‘Twilight Zone’: The show that won’t die

By DOUGLAS BRODE

PHOENIX, N.Y. — “I sat home and watched the ‘Twilight Zone’ marathon on cable TV.” So admitted one of the women on TV’s “The View” last January when that show resumed after a holiday break.

“So did we!” chimed in two of the other five. The remaining two appeared sorry to have missed the fun. But they’d surely tune in the next time the Sci-Fi Channel featured a two-day back-to-back festival of favorites including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “Mirror Image,” “The Hitch-hiker,” “Living Doll,” “After Hours” and the episode that back in the early 1960s proved so controversial it ran only once on CBS: “To Serve Man.”

(“It’s a cook book!” shouts the frantic friend of our hero, he about to travel off with seemingly friendly aliens who’ve presented Earth people with a volume of their supposedly benign plans for mankind.)

Mostly, “The View’s” women heatedly debate the most pressing of today’s issues. There was no such split decision when it came to loving (and still watching) “Zone.”

They’re not alone. Male TV personalities as diverse as Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann have each confided to family and/or friends they’ve been hooked on “Zone” for as long as they can remember.

And, in truth, so have us all.

Which ought to cause us to pause and wonder, as “Zone” reaches its 50th anniversary today (precise to the day of the week as well as the calendar date of the first broadcast, which would have tickled its puckishly charming creator, Rod Serling, pink!): Why?

Serling believed that his series — which, through a glass, darkly mirrored that unique period during which it aired (1959-64) — would enjoy a short shelf life. The usual syndrome for a once popular show cancelled by its network was a three year run in “stripped” form: What had originally been a once-a-week outing now presented, via syndication, five nights a week.

‘Twist endings’

Viewers would enjoy watching their favorites a couple more times, then grow tired when the material came to seem overly familiar. A show like “Zone,” which depended on its “twist endings” for appeal, seemed especially vulnerable. Once you knew what was coming during the last 30 seconds, how could what preceded this have any impact?

To the surprise of everyone, people watched again and again. The ratings remained high. Surprisingly, higher than they’d been during its initial run, during which “Zone” never once cracked the Nielsen ratings top 20.

Here’s just one reason why people (those of us old enough to have caught those episodes the first time around, others who picked up on them over the years, young fans who almost never want to watch anything “old,” particularly if it’s in black and white, but make an exception with this excursion into “the fifth dimension”) watch, watch and watch again.

Yes, Rod intended his episodes as allegorical commentaries on problems of his own time. He knew the networks and sponsors would refuse to air anything that came down hard on some then-controversial theme (race relations, atomic weaponry, the gnawing sense that America had become a culture of conformity). Serling was wise enough to realize that if one couched his statements within the context of imaginative-fantasy (As Gene Rodenberry would likewise do during the mid-to-late 1960s with “Star Trek”) you could get away with saying pretty much anything you wanted.

How could anybody out there get angry about something that was (supposedly) taking place on, say, Mars?

Rod accomplished what he set out to do. By presenting what appeared to be the least political show on television he proved more political than any other TV writer of his time, employing implication rather than direct statement.

Still, when the residents of a suburban neighborhood become so fearful of a possible invasion from space that they turn into a mob, who could possibly miss the impact of Rod’s final commentary: “the pity of it is, this is NOT confined to ‘The Twilight Zone!”’

X Douglas Brode is the co-author (with Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s widow) of “Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute” (Barricade Books). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.