Danse Macabre (39 page)

They hadn't; perhaps only
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
, the launching pad for that apostle of disaster, Irwin Allen, can compete with
Kolchak
for total collapse. Yet we should remember that not even Seabury Quinn, with his Jules de Grandin series in
Weird Tales
, was able to keep the continuing-character format rolling very successfully, and Quinn was one of the most talented writers of the pulp era.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
(which became known during its run to some pundits as
Kolchak's Monster of the Week
) nonetheless holds a certain warm spot in my heart—a
small
warm spot, it is true—and in the hearts of a great many fans. There is something childlike and unsophisticated in its very awfulness. 

5

"
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as
space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between
science and superstition, between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. It is
the dimension of the imagination. It is an area we call . . . The Twilight Zone
." With this rather purple invocation-which did not sound purple at all in Rod Serling's measured and almost matter-of-fact delivery-viewers were invited to enter a queerly boundless other world . . . and enter they did.
The Twilight Zone
ran on CBS from October of 1959 through the summer of 1965—from the torpor of the Eisenhower administration to LBJ's escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the first of the long hot summers in American cities, and the advent of the Beatles.

Of all the dramatic programs which have ever run on American TV, it is the one which comes closest to defying any overall analysis. It was not a western or a cop show (although some of the stories had western formats or featured cops 'n' robbers); it was not really a science fiction show (although
The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows
categorizes it as such); not a sitcom (although some of the episodes were funny) ; not really occult (although it did occult stories frequently-in its own peculiar fashion), not really supernatural. It was its own thing, and in a large part that fact alone seems to account for the fact that a whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of the sixties . . . at least, as the sixties are remembered.

Rod Serling, the program's creator, came to prominence in what has been referred to as television's "golden age"—although those who have termed it so because they remember fondly such anthology programs as
Studio One, Playhouse 90,
and
Climax
have somehow managed to forget such chestnuts as
Mr. Arsenic, Hands of Mystery, Doorway to
Danger,
and
Doodle
Weaver
—programs which ran during the same period, and which by comparison make such current TV programs as
Vega$
and
That's Incredible
! look like great American theater. Television never really has had a golden age; only successive seasons of sounding brass which vary slightly as to the trueness of the tone.

Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays—
Patterns
,
The Comedian,
and
Requiem for a Heavyweight
—form a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age" . . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky (
Marty
) and Reginald Rose (
Twelve Angry Men
) who contributed to that illusion of gold.

Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was flyweight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha relates in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their `people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later:

`What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' " *

Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 (
Patterns
, starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executive—the teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature films—
Assault on a Queen
was maybe the worst of them;
Planet of the Apes
and
Seven Day in May
were two of the good ones—but television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky (
Hospital, Network
). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a five-year hiatus following the cancellation of
The Twilight Zone
, he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of
Night Gallery.
Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important." **

Serling apparently saw
The Twilight Zone
as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancellation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of "it's only make-believe,"
The Twilight Zone
was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness—rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis.

*For this and much of the material on Serling and
The Twilight Zone
, I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in
Starlog
#15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.

**Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976
Writer' Yearbook
.

Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith* as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of
The Twilight
Zone
seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood. If
The Twilight Zone
had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n' robbers meller,
The Detectives
, on ABC, and the immensely popular
Gillette Cavalcade of
Sports
on NBC-this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.

But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic.
The
Twilight Zone
's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews. The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." ** Nevertheless, problems continued. The program had problems finding a steady sponsor (this was back in the days, you must remember, when dinosaurs walked the earth and TV time was cheap enough to allow a single sponsor to pay for an entire program—hence
GE Theater, Alcoa Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, The Lux
Show, Coke Time
, and a host of others; to this writer's knowledge, the last program to be wholly sponsored by one company was
Bonanza
, sponsored by GM), and CBS

*Meredith became perhaps the most familiar face of all to
Twilight Zone
fans, save for Serling's own. Probably his best-remembered role came in "Printer's Devil," where he plays a newspaper owner who is really Satan . . . complete with a jutting, crooked cigar that was somehow diabolical.

**In 1972 CBS discovered another "prestige program"-
The Waltons
, created by Earl Hamner, Jr., who wrote a good many
Twilight Zones
. . . including, coincidentally, "The Bewitchin' Pool," the last original
Twilight Zone
episode to be telecast on the network. Placed against brutal competition-NBC's
The Flip Wilson Show
and ABC's own version of The Church of What's Happening Now,
The Mod Squad
-CBS stuck with Hamner's creation in spite of the low ratings because of the prestige factor.
The Waltons
went on to outlive its competition and at this writing has run seven seasons.

began to wake up to the fact that Sterling had put none of his cudgels away but was now wielding them in the name of fantasy.

During that first season,
The Twilight Zone
presented "Perchance to Dream," the late Charles Beaumont's first contribution to the series, and "Third from the Sun," by Richard Matheson. The gimmick of the latter—that the group of protagonists is fleeing not from Earth but to it—is one that has been utterly beaten to death by now (most notably by that deep-space turkey
Battlestar Galactica
), but most viewers can remember the snap of that ending to this day. It was the episode which marks the point at which many occasional tuners-in became addicts. Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different. During its third season,
The Twilight Zone
was either canceled (Serling's version) or squeezed out by insoluble scheduling problems (the CBS version). In either case, it returned the following year as an hourlong program. In his article "Rod Serling's Dream," Ed Naha says:

"The 'something different' the elongated (
Twilight Zone
) came up with turned out to be boredom. After thirteen publicly shunned episodes, the 60-minute
Twilight Zone
was canceled."

It was indeed canceled-only to return for a final, mostly dull, season as a half-hour show again-but because of boredom? In my own view, the hour-long episodes of
The Twilight Zone
included some of the best of the entire run. There was "The Thirty-Fathom Grave," in which the crew of a Navy destroyer hears ghosts tapping inside a sunken submarine; "Printer's Devil"; "The New Exhibit" (one of
The Twilight Zone's
few excursions into outright horror, this dealt with a wax museum janitor played by Martin Balsam who discovers that the Murderers' Row exhibit has come to life); and "Miniature," which starred Robert Duvall in a Charles Beaumont script about a man who escapes back into the gay nineties.

As Naha points out, by its final season "no one at CBS really cared about the series." He goes on to say that ABC, which had had some success with
The Outer Limits
, extended feelers to Serling about doing a sixth season with them. Serling refused. "I think ABC wanted to make a trip to the graveyard every week," he said.

For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written
Patterns
began doing television commercials—that unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in
Requiem for a
Heavyweight
who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 lie began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of
Night Gallery
. The series was inevitably compared to
The Twilight Zone
in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watered-down
Thriller
with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job.

Serling had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing
The Twilight Zone
. (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn
Night Gallery
"into
Mannix
with a shroud.") Nonetheless,
Night Gallery
produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began to—ulp!—chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no nerves, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the nearimpossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes: the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them. Most
Night Gallery
episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn.