How ‘The Twilight Zone’ Influenced Some of Modern TV’s Greatest Creators

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

In the fall of 1959, when cheesy sitcoms (“Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver”), Westerns (“Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide”), and variety shows (“The Dinah Shore Chevy Show,” “The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom”) dominated the TV airwaves, a very different sort of program called The Twilight Zone debuted. Each episode told a completely different, surreal story, often involving aliens, monsters, or unexplained supernatural forces. It was the brainchild of Rod Serling, a decorated World War II veteran who saw the potential of television to tell stories as ambitious as movies or novels long before anyone else.

Alan Sepinwall’s new book “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone With TV’s First Visionary” traces his life story in incredible detail, and features new interviews with Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Ben Stiller, Rian Johnson, Vince Gilligan, Rob Mac, and other admirers. In this exclusive excerpt, some of those writers and showrunners of today discuss the impact and legacy of “The Twilight Zone.”

When Rod Serling was teaching creative writing at Ithaca College late in life, one of his students, Harvey Warren, marveled at The Twilight Zone’s famous twist endings. “I asked, ‘How do you come up with this stuff?’” Warren says. “And he goes, ‘It’s O. Henry.’ ‘O. who?’ ‘You guys need to read.’ And I went back and started reading O. Henry, and went, ‘My God, short stories with surprise endings!’”

So, no, Serling didn’t invent the concept of twist endings. But to the generation growing up on Twilight Zone, he might as well have — for good and for ill. For a long time, both during the original run and in the first few decades of syndication, the twists were what people talked about most: Henry Bemis’ glasses breaking in “Time Enough at Last,” the inverted beauty standards of “Eye of the Beholder,” or the cookbook from “To Serve Man.”

Just as Citizen Kane and Casablanca can seem clichéd to first-time viewers who are unaware that they invented those clichés, the Twilight Zone twists play differently to anyone who’s grown up with a pop-culture world unmistakably influenced by them. Surprise endings were few and far between in pre-Sixties cinema, and even rarer in the early years of television.

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“If all The Twilight Zone had were the twist endings, no one would remember it to this day,” says Vince Gilligan. “The twists are what get you in the first place. It’s the humanity and excellence of the storytell-ing that allows me to watch them again and again.” He points to “Third From the Sun,” with its twist revealing that the characters are fleeing to Earth, rather than from Earth. What strikes him now about it is a smaller moment where Eve Sturka (Lori March), wife of Fritz Weaver’s Will Sturka, is preparing to clear the dining room table of the lemonade she just served, when she realizes that they are never coming back to this house, or this planet, and that she has to let go of everything she associates with life here. “It’s little moments of character observation,” says Gilligan. “That’s a great episode, not because of the twist.” (Gilligan loves the episode so much that, on his hit Apple TV sci-fi series Pluribus, he named the main character Carol Sturka as a tribute to Will Sturka.)

The twists, like the overall use of sci-fi and fantasy devices, were there to help Serling and his collaborators get their larger points across about humanity in this fragile Cold War moment. When Rod went home to deliver Binghamton Central High School’s commencement speech in 1968, he told the graduating students, “You have to have a point of view about things. You have to take a position, assume a stance, believe in something strongly enough to raise a voice about it.” With Twilight Zone, he was raising a voice about a lot of ideas that mattered to him.

“Dignity was really important to him,” says author Mark Olshaker, Serling’s protégé who wrote the book on which the Netflix series Mindhunter was based. “How you treat people was as important to Rod as anything else. It showed in every aspect of his work. Probably his single biggest theme was bigotry and hate of all kinds.”

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Season Three’s “The Shelter” was a non-supernatural spin on “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” where neighbors in a seemingly close-knit suburb go from friends to enemies when there are reports of a nuclear missile strike, and there’s not enough room in one family’s fallout shelter to accommodate everybody else. One by one, the neighbors turn on one another, with an immigrant family winding up on the receiving end of the most venomous, xenophobic rhetoric.

Season One’s “The Big Tall Wish” was yet another Serling story about a boxer on the downside of his career, but with two key differences from something like “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” First, there’s magic involved: Young Henry Temple (Stephen Perry) wishes that the kind fighter Bolie Jackson (Ivan Dixon) will improbably win his comeback match, and the wish comes true — at least until Bolie refuses to believe that such things can happen, and his skepticism breaks the spell. Second, Dixon, Perry, and most of the actors in the episode are Black, at a moment when Black faces on television were incredibly rare, and almost always appeared in the context of race relations.

To simply show Black characters living their lives, having dreams, and getting involved in stories very similar to ones featuring white characters was so revolutionary for 1960 that Variety ran a story about it with the headline “Negro Seg for Serling’s ‘Zone,’” speculating about whether CBS’ affiliate stations in the South would boycott it. (If any did, I wasn’t able to find accounts of it from that time in various newspaper and magazine archives.) “Television, like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of a sin of omission,” Serling said. “Hungry for talent, desperate for the so-called ‘new face,’ constantly searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose. This is the Negro actor.”

Ivan Dixon returned to play a reverend in a story explicitly about racism: one of the best episodes of the uneven fifth season, “I Am the Night — Color Me Black.” In it, a town is plunged into literal darkness as a man is about to be hanged for a killing that was really in self-defense, and where the dead man was a bigot who terrorized local minorities. The execution takes place, but the darkness doesn’t subside, and we soon hear radio reports of similar phenomena happening around the world in other places consumed by hatred.

The first season’s “Dust” takes place in an Old West town where a young Mexican man is about to be hanged for drunkenly crashing his wagon into a little white girl, killing her. Though supernatural forces eventually come into play, the emotional core of the episode involves the man’s parents pleading with the girl’s family to spare their son’s life. “As a Latina, seeing ‘Dust’ was something else,” says Twilight Zone fan Diana Bedoya. “As someone obsessed with criminal justice and civil rights, I rarely see a depiction of mercy towards a convicted man, especially a minority, and especially one who did commit the offense for which he is imprisoned. Serling said, through that episode and others, that the poor, Black, and brown and any other race, deserved respect. Also, that some criminals deserved grace. It is a message not seen on other shows, which focus on punishment.”

Serling was an unabashedly sentimental writer, often going for the endings that would feel sappy if not for the skill that he and his actors brought to them. But he could also be full of fury where he saw injustice. One of the series’ best episodes, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” is a dark counterpart to “Walking Distance.” Former Nazi concentration camp commandant Lutze (Oscar Beregi Jr.), who has successfully created a new postwar identity for himself, feels such nostalgia for Dachau, where he put many Jews to death and tortured countless others, that he risks a trip back to the place. While walking the grounds, he encounters Alfred Becker (Joseph Schildkraut), a former prisoner whom he takes for the caretaker of what is now a historical site, forgetting at first that he himself murdered Becker right before the Americans liberated the camp. Becker and other Dachau ghosts gather to place Lutze on trial for his crimes against humanity, forcing him to experience the same cruelty that he put them through, eventually driving him so mad that he has to be institutionalized. “This is not hatred,” Becker tells him. “This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God.”

“If you look at ‘Deaths-Head Revisited,’” says Olshaker, “it’s both sentimental and totally poignant and focused. Rod figured out cosmic justice, which couldn’t happen in the real world. How else do you give retribution to a monster like this? Killing him? So what? But if you can make him live the rest of his life in complete madness, what’s better?”

“I was probably struck by the genre elements first,” says J.J. Abrams. “But I think the thing that I came to genuinely love about it was the humanity of it, and the heart of it, and the emotion. I remember being completely sucked into the story of whichever character you were following, who was either someone utterly relatable, because they were the oppressed, or utterly relatable because they were afraid, or utterly relatable because they were heartsick, or utterly relatable because they were fated to confront something ugly or terrifying, or their own truth, that they couldn’t see otherwise. That relatability was just profound. The combination that, to this day, makes me such a fan of that show, and of what Serling and company did, was that unbelievable Venn diagram of the otherworldly and the impossible, with the utterly human, relatable, and identifiable.”

The karmic scales of the series weren’t always purely in balance. There are classic episodes where the bad guys win. “It’s a Good Life” features Bill Mumy as Anthony Fremont, a spoiled little boy with limitless psychic powers, who has put an entire town under his control. He forces people to cater to his every whim or else suffer grisly punishments, like being transformed into a jack-in-the-box, rendered catatonic, or “wished into the cornfield” — which at times sounds like a euphemism for death, and at others a fate far worse. The episode ends with Anthony still in charge. Some viewers, like film historian Douglas Brode, saw the story as a veiled criticism of the more permissive and empathetic parenting philosophy being encouraged at the time by celebrated pediatrician Benjamin Spock — that Anthony is simply the most extreme version of a child who was never disciplined enough to differentiate right from wrong. Or you could take Serling’s closing narration at face value and decide that there’s “No comment here, no comment at all.”

“I don’t think he was a cynic or a pessimist,” argues writer-director Rian Johnson (Knives Out). “I don’t think that he had a low view of humanity. I think, obviously, both from his episodes and listening to him speak, he was an angry young man even when he wasn’t a young man anymore. He raged against the dying of the light, but I believe it was because he believed in the light, and he loved it. That’s clear even in the bleakest episodes. I think they’re bleak because he values the things that are being destroyed in them.”

Some episodes involved fears that were very specific to Rod, like Season Two’s “The Silence,” where a man with a Serling-esque gift for gab bets that he can go a whole year without speaking at all.

“I love the ones that essentially take a tragic flaw and exploit it,” said Jordan Peele. “That’s how I think of these stories: You set up a character, and you show the tailor-made worst nightmare for this character with this flaw.”

Some fears were more universal, like “Time Enough at Last” and other tales of impending nuclear apocalypse. And some were far more prescient than Serling could have imagined. Season Three’s “The Midnight Sun” is an unwitting climate change allegory, where Earth’s orbit has somehow shifted, pushing it closer to the sun, plunging the planet into an ever-brighter, ever-hotter, eventually doomed reality; in the end, the twist is that our heroine, Norma (Lois Nettleton), has been dreaming this, but only because Earth’s orbit is instead taking the planet farther from the sun, resulting in a dark, cold, and equally doomed circumstance.

He penned multiple episodes about obscenely rich characters building bunkers to protect them from worsening circumstances that poor people wouldn’t be able to escape. Some of these crossed over with the ones he wrote about wealthy characters who believed that their money and power alone not only proved they were better and smarter than the less fortunate, but also gave them the right to do whatever they want to those people. Season Three’s “One More Pallbearer,” where a millionaire invites three people from his past into his bomb shelter in a futile attempt to trick them into apologizing for their alleged sins against him — none of which would be viewed as sins by anyone but an insecure narcissist — feels like something any number of modern bitter tech bros could be contemplating at this minute.

Serling already wasn’t big on subtext in his Playhouse 90 work, letting characters speak their minds and repeatedly spell out the message of a particular piece. Twilight Zone episodes were a third of that length, so even with the genre allegories, Serling often had to be even more overt with what he was trying to say. His closing narration for “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” doesn’t even bother trying to hide behind the parable:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own… for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined only to the Twilight Zone.

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