Rod Serling and "The Twilight Zone": The Story of a Television Prophet

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Let's take a listen. Hey, I'm Nick Ferrisi. 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 Serling 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 Serling's work was not forgotten.

And it hasn't been. Rod Serling was a Christmas baby born on December 25th, 1924. He was born in Syracuse, New York, but he and his family moved to Binghamton when Rod was maybe 18 months old. And he always looked back on his time in Binghamton, his childhood in Binghamton, 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 five foot five. 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 should be said that this is something that it's not something they just gave you. 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 unit's 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 island. 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 and the rest of those guys got across that mountain, they were different people. Rod Serling 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 Serling, 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. 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 Miller, encouraged him 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 Serling 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, there was a lot of people who looked down their nose at television.

They would call it just radio with pictures. And they thought maybe it was a fad, and it wouldn't last. And Rod Serling was one of those. No, he knew that this was the way to go. And he also saw 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 need 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 censors 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 12th century, and he became a star long before the Twilight Zone. And this is something that maybe people don't really realize, is that Rod Sterling was the most prestigious writer in television before the Twilight Zone. And it began in 1955, very specifically, with a show called Patterns. He wrote a show called Patterns. It 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 it's, you know, 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 just as soon not waste any time doing trading. As of now, your salary is doubled. Your stock option is doubled right down 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 going to take me on as just another Vice President. You can push around. You 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. 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 Serling 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 all the books on television. Well, you know what? I'm going to tell you something. 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 as idyllic. But at 18, right after Pearl Harbor, he joins the army. He's Jewish. He's proud of it.

And he wants it. 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 story of a television prophet. Here on Our American Stories.

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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 have 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 antisemitism, about cowardice and bravery. And by this point, Rod Serling was most outspoken. Whenever he was interfered with by, you know, 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 hadn't 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, you know, 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. And 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 basis 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 basis of storytelling in our particular series. I'm the kind of a guy who is now in that aging late 30, early 40 bracket, in which suddenly there is 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 a sense of, you know, 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 put this, 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 is patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since 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 obsolete. I have a function. I have a purpose. Please, please.

I want to serve the state. Please, please. No, I'm not obsolete.

No, no, please, please. I'm not obsolete. No, I want to serve the state. Please, I'm not obsolete.

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 for mankind in the twilight zone. So he was able to do things like the monsters are due on Maple Street, which is as blatant a social commentary as Rod Sterling ever wrote. And yet he got away with it with no problems from the networks, no problem from the sponsor.

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, oh, you know, Rod's over there in his playground.

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 colloquialism that people used. Again, you have to put yourself in the timeframe. This is 1959 when the 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 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, they 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 TV version, it would become a terrific movie too, put him 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. On Saturday, February 22nd at 1.30 PM Eastern, it's the Pro Volleyball Federation's first all-star match. The league's biggest stars will clash in a can't-miss event hosting the Indy Metro area, home of the Indy Ignite. Catch every serve, spike, and save live on CBS. Don't miss this historic showdown of volleyball's finest.

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Your TV is. And we continue with our American stories and with author Nick Parisi. His book Rod Serling, his life, work, and imagination 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 Serling and say, I couldn't have done this without Rod Serling. Because again, the concepts in Star Trek were outlandish for the time. But Rod Serling had warmed them up, had warmed up the audience. So 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 afterwards owes some debt to The Twilight Zone, to Rod Serling, and to Star Trek afterward. But it just was standing on the shoulders of giants.

That's where it began. And Rod Serling was the one who knocked down those doors. So Rod Serling 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, it 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, which is 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 Serling 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, the people who created those shows, David Chase, Vince Gilligan, these people worship Rod Serling.

They see Rod Serling 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 that 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 backward 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 Serling 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 onscreen presence.

He did all the promotion for the show. And then after The Twilight Zone, he hosted a show called The Night Gallery, Rod Serling'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, directors wanted to work with Rod Serling and particularly actors. Actors loved Rod Serling's words.

They loved 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 dialogists. So The Twilight Zone, now it runs like a who's who of Hollywood stars to some extent. Robert Redford was 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 Moorehead, Carol Burnett, Telly Savalas, 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 Jack Klugman would say that when he got a script, if it was 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 these, 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 the 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 the 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 set up, quality in the dialogue, or in this case, monologues, because it's only one person speaking. And the quality jumped off the page, he said, and that's what made this different. And that's, a lot of times The Twilight Zone, you see now is these great ideas, these amazing ideas, where 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. The fact is that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over the years by making every black man a banjo player on 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 any one 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, 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'd be hard to say that it's not because they don't have Rod Serling. And Rod Serling sadly died in 1975. He was only 50 years old. He died of a heart attack.

He died 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. 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 in 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 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 Moorehead, 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.

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