I'd much prefer the distortion on the good side of the scale, but all television fiction.
I find quite irrelevant and quite unrelated. But if I had a group of stories to select, I think by virtue of its mass media form. I would try to choose those stories that though even science fiction and genre. would be tellable in terms of the most acceptable human terms that we now know. They created something that is still running in 24-hour marathons.
On 4th of July and New Year's Eve, and still airing around the world. And they're still trying to duplicate it in reboots and everything else, and they still haven't been able to do it. And why?
Well, it's um it'd be hard to say that it's not not because they don't have Rod Sterling. And Ratzerling sadly died in 1975. He was only 50 years old. He died of a heart attack. He died uh on the table during open heart surgery.
And he left behind an amazing Body of work. For a man who only lived to be 50 years old, and like I said, he didn't start his career until he was 25, so those last 25 years. he left us with an amazing body of work. Fuck. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler.
And a special thanks to Nick Parisi. Author of Rod Serling, His Life. Work. and imagination. My goodness, it was just so remarkable to listen.
To Rod Serling, that voice. and his thoughts and his mind. things he was talking about still resonating. deeply today. I love what he talked about, writers.
having special love, special preoccupations. And his A desperation to be young again. Of course, knowing that could never happen. and the bittersweetness of it all. And my goodness, the careers he launched, the actors he attracted, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Agnes Moorhead, William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy, and Jack Klugman said.
He wouldn't even read the scripts, he would just say yes. to whatever Rod Serling wrote. What a 25 years it was. producing perhaps one of the most important and influential shows in American television history, the story of Rod Serling. In so many ways the story of American imagination.
Here. on our American stories. Let's be real. Life happens. Kids spill, pets shed, and accidents are inevitable.
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And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm a smah in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London and this is the Global Story.
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.
