In some ways The Twilight Zone seemed like an odd project for Rod Serling to embark upon in 1959. He had already earned his bona fides writing celebrated scripts for television shows like Kraft Television Theatre and Playhouse 90, and he had already amassed an impressive collection of Primetime Emmy and Peabody Awards. So why pursue a fantasy/science fiction variety show? At the time, science fiction television was not exactly considered Shakespearean, and many questioned whether or not the medium of television could lend itself toward more serious literary endeavors. “To go from writing an occasional drama for Playhouse 90, a distinguished and certainly important series, to creating and writing a weekly, thirty-minute television film,” said Serling, “was like Stan Musial leaving St. Louis to coach third base in an American Legion little league.”
Serling, a native son of Binghamton New York, was a World War II veteran and a man of letters thanks to his English Literature degree from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He began to hone his craft working in radio in Cincinnati, before ultimately deciding that radio was an artistic medium in decline, and so he started writings scripts and developing ideas for television shows. His first big success came with Kraft Television Theatre through a script Serling wrote called “Patterns” (it won a Primetime Emmy). It was about an aging boss and his struggle to handle a rising young executive in line to be his replacement. Serling’s next big success came with “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” the story about a boxer produced for Playhouse 90 in 1956 (which also won a Primetime Emmy).
As the industry moved westward so went the Serling family. Rod Serling relocated to California in 1957 and he quickly developed a reputation as the “angry young man of Hollywood” partly for his courageous opposition to censors, sponsors, and studio executives who wished to revise or silence his social commentary on issues ranging from the Vietnam War to racial prejudice. Most notably, he wrote a script called “Noon On Doomsday” for the United States Steel Hour about a Southern lynching which was intended to be a commentary on the murder of Emmett Till. Needless to say, the script was heavily redacted by censors and sponsors. The same thing happened to Serling’s scripts “A Town Has Turned To Dust” (about a Southern lynching but it was not produced and aired until Serling moved the story’s setting out of the South and changed the victim from black to Mexican, William Shatner starred in the Playhouse 90 episode) and “The Arena” (a story featuring U.S. Senators debating contemporary politics before the script was edited). Quickly growing tired of all the network revisions and yearning for more creative freedom, Serling submitted a script entitled “The Time Element” to William Dozier, vice president of West Coast programming at CBS. “The Time Element” was a time travel fantasy about a man named Pete Jensen who has a recurring dream he explains to a psychiatrist in which he is transported to Pearl Harbor the day before the Japanese attacks, but despite trying to warn the locals, no one believes him. He is later counted among the dead at Pearl Harbor as his psychiatrist vaguely recognizes his face in a photograph. Serling had initially written the story after graduating college, though this version for CBS was an hour-long extension of a half hour script that aired on The Storm in Cincinnati back when Serling was a new writer for the show. His intent was to launch a whole new television variety program, but instead CBS bought the script for $10,000 used it in 1958 for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, a show produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Producer Bert Granet had to persuade the top brass at CBS to greenlight this episode with a stellar cast of William Bendix, Martin Balsam, Darryl Hickman, and Jesse White. Immediately after airing, CBS received more phone calls, letters, and telegrams about it than ever before. The episode received so much critical acclaim that CBS ultimately relented and granted Rod Serling the opportunity to create his own show. Thus The Twilight Zone was born.
In pre-production, Serling took careful efforts to maintain creative control over the show. He formed his own production company called Cayuga Productions (named after his family’s cabin growing up on Cayuga Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region). Serling also consulted with a group filled with unparalleled creative talent. First, he discussed the show with legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury who was then at the height of his career. Mr. Bradbury helped considerably in the development of the first season of The Twilight Zone, and perhaps most importantly, Bradbury opened the door for Serling to secure two of the greatest science fiction authors of the 20th century: Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. They were soon followed by a collection of other brilliant writers including George Clayton Johnson, Montgomery Pittman, Earl Hamner, Jr., Jerry Sohl, and John Tomerlin. Sadly, as time passed Serling and Bradbury had a falling out, but one of Bradbury’s scripts was eventually accepted into the show’s third season. With the exception of “The Chaser” (written by Robert Presnell Jr.) the first season featured scripts that were exclusively written by either Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont, or Richard Matheson. In addition to a pool of talented writers, Serling managed to secure one of the greatest musical composers of the 20th century, Bernard Herrmann, whose long list of amazing credentials need not be echoed here, but his atmospheric scores for the first season of The Twilight Zone perfectly captures the tone of the show (his theme song was later replaced by Marius Constant’s theme which is sometimes regarded as the more recognizable song from the second season onward).
At first, Serling drafted a script entitled “The Happy Place,” a “downbeat and depressing” story about a futuristic totalitarian society that embraces euthanasia. But this was too somber for the new show. He returned to the drawing board and wrote “I Shot An Arrow Into The Sky,” the story of an outcasted young boy who befriends a visitor from outer space (unrelated to the 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name) but this was, too, was insufficient for the new series. After a summer vacation spent brainstorming, Serling returned with a pilot episode “Where Is Everybody?” and after a private screening in New York, General Foods signed on as the series’s main sponsor with Kimberly-Clark kleenex as a secondary sponsor. With funding secured, Serling needed a producer. For the pilot, he worked with CBS producer William Self, but he declined to continue in this role. Serling’s next choice was film producer John Champion, but he was rejected by CBS due to a lack of experience in television. William Self suggested Buck Houghton, his former script editor on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. After reviewing a few scripts and meeting with Serling, Houghton was hired for the job. He quickly became a force to be reckoned with, nearly every production decision would be run through him. All future episodes from seasons 1-3 of The Twilight Zone would be produced by Buck Houghton.
From here, Bob Keats was hired in makeup, William Ferrari for art direction, Ralph W. Nelson for production manager, Mildred Gusse as casting director, and George T. Clemens (a veteran of classic films like High Noon and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as director of photography. Production for the show began in June 1959 with the crew renting out space at MGM to produce twenty episodes, each being granted one full day of rehearsal followed by three full days of shooting (at the time, this was a very generous schedule). In order to keep up with the demand for scripts, Serling would rise at either five or six o’clock and begin dictating scripts into a tape machine (it would usually take three or four hours of his twelve to fourteen hour workday). He and Buck Houghton would then get the scripts into shooting shape, sometimes submitting them to the production team on the day of shooting, rewriting them while filming was already underway. The Twilight Zone was a well-oiled machine and Serling penned 29 of the first season’s 36 episodes –his imaginative tales of strange horror, science fiction, and fantasy often had a moral lesson of cosmic justice. “I’ve been wanting to do a show of this kind –a series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of nature– for many years,” said Serling. “So I had a backlog of story ideas. You could say many of the stories were written in my mind.” He later told the Marion Leader-Tribune (in Marion, Indiana): “This is something I’ve wanted to do for years. Television hasn’t touched it yet. Sure there have been science-fiction and fantasy shows before, but most of them were involved with gadgets or leprechauns. The Twilight Zone is about people – about human beings involved in extraordinary circumstances, in strange problems of their own or of fate’s making.”
However, Serling wanted to introduce other talented writers into The Twilight Zone universe. An open invitation was sent for unsolicited manuscripts, but Serling’s staff quickly received a staggering 14,000 scripts. After reading the first 500 or so, they decided none met the high standards of excellence Serling had established for the show. It was only after a private screening of the show’s pilot for potential writers that best friends Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont quickly signed on for. For the first season of The Twilight Zone, Serling, Beaumont, and Matheson wrote all but one script.
Today, the first season of The Twilight Zone represents the pinnacle of golden age television. Season 1 contains some of the greatest episodes in the whole series, including “Where Is Everybody?,” “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine,” “Walking Distance,” “The Lonely,” “Time Enough At Last,” “The Hitch-Hiker,” “Mirror Image,” “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” “A Stop At Willoughby,” “The After Hours,” and “A World Of His Own” among many others. Thus far, I have resisted efforts to rank or group my favorite Twilight Zone episodes –they are all just so wonderful, each one is like a little masterpiece. Ranking them is simply too difficult a task.
The spring of 1960 brought a deluge of accolades for The Twilight Zone –it won its first of three Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation at the 18th World Science Fiction Convention, along with awards from Limelight, Radio and Television Daily, and Motion Picture Daily, as well as a Producers Guild Award for Best Produced Series (awarded to Buck Houghton), a Directors Guild Award for “Time Enough At Last” (awarded to John Brahm), and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama (awarded to Rod Serling, his fourth Emmy but his first for The Twilight Zone).
Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.
When I started watching the classic Twilight Zone, somehow for me the episodes were all out of chronological order. For me personally it was a more exciting impact that way. But I remember that the first from Season 1 that I saw was Third From The Sun, which gave me the best respects originally for how the show could impress audiences with twist endings. Thanks for this article.