Television is a vast wasteland, or so I often heard while growing up. That description had been commonplace since Newton Minow, of the F.C.C., used it in his address at the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961. But, as with so many famous American turns of phrase, its context was soon forgotten. In his speech, titled “Television and the Public Interest,” Minow challenged the industry members in his audience to sit down and watch their own stations for an entire day. “Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland,” one crossed by “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”
“When television is bad,” Minow claimed, “nothing is worse”—but not before assuring his listeners that when television is good, nothing is better. In support, he adduced a handful of then current examples: specials hosted by Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s “Victory” and Winston Churchill’s memoirs. By far the best-remembered of Minow’s exemptions from the wasteland is “The Twilight Zone,” which had débuted on CBS in 1959 and would run until 1964. It’s also the least obviously high-minded: as an anthology series, “The Twilight Zone” tells a different story each episode, and many of the genres through which it cycles do involve a certain amount of mayhem, violence, sadism, and murder—as well as a few gangsters and Western men both good and bad. Yet “The Twilight Zone” also stands as perhaps the earliest example of what we think of today as auteur-driven prestige television.
The auteur of “The Twilight Zone” was Rod Serling, whose onscreen persona—dark suit, lowered cigarette, introductory words delivered from one side of his mouth—remains so oft-parodied as to be more recognizable than the content of the show itself. But certain “Twilight Zone” scenes have also persisted in popular culture: the lone survivor of a nuclear apocalypse who surrounds himself with books and promptly breaks his glasses; the omnipotent young boy, wide-eyed with disappointment, wishing the grownups around him into a distant cornfield; the furry creature perched on the wing of the jetliner, tampering with its engine. These are among the show’s signature images, but an American under fifty is most likely to have first encountered them, as I did, in the form of gags on “The Simpsons.” Such received impressions make “The Twilight Zone” seem like a cavalcade of cheap thrills.
Nevertheless, in America cheap thrills have a way of solidifying into cultural touchstones, and when creating “The Twilight Zone” Serling clearly understood the freedom that such déclassé subject matter could afford him in the years ahead. For television of the nineteen-sixties would prove quite different from television of the nineteen-fifties: already, in 1961, Minow could reference “the much bemoaned good old days of ‘Playhouse 90,’ ” an anthology drama series that had run on CBS from 1956 to 1960, and to which Serling had contributed. His scripts, dealing seriously with subjects from washed-up boxers to the Warsaw Ghetto, won him the very first Peabody Award for television writing. They also shored up his reputation as a prolific screenwriter with a strong social conscience, established with “Patterns,” an acclaimed boardroom melodrama broadcast on NBC’s “Kraft Television Theatre” in 1955.
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Like most early dramatic television programs, both “Kraft Television Theatre” and “Playhouse 90” at first aired all their productions live. Looking back at “Patterns” in 2008, the television critic Tom Shales wrote that “some people thought live TV was the beginning of a truly new storytelling medium—one uniquely suited to intimate, unadorned, psychological dramas—but it turned out to be a beginning with a tiny middle and a rushed end.” The earnest verbosity of shows like “Patterns” ultimately had less in common with what television would become than with what radio had once been. Serling had developed his writing chops on the radio as a college student in the late nineteen-forties, after returning from the Second World War, and he later lamented the medium’s diminished dramatic viability. With the rise of television, he once said, radio “dug its own grave. It had aimed downward, had become cheap and unbelievable, and had willingly settled for second best.”
Dismayed by radio’s devolution into a garish sonic billboard, Serling feared that the fledgling medium of television might meet a similar fate—and, if his struggles with sponsor-pleasing station policies were any indication, it would. In 1956, censors at CBS rendered two of his scripts almost meaninglessly vague: one, based on the murder of Emmett Till, was stripped of all similarities to real persons and events; another, a Senate-floor drama, of all references to actual political parties and issues. “In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots,” Serling said. “This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.” This realization may have inspired the modus operandi of “The Twilight Zone,” whose veil of science fiction and the supernatural allowed Serling to engage in social criticism with relative abandon.
Having spent the past year watching “The Twilight Zone” from start to finish, I can report that, on the whole, the series holds up surprisingly well. Aesthetically, it seldom exhibits the comical shoddiness associated with nineteen-fifties genre television. Often shot at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, the series had access to a wide variety of sets and props from feature films. (Science-fiction episodes make frequent use of vehicles, robots, and one particular flying saucer from M-G-M’s 1956 camp classic “Forbidden Planet.”) Each episode conjures up its own reality in an inventive and economic—if not unfailingly convincing—manner, but what holds it all together is the writing: “The scripts, of course, were invariably superior to the general run of shows around then,” the “Twilight Zone” regular John Anderson said (as quoted in Marc Scott Zicree’s “The Twilight Zone Companion”); his roles on the show included the archangel Gabriel and a commercial pilot who accidentally flies back to the time of the dinosaurs.
Even so, not all “Twilight Zone” scripts are of a uniform quality. Serling wrote or adapted a superhuman-sounding ninety-two of the show’s hundred and fifty-six episodes himself, thus imbuing “The Twilight Zone” with his own authorial personality. But, at some point, sheer fatigue seems to have unleashed his weakness for both too-direct and too-broad statements about the concerns of his time. One third-season episode, rushed into production during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, involves a suburban doctor who denies his unprepared neighbors entry into his fallout shelter on the apparent eve of nuclear war, triggering their reversion to near-savagery. (A similar scenario would later play out on “The Simpsons,” with Ned Flanders in the role of the doctor.) “No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact,” Serling says in his closing narration. “For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.”
