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

And we continue with our American stories. Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in American television. His 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 501(c)(3) 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 Regiments. 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 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 survived 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 Leyte in 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 Mayanad 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 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.

I was traumatized into writing by wars, by going through a war, in a combat situation, and feeling a 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 Miller, encouraged him to get all this stuff out, and he did. And now we’re talking about the late forties 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 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 were a lot of people who looked down their nose at television. Though they would call it, “It’s 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 Serling was one of us. 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 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 quite understand.

These were issues that were very, very important to Rod Serling. 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, 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, is that Rod Serling 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 that it’s not the way it was. But the critic for The New York Times, Jack Gold, 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 do not waste any time doing trading. As of now, your…

Salary is doubled; your stock option is doubled. Right down the line.

You’re expensive, counties. 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.

Let’s to stay both.

You have yourself a deal. Have a 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, right, you know, Rod Serling said, “The moment that that show went off the air, my phone started ringing, and it never stops.”

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 as 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 him 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, 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. It 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 him one of his first Emmy Awards 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 Serling was 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 the 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.” 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 the 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 thirty, early forty bracket in which suddenly there is a tremendous, bitter-sweet, 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 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 street 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 signposts 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 saying,” and that’s the way he did it. If you put the words and the mouths of robots or the mouths of aliens on another planet, where 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 has 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 ev answers, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace.

These, these, I’m not obsolete.

I have a function, I have a purpose.

Please, these. I want to serve the state. Please, please! No, I’m not obsolete. Oh, no, I’m—please, 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 worshiped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is absolutely a case to be found under ‘M’ from 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 Serling ever wrote. And yet he got away with it with 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 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, The 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 Gunsmoke, 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 100 years. But in the strange, rhythmic 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 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 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—and th…