Everything to Know About The Twilight Zone

It’s nearly impossible to find someone alive today who doesn’t know about The Twilight Zone, particularly the original iteration that ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964 (classic episodes air regularly on SYFY).

Rod Serling’s groundbreaking anthology series has seeped so far down into our cultural groundwater, that anyone could immediately identify one of Rod’s iconic voiceovers or the pig-nosed hospital staff in “Eye of the Beholder.”

“Rod really does permeate our pop culture and our reference points,” Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, told SYFY WIRE on the occasion of Serling’s 100th birthday. “Young people love Twilight Zone as much as older people … At the end of his life, Rod thought that he had failed. He said his work was momentarily adequate. The one sad thing is he didn’t know that he had succeeded as hugely as he had.”

Everything you need to know about the original Twilight Zone

Who created The Twilight Zone?

The show was created by Binghamton native and World War II veteran Rod Serling, who built his career during the Golden Age of television in the 1950s. Despite receiving a great deal of critical acclaim for his teleplays, Serling felt creatively hampered by network censors and sponsors who wanted to avoid controversial topics at all costs. When one of his scripts commenting on race in America (a response to the grotesque murder of Emmett Till) was cut to bits by superiors, Serling decided that the only way to tackle weighty topics was to sugar-coat them with the colorful candy shells of alien visitors, talking slot machines, plane-wrecking gremlins, living mannequins, nefarious fortune telling dispensers, and more.

“He thought, ‘Well, if I write a science fiction, fantasy, or horror, I can say what I want to say about the human condition and the censors won’t notice,'” Zicree explained. “That’s absolutely what happened. But Rod never intended to be a science fiction writer. He wanted to be the Arthur Miller of television. The times being what they were in the 1950s, the censors and sponsors weren’t going to allow that. So he came up with a workaround that incidentally [resulted in] one of the greatest TV shows ever made.”

What is The Twilight Zone about?

The original Twilight Zone comprises 156 different tales about ordinary people caught in fantastical situations — many of which end with a shocking twist dipped in irony. Some episodes are didactic, hoping to impart some moral lesson regarding the human condition on the viewer, while others simply highlight the randomness of what it means to exist in a cruel and uncaring universe. The Twilight Zone’s most consistent themes revolve around war, death, power, jealousy, greed, conformity, kindness, complacency, bigotry, fear of the unknown, obsession, perseverance, and the mysteries of the human mind.

“These are wonderful stories and they really hold up,” Zicree said. “And even when you know what the gimmick is, you can still watch them over and over again because you love the characters, you’re engaged by these people. Rod wasn’t a snob, he wrote about bank tellers and sales girls and regular people. It’s very rare that he’s writing about the president of the United States or something. That’s not his interest. His interest is regular people living their lives and facing the unknown and hopefully surviving.”

Who stars in The Twilight Zone?

Given its anthology format, The Twilight Zone brought in a different cast of actors every week, though some — like William Shatner, Gladys Cooper, Albert Salmi, Fritz Weaver, Jack Klugman, Joe Maross, and Burgess Meredith — often came back for multiple appearances. The show is also notable for featuring early turns from soon-to-be A-listers such as Shatner, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, Ron Howard, Leonard Nimoy, Carol Burnett, George Takei, and Robert Duvall.

The only constant cast member was Serling himself, with the series creator serving as both host and narrator.