One neighbor is accused of being an alien. After a comet flies overhead during rumors of an alien invasion, plunging a small suburban neighborhood into darkness, neighbors begin to question and distrust neighbor as their routine becomes increasingly disrupted. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, part of the first season and airing originally in 1960, is perhaps the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone and was written by Serling himself. Although some of these episodes – ones where viewers were encouraged to see things from “a different point of view” – were often didactic and found Serling giving into his worst impulses, others like “The Invaders” found creative and exciting ways to smuggle in this message of acceptance. This particular twist was a common trope on The Twilight Zone, found in “Third From The Sun” (where astronauts flee a planet on the verge of nuclear war for a new home…called Earth) and “Probe 7, Over and Out” (where a pilot lands on a distant world, meets a native woman, and introduces himself as Adam…to her Eve). In the episode’s final moments, the audience learns that the spacecraft bears an Air Force insignia, hears the cries of the astronauts radioing back home to stay away, and realizes that they have been rooting for another species entirely. The episode itself is largely wordless, and the old woman eventually defeats the aliens one by one. In 1961’s “The Invaders,” written by Richard Matheson (of I Am Legend fame), an old woman in a cabin is set upon by small aliens in a flying saucer. However, there are two episodes in particular that stand out as best demonstrating the breadth of Serling’s intentions in crafting speculative fiction with a social message. And the show, too, has become known in popular culture for its twist endings – perhaps most famously in “To Serve Man,” where a seemingly benevolent alien race offers world peace and trips to their home world, only for the protagonist to learn the truth about the alien’s book To Serve Man: “It’s a cookbook!”
The shelter twilight zone series#
Not every episode followed this format – indeed, some of the most famous episodes of the series (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “It’s A Good Life” among them) are known for their Sam Raimi-esque suspenseful horror rather than any sort of moral parable. As the protagonist faced the consequences of their decision, Serling would return to offer a summary of the episode’s conclusion, articulate the message audiences should keep in mind, and remind them that the events witnessed only took place in “…the Twilight Zone.”
In the aftermath of this reckoning, the third act of the episode would involve some kind of twist or pivot (again, usually science-fictional or supernatural in nature) that either reinforced the moral quandary at the episode’s center – or put it in a new light. This particular phenomenon would, in turn, provoke some kind of threat, which would force the protagonist to make some kind of ethical/moral choice. Serling would frame the narrative around a protagonist or protagonists who often found themselves facing some kind of science fiction or supernatural phenomenon. Stories followed the same basic format, with variations throughout, but each week, Serling would introduce a new story from “The Twilight Zone,” which was whatever it needed to be for that particular episode. (It’d be easier to get his messages past the censors, too.)Ĭritically acclaimed upon its premiere in 1959, The Twilight Zone was an anthology series that ran in roughly half-hour episodes for its first three seasons and hour-long episodes for its fourth. It was much easier, he concluded, for audiences to take a bit of political commentary and moral reckoning if it featured aliens, robots, and spacemen – among other science-fiction elements. Serling realized he’d have to find another way to tell the tales he wanted to tell. However, by the time Serling created Twilight Zone, this kind of realism had gone out of fashion, and Serling was tired of battling network censors who disliked the overt political message of his stories. Serling, a veteran, humanist, and playwright in the “social realist” mode of the 1940s and 1950s, was an early evangelist for television’s mass potential, writing acclaimed works like Requiem for a Heavyweight and A Town Has Turned To Dust (loosely inspired by the Emmett Till murder). He took them, of course, to The Twilight Zone. From 1959 to 1964, Rod Serling took CBS audiences on a journey.
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