Below concludes the lecture script... The article was also published previously on; Left Brain Media

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When Anne Serling, Serling’s daughter, talked of her father’s writing, she spoke of human issues above all else. “There was a lot of pain in a lot of his stories, a lot about loneliness and loss. He evoked themes of prejudice and love and war – the issues that are in our society. So he encompassed a lot of subjects that were all part of what he had dealt with for most of his life”. Serling’s focus on race in his work punctuated many of the most effecting and timeless pieces Serling ever wrote. Serling’s eloquence in his writing was best used in his open letter following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. “Sir. There is a bitter sadness and special irony that attends the passing of Martin Luther King. Quickly and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise – the ritual dirge so time honoured and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric. In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life. In his grave, we praise him for his decency – but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own… he asked only for equality and it is that which we denied him”. Violent racism became the central focus of the fourth episode of Season Four He’s Alive! This very heavy-handed but ultimately wholly effective episode was considered by Serling, who wrote it, to be the most important episode of this series. The episode followed a 1960’s Nazi being spurned on by the ghost of Hitler. With its themes of contemporary Nazism rearing its ugly head again after the war, it certainly is important and will never not be important. Serling’s closing narration will forever not be unfortunately timeless.

Where will he go next? This phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare... Anyplace, everyplace where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when comes to your town. Remember when it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind unreasoning assault on a people or a human being. He’s alive because, through these things, we keep him alive. 

The episode reportedly received four thousand pieces of hate mail directed to Serling and his staff.

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Even from the first episode of Season 2, King Nine Will Not Return, Serling was adapting previous ideas, with the opening of Season 2 from 1960 effectively being a remake in conceit and formula of the original pilot episode Where is Everybody?  A more bombastic and less subtle take. Much the same can be said for the change in theme tune with the introduction of the almost instantly iconic title theme by Marius Constant, the classic doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-dooo-doo-doo guitar and bongo theme, as opposed to the more languid Bernard Hermann first season theme, which in many ways I ultimately prefer. Other changes season to season included that due to the show’s inflating budget and general expenditure outweighing its viewership, six of the episodes were filmed on videotape, as opposed to the beautiful film recordings of the other episodes. Although three of these episodes don’t suffer too much in quality, it still really highlights the power of George C. Clements’s photography of the other episodes. The show went on to create more classic episodes, including Eye of the Beholder (Episode 6 of the 2nd Season), Nick of Time (Episode 7 of Season 2), The Invaders (Episode 15 of Season 2), as well as the show earning the Unity Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations”. The show was even mentioned as an exception in Newton Minow’s iconic 1961 speech “Television and the public Interest”, the speech in which he referred to the current world of TV as a “vast wasteland”. However from the point of Season 2 onwards, the immense strain of the work already began to take hold on Serling, he commented on his exhaustion “I’ve never felt so drained of ideas as I do at this moment”, the man was 37 and he couldn’t have felt more creatively sapped.  Serling would comment later around the fifth season of the show that he “was writing so much, I felt I had begun to lose perspective on what was good and what was bad”.

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Despite continuingly facing adversity delivering Serling continued to deliver exceptional and timeless episodes, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, Living Doll, On Thursday We Leave For Home, To Serve Man, It’s a Good Life and The Silence but to name a few – the show kept facing immense internal and external issues. The main of these came with the 1963 fourth season of the show which featured a truly calamitous decision on the end of CBS. When one talks about what makes the show the high quality product it is, one may comment upon the snappy endings, the exceptionally taut and well crafted writing, the grand performances. All of these elements do remain in the fourth season, effected profoundly by one key difference. Forced by a studio still longing to cancel his show, Serling had to expand his episodes to an hour in length. Serling’s simple response was that the show “is the perfect half hour show... if we went to an hour, we’d have to fleshen the stories our stories, soap-opera style. Viewers could watch fifteen minutes without knowing whether they were in a Twilight Zone or Desilu Playhouse”. The frank truth is of course that some half-hour episode struggle to fulfil their running time, this then was of course the minority amongst lesser episodes, but in the fourth season almost every episode was plagued by padding and scripts that just can’t justify their length. The minority became the majority and the exception became the rule. When it came to the fifth season further issues ensued. Charles Beaumont was succumbing to a crippling brain disease that would later take his life, at this time he was still delivering episodes for the show, however largely ghost written by Jerry Sohl and John Tomerlin. Perhaps the biggest issue regarded the change in producer from Bert Granet (who’d replaced Buck Houghton) to William Froug. Froug’s decision making was largely unpopular, frequently in the realm of alienating the writers who had built up the steady body of work beyond Serling’s contributions. In particular shelving a Richard Matheson script, which Granet had purchased under his term, only for the script to later in 1986 be produced as an Amazing Stories, going on to be nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America award. The fifth series overall had many oddities, perhaps the strangest was the purchasing of the French short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was modified for broadcast with a Serling intro and outro recorded. The episode would also later that year win the Academy Award for Best Short Film.

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These decisions and Serling’s overall weariness led in the end to the show’s final cancellation. Froug would say “for one reason or other, Jim Aubrey decided he was sick of the show… he claimed that it was too far over budget and that the ratings weren’t good enough”. Serling however stated instead that he had “decided to cancel the network”. The pains and struggles of Serling dealing with other creative’s can be seen in the Season 3 episode It’s a Good Life, according to Mathew Weiner. This ingenious adaptation by Serling of Jerome Bixby’s short story, directed by James Sheldon, tells the story of Anthony Freemont, a little boy played by Bill Mumy. Little Anthony is one of the most horrifying creations ever put to a screen and this episode milks every brutal ounce of horror that can be milked from the concept. The story of a little boy whose powers of the mind render him a complete monster placing everybody in the town, including even his mother and father into intense fear for the entirety of their lives. Weiner believes (as paraphrased by Michael Agresta in 2014) that “the allegory should be immediately comprehensible to any writer of television. The infantile needs of the audience must always be served. Not least among these is the need to be told that life is good, happy and pleasant. This is the “tyranny of the audience”. In his final interview, with Linda Breville, held in march 4, 1974, speaking without the knowledge that he had less than four months to live, Serling spoke much of death in a very eerie fashion. “I’ve never planned ahead. I just sort of go through life checking the menu of three meals that day. I never worry about tomorrow. It’s only since I’ve gotten older than I’ve begun to wonder about time running out… Maybe next Thursday won’t come one day… But that’s not uniquely the writer’s concern, that’s the concern of every middle-aged man who looks in the mirror”. The links between these comments and Walking Distance are what make every frame of that episode to me all the more powerful with every watch. In this final interview Serling spoke even more directly about death. “Death is with us in such abundance and hovers over us in so massive a form that we don’t have time to invent a mythology… Whether it’s an old man with a scythe or a pale rider on a horse or what it is. Now it’s become so omniscient and so constant that our major battle is warding it off”. Within four months Serling’s warding would be to no avail. He would die in 1975 after having a heart attack and open-heart surgery.  Mike Doll for Serling’s Binghamton, New York obituary put into writing the fantastical thought that many fans hold dear. “Perhaps his death, as the stories he wrote and the audiences he enthralled, took him into that mysterious place that he called during his life The Twilight Zone”.

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When Carol Serling, Rod’s long-time wife and partner passed in 2020 her New York Times obituary called her “the tender of The Twilight Zone flame”. As she said so often herself she has “made a business out of his legacy”. She told Cemetary Dance that Serling’s work gave her “an entry into the world that [she] wouldn’t have had otherwise”. Carol was the associate producer and consulting editor of Twilight Zone magazine, was a consultant on the 1980 Twilight Zone: The Movie, was an executive producer on the most recent reboot of the show, in 2009 and 2010 edited anthologies of stories inspired by the show and in 1994 found two unproduced Serling Twilight Zone scripts and sold them to CBS, they would later be televised as “Rod Serling’s Lost Classics”. Carol’s tender of the immense flame of the Twilight Zone is undoubtedly a chief aspect of why we’re still talking about the show and him today. The first "Twilight Zone" series aired on CBS for five seasons, from 1959 to 1964. CBS later revived the show in 1985 for two seasons, starring Charles Aidman as host. "Twilight Zone" was revived for a third time in 2002, with host Forrest Whitaker. The third revival lasted only one season. With yet another revival in these past five years led by Academy Award winner Jordan Peele. The legacy of the show can be seen everywhere. Mathew Weiner described the legacy of the show in this way, “if there is a message from The Twilight Zone its aim high. They don’t all work, but they all aim high. They don’t think the audience is stupid”, this ethos profoundly effected Weiner and so many other TV and film creative’s of the many years after.

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In his final interview Linda Breville asked Serling squarely about legacy…

BREVILLE: And what do you want them to say about the writer Rod Serling a hundred years from now?

SERLING: I don’t care. I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say ‘oh, he was a writer. That’s sufficiently an honoured position for me.

BREVILLE: Then that’s all it boils down to really?

SERLING: I guess we all have a little vaunting itch for immortality, I guess that must be it.

To say Serling is immortal is an under-statement of blinding size. Without Rod Serling’s pen and vision then the world of TV would be an entirely different landscape and perhaps would be a place where stories were still surface level and characters had no depth. Serling breathed life into a medium and began the first step toward the prestige world of TV that we are in today. True, one might say we are in the golden age of television now, but there is a small part of me that wishes I was in 1960 and I was sitting down in front of a very small TV, viewing a Twilight Zone episode for the first time and no knowing a damn thing about what I was going to see. For no matter whether the bandages are coming off, or we are strolling through a library, or even strolling through our old hometown... we are in The Twilight Zone, and what a perfect place that is to be in. And what a tour-guide we had in Mr Rod Serling, the man in the suit, somewhere beyond the 5th dimension, in a place that felt more familiar than we could have ever imagined. For… 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, and it lies between the pit of man’s fear and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... The Twilight Zone.

- Thomas Carruthers