Fifty years ago this month the smartest television show of all time first aired. As a writer, I am a sucker for good writing. “The Twilight Zone,” as Michael Anton recently wrote in his commemoration at National Review Online, is nothing if not a writer’s show. Modern sci-fi fans, caught up in dazzling special effects and action, lose sight of the fact that sci-fi, in its radio incarnations “X Minus One” and “Dimension X,” and its later television offerings such as “The Outer Limits” and “Doctor Who,” is the plaything of nerd scribes with creative imaginations. The megastars and big-budgets would come later. In the beginning, there were wordsmiths.
It’s telling that “The Twilight Zone’s” recurring character is not an A-list hearthrob but the diminutive, gap-toothed, akimbo-eared Rod Serling, the show’s chief writer. Rocky Balboa’s trainer, otherwise known as that bow-legged villian of Gotham, is the closest thing one gets to an actor associated with “The Twilight Zone.” Even the theme music steals the limelight from the actors.
A few years ago, I purchased the 28-disc “complete, definitive collection” spanning all five of the show’s seasons. I’m on season five, and I generally watch late on weekend nights after imbibing. The benefits to this are twofold: first, my imagination is more malleable then and, second, it enables me to enjoy the episodes a second time around without deja vu.
After purchasing the series, a friend recommended “The Obsolete Man” as his favorite episode in this his favorite series. Rather than watch sequentially, I skipped to that Burgess Meredith-starring episode. “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “The Invaders,” and “To Serve Man” are also well done, but “The Obsolete Man” may be my favorite now too. Its set is spartan, the costumes drab, and the budget that of a high school play. Who needs CGI when you have Rod Serling writing the script?
Thirty years before that anonymous man stood up to a tank in Tiananmen Square, Burgess Meredith yelled “The emperor has no clothes!” at the state in “The Obsolete Man.” Life imitates art. Our hero, Mr. Romney Wordsworth, standing before his prosecutor/judge/executioner, vehemently defends individuality against the dystopic conformity of the total state, books against their burners, and God against the hubristic men who would play Him as they deny Him. “You cannot erase God with an edict!” Wordsworth boldly informs the kangaroo court. His interrogator responds, “The state has no use for your kind.” It’s telling that writers would make the hero not a warrior or a saint, but a librarian.
Though Serling was a man of the Left, so much so that he returned the good cheer of his neighbor Ronald Reagan with contempt, several “Twilight Zone” episodes, particularly “The Obsolete Man,” feature distinctly conservative themes. This is true of a few “Doctor Who” episodes (“The Sunmakers,” “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”) and numerous sci-fi films (“Serenity,” “The Island,” “The Invasion”). This certainly doesn’t make the genre inherently conservative; if anything, science fiction tends to lamely absorb the liberal shibboleths of its age (see [hear?] the Cold War moral equivalence of ’50s radio sci-fi) as it imaginatively anticipates the future of science, technology, government, etc.
Other writers have advanced the idea that “Star Trek” and “The X-Files” echoed conservative themes. I find these arguments interesting but ultimately unpersuasive. There’s an impulse to read one’s politics into what one finds aesthetically pleasing. This is ultimately not as harmful as imposing one’s politics on one’s artistic tastes. But it is still a form of mild delusion. Propaganda isn’t art. And good art generally transcends politics.
Fifty years after the first “Twilight Zone,” one is struck by the dearth of writer-driven shows on television. Visitors to the 500-channel wasteland find an abundance of reality television, celebrity news, and game shows–or a combination of all three formats. Is there a place on the twenty-first-century idiot box for intelligently written programs? Rod Serling’s villains often targeted men of letters. A half-century later, television executives have marked writers as “obsolete men.” We are all living in the “Twilight Zone.”
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