That sounds exactly like a moral to me, but at least it’s less high-handed than what would come later on. In the fifth and final season, another Serling script presents a small town whose people eagerly await the hanging of a convict. The condemned man shot a bigot in self-defense, but murder is murder. Oddly, the sun fails to rise on the day of the execution, and the characters later realize that only their town’s sky is blacked out, the darkness being an objective correlative for the “hate” that prevails there. Generic prejudice of this kind is one of the show’s usual targets; so are such nineteen-fifties liberal bugbears as McCarthy-style witch hunts, techno-maniac philistinism, and corporate conformity, often dramatized in rigorously brain-dead futuristic dystopias. The innocent may suffer in Serling’s dramatic universe, but the guilty enforcers get their comeuppance by the time of the twist ending.
In the nearly sixty years since its cancellation, “The Twilight Zone” has undergone several revivals, none of which have made the cultural impact of Serling’s original series. But the most recent edition, which appeared on the CBS All Access (now Paramount+) streaming platform in 2019 and 2020, at least found Serling’s most plausible modern-day successor in the series’ narrator and co-creator Jordan Peele. Also a film director, Peele demonstrated, with his 2017 feature début, “Get Out,” a Serling-esque commitment to both engagement with real-world social conditions and bizarre allegorical premises (though that film would hardly bring him an honor like a Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations, which Serling won in 1961). But perhaps Serling’s auteurist model survives less in “The Twilight Zone” ’s direct descendants than it does in non-anthology prestige television dramas—in a golden age of which, one often hears, we live today.
One also hears that, far from the outwardly simplistic morality of “The Twilight Zone,” these dramas are marked by their unprecedented moral complexity. By most reckonings, their golden age began with David Chase’s “The Sopranos,” which deals with the personal and professional travails of a minor New Jersey Mafia boss. Though Tony Soprano frequently engages in criminal or otherwise reprehensible behavior, the series famously leaves open the question of his own final comeuppance. But we’re ultimately permitted little more latitude to make up our own minds about his conduct than we are to make up our own minds about the war on drugs as depicted in “The Wire,” David Simon’s bleak study of American institutional dysfunction at all levels—or, to use a lighter example, about the impulsive, narcissistic Brooklyn millennials of Lena Dunham’s “Girls.”
Rather, these characters and systems are, to borrow words often associated with Serling (though seldom actually spoken by him), “submitted for your approval”—or disapproval, as the case may be. Few prestige television dramas have taken as many pains to engineer this kind of judgment in their audiences as Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men,” much of which happens to be set in the time period when “The Twilight Zone” aired. Clive James, who died in 2019 but lived through the real nineteen-sixties, saw in “Mad Men” an “illusion, though a remarkably nuanced and fascinating one. The illusion was of a past when even the smartest people weren’t quite as smart as us.” Despite ostensibly mounting a critique of the mid-century advertising industry and the types who ran it, the show itself is “a marketing campaign: what it sells is a sense of superiority.”
But, then, which of our golden-age dramas doesn’t? Even many fans of Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing,” with its loquacity unheard since the days of “Playhouse 90,” now concede that it functions primarily as a therapeutic fantasy for middlebrow liberals. All evidence suggests that Serling was a liberal himself or even what we would now call a “progressive” (one biography dubs him “television’s last angry man”), but his activist instincts were everywhere hindered by the corporate exigencies of early network television. “I think it’s criminal that we are not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist,” he complained to Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview meant to promote the upcoming début of “The Twilight Zone.” Yet he stayed in television, he explained, because “it’s very possible to perform a function of providing adult, meaningful, exciting, challenging drama without dealing in controversy.”
Having also railed against the disruptiveness of commercial breaks, Serling would no doubt have appreciated the advent of ad-free premium cable channels and Internet streaming platforms. But he would be less pleased by the fact that, amid this much widened televisual landscape, “dealing in controversy” has become one of the few reliable ways to secure a viewership. Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria,” for example, is even now pushing the limits of HBO’s permissive content policy by working ever more brazen depictions of sex, violence, and drug use into the lives of its teen-age characters. Such material, however implausible, can now be justified as gritty, unvarnished realism, but its real function becomes clearer when scandalized viewers (and those scandalized by the scandalized) take to social media to post their reactions, all of which amount to so much free publicity.
“Euphoria” is “adult” in a sense, albeit not the one in which Serling discussed his own aspirations in the medium. It exemplifies the now common strategy of prolonging and convoluting an essentially juvenile narrative while freighting it with as much titillation as it will bear. Up to a point, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss found great success applying this grotesque method to “Game of Thrones” ’s fantasy-novel milieu of swords, castles, and dragons. Further downmarket, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Riverdale” has spent six seasons juicing up Archie Comics with crime, fornication, and murder, resulting in entertainment suitable for neither children nor adults. All these shows maintain high production values and auteurist branding, but they retain Serling’s moralism and instinct for spectacle without his conscience or imagination. Despite television’s enormous growth since the days of “The Twilight Zone,” prestige drama has yet to reach maturity.
