1959
The Twilight Zone premieres
Rod Serling's anthology series debuts on CBS, using strange tales and twist endings to slip sharp social commentary past nervous sponsors.
On October 2, 1959, CBS broadcast the first episode of The Twilight Zone, a half-hour anthology series created by Rod Serling. The opening story, “Where Is Everybody?”, follows a man who finds himself alone on a dirt road with no memory of who he is. He wanders into a diner with a hot pot of coffee on the stove and a jukebox playing, then into a town that seems completely deserted. In the final minutes, viewers learn that he is an Air Force sergeant sealed in an isolation booth, being tested for a long solo trip to the Moon, and that the empty town was a hallucination.
Serling was already one of the best known writers in American television, with acclaimed plays such as “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”. He had grown tired of sponsors and networks cutting his scripts. In one case, the line “Got a match?” was removed because the sponsor sold lighters. Serling believed that a science fiction setting would let him explore controversial ideas with less interference, and his earlier time travel script “The Time Element”, produced for Desilu Playhouse in 1958, proved that audiences would follow him there. His first pilot for the new series, about a society that executed people at 60, was rejected as too dark, so he wrote “Where Is Everybody?” instead.
Critics loved the premiere. The Chicago Daily News, Daily Variety, and the New York Herald Tribune all praised it as some of the best half-hour television they had seen. Ratings were another matter. CBS had hoped for much stronger numbers, and by the end of the first season the show seemed close to cancellation. It survived, and Serling’s role as host even grew.
Why it matters
The series ran for five seasons and 156 episodes, ending on June 19, 1964. Serling wrote or co-wrote 92 of them and became the face of the show, opening and closing each story with his narration. Episodes such as “Time Enough at Last”, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, “Eye of the Beholder”, and “To Serve Man” are still studied and quoted, and the phrase “twilight zone” entered everyday English as a way to describe something surreal.
Critics regularly place it among the greatest television series ever made. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it the third best written TV series of all time. It has been revived three times, in 1985, 2002, and 2019, and inspired a feature film in 1983.
Did you know?
The show’s best known theme, the eerie guitar and bongo figure, was not written for it. CBS bought several short library cues from the French composer Marius Constant and spliced two of them together. It replaced Bernard Herrmann’s original theme in the second season.
