Personal TWILIGHT ZONE MARATHON

It's 6:28am and I'm about to enjoy my 4th episodes of a personal Twilight Zone marathon. A dear friend gave me Season 3 of the Definitive Edition of The Twilight Zone a few Christmases back, and it's been long enough ago that many of the episodes have slipped my memory, so I'm able to enjoy them again, almost anew.

I say "almost" because when I was a kid I bought Marc Scott Zicree's amazing book The Twilight Zone Companion and have read it many, many, many times over the last 2 decades. When I found the unabridged audiobook version on Audible.come, I bought that and have been listening to it again.

Anyway, the Definitive Edition of The Twilight Zone includes a segment in each show before the closing credits called "And Now, Mr. Serling". After each show, Rod Serling would pop up on-onscreen and tease next week's episodes. Then he would take a beat, then plug the brand of cigarettes he was (presumably) smoking. (If you're not actually that familiar with The Twilight Zone you may not realize that Serling was a serious smoker, and often appeared on-camera with a cigarette in his hand. And in the late-1950s and early-1960s, there weren't any FCC rules about people smoking on-camera.)

I was watching the "And Now, Mr. Serling" segment of "Showdown with Rance McGrew" and laughed out loud when, while doing his plug for Chesterfield cigarettes, Rod raises his left hand (which had been hanging inconspicuously by his side for most of the segment) to reveal he's holding a pack of Chesterfields!

My knee-jerk reaction was to be sad that poor genius Rod Serling had to do commercials in order to tell his amazing stories! The Young Artist in me, naturally, rebels at the injustice of this master writer being forced to whore his brilliant show (in a subtle way, mind you, in as dignified a fashion as one might hope for an advertisement) in order to get it on the air.

But then the Older, More Experienced Guy spoke up and made a fascinating point...

Any serious fan of Serling's work knows how Serling's writing was often adversely affected by changes demanded by the sponsors of the shows. Serling was famously anti-censorship, and rightfully so! His body of work was most infamously tainted and neutered by censorship by sponsors!

Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky are often remembered as two of the most important writers in Television's infancy. Serling wanted to entertain, sure, but he also wanted audiences to think. He wanted us to consider what was going on in the world, and how we live our lives.

And this was sort of antithetical to what advertisers want. Advertisers do not want us to think, they want to tell us what we want. That's what advertising is. It's the difference between Google and Bing: Rod Serling (and other thought-provoking writers) are like Google, in that they simply show us what's out there, and advertisers are like Bing in that they want to show us what they want us to see. If Serling writes a teleplay about racism in the South (in the early '60s) and one of the sponsors is Coke, and Northerners tend to prefer Pespi while Southerners tend to prefer Coke (again, this was the early '60s; I don't know if the delineation is still true) then Coca-Cola isn't really going to be thrilled with a TV show that's all about racism in the South. It's not because Coca-Cola was evil or racist, it's because they're paying for people to watch a program during which they can advertise their product.

But when they demand changes to the production of Serling's script that dilute the dramatic integrity of the piece, Serling (and Serling's fans) will naturally paint the advertisers as the villain.

HOWEVER...

Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone as a means of telling relevant stories without sponsor censorship.

He realized (and stated often) that if you tell a controversial story about racism in the South in the 1960s, but set it on Venus instead of in the Southern United States, the network and the Sponsors probably wouldn't catch the reference. The audience would understand what the story was commenting on, and we will duly think about the human truths the show wants us to consider. But the bureaucrats whose job is to de-fang stories with too much bite (which might upset some of the folks paying the bills) weren't really likely to see what was going on until the episode aired, and the rest of the world saw it with them!

It was a brilliant strategy, of course, and others have followed in Serling's footsteps. Gene Roddenberry did the same thing with every incarnation of Star Trek.

So immediately after laughing and feeling sorry for Mr. Serling as he holds up a pack of Chesterfields and assures us that "twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes," I realize that if it hadn't been for the adversity of advertisers in Serling's career, I might never -- NEVER -- have known who he was!

Seriously!

I don't watch Dramas! I'm not going to hang out with a bunch of racists for 2 hours! I watch Sci-Fi and Horror and the like! If racist hicks are being haunted by the ghost of one of their victims, I'll TOTALLY watch THAT! But if it's just a story about how some people are too ignorant to allow other people to live in peace, I am so not interested in spending my time with those dumb fucks!

A specific example: The episode I just watched "Showdown with Rance McGrew"...

If this were a Drama, it would be the story of how phony and weak a TV cowboy is and how the Old West, as portrayed by Hollywood (in the '50s and early '60s), is absolutely nothing like what happened historically. Rance McGrew is a spoiled Hollywood TV star, and a coward, and a wimp.

I don't want to hang out with that guy for half an hour!

But because this was an episode of The Twilight Zone, that Hollywood dude meets the real Jesse James, who sets him straight about the way Old West outlaws really behaved. he terrorized poor McGrew (the way McGrew terrorized everyone on the set in the first half of the episode) and though the episode ends a little tragically for McGrew, it's a fun romp for the audience.

The point I'm trying to get to here is that The Twilight Zone forever changed my life after the first episode. the show went off the air 6 years before I was born, and yet even today it inspires and influences me! Rod Serling inspires and influences me! And had it not been for Network and Advertiser censorship, The Twilight Zone wouldn't have happened!

And I know this is presumptuous, but I think if Serling were with us today, he might agree with that. Serling seemed the type of guy with a great and realistic sense of perspective; he would probably downplay the influence he has had on generations of writers and storytellers, but I don't think he would have any problem crediting censorship for helping him create his legacy. (He would also be quick to point out that thought he wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show's 156 episodes, there were several other writers -- including Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Earl Hamner, Jr. -- had as much to do with shaping The Twilight Zone as he did...even though die-hard Serling fans, such as myself, might argue the point.)

But here's a bigger consideration: If censorship hadn't driven Rod Serling to create The Twilight Zone, would Star Trek exist?

How many works of speculative fiction are a direct result of Serling's couching of important stories within a fantastical premise? I mean, Sci-Fi authors had long been setting their social criticism within fantastical settings. Serling didn't invent the literary tradition. But he popularized it! The Twilight Zone was (and is still) viewed by tons of people who have never read Heinlein or Asimov or Clarke or Matheson or Bardbury, or even Verne or Wells!

Paddy Chayefsky is still hailed as a great and important writer, but I'm not sure I've seen any of his work. I never saw Network, but I did read his screenplay for it. But the rