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32. The Twilight Zone: Landmark Television
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299 32 The Twilight Zone Landmark Television Derek Kompare Abstract: Few programs in television history are as iconic as The Twilight Zone, which lingers in cultural memory as one of the medium’s most distinctive aesthetic and cultural peaks. Derek Kompare examines the show’s signature style and voice of its emblematic creator Rod Serling, exploring how the program’s legacy lives on today across genres and eras. As with any other art form, television history is in large part an assemblage of exemplary works. Industrial practices, cultural influences, and social contexts are certainly primary points of media histories, but these factors are most often recognized and analyzed in the form of individual texts: moments when particular forces temporarily converge in unique combinations, which subsequently function as historical milestones. Regardless of a perceived historical trajectory towards or away from “progress,” certain programs have come to represent the confluence of key variables at particular moments: I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) revolutionized sitcom production; Monday Night Football (ABC, 1970–2005; ESPN, 2005–present) supercharged the symbiotic relationship of sports and television ; Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987) introduced the “quality” serial drama to primetime. The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) is an anomalous case, simultaneously one of the most important and least representative of such milestones. While universally hailed as one of the medium’s creative peaks, its actual influence on subsequent programming , unlike that of the examples listed above, has been marginal. Its compact tales of ordinary people encountering extraordinary situations certainly provide some of the most memorable moments in American television history, including episodes like “Time Enough At Last” (November 20, 1959), when fate, and gravity , ruin a bookworm’s post-apocalyptic utopia; “The Invaders” (January 27, 1961), a stark lesson in perspective; “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (March 4, 300 Derek Kompare 1960) a chillingly plausible vision of social breakdown; and “Walking Distance” (October 30, 1959), a poignant critique of nostalgia. However, its contemporaneous kindred spirit The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965) notwithstanding, the series’ legacy has not been a line of similarly ambitious, well-executed and well-received anthology dramas, but rather a spotty succession of mostly forgettable “shock” series with plenty of “gotcha” moments, but little of The Twilight Zone’s signature artistry , candor, or wit. Thus, alongside its celebrated creator and primary writer, Rod Serling, the series has historically suffered the same fate as many of its episodes’ protagonists: erudite, witty, passionate, and noble, but ultimately marginalized from a shallow, risk-averse world that can’t quite understand it. Fifty years later, in an era when many television writer-showrunners have become minor celebrities (at least among industry peers, critics, and fans) for creating programs that are said to function “beyond” the normative, “safe” parameters of the medium, it is well worth considering how history has shaped our perceptions of such previous figures and their series. Serling was arguably the first in this incongruous line of the celebrity iconoclast television showrunner. As Jon Kraszewski details in The New Entrepreneurs, unlike his fellow “angry young men” of 1950s anthology drama fame, particularly Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose, Serling embraced the commercial and creative demands of the new Hollywood-based production mode of the 1960s.1 However, in contrast to other celebrity producers of the time, like Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Jack Webb, and even Alfred Hitchcock, and as suggested by his signature series’ title, Serling also self-consciously staked out commercial television’s creative and ideological frontiers rather than its center. His legacy has thus been not so much the format of The Twilight Zone, which followed decades of suspenseful anthology fiction and drama in literature, radio, and television , but rather its combined creative and industrial ethos: ambitious television that simultaneously subverts and satisfies the expectations of safe commercial broadcasting —that is, consistently disturbing the boundaries of convention and comfort and raising the medium’s aesthetic bar, while still offering a reliable venue for advertisers to hawk cars, cigarettes, and processed food. Accordingly, both Serling and The Twilight Zone display many of the contradictions and compromises that have plagued television’s most venerated producers and series ever since. Television can be a relatively bold medium, but always within the parameters of its broader commercial and cultural functions. Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone in 1959, during a period when network television was still in the throes of the first of many conceptual shifts, moving from primarily live, New York–based comedy-variety shows and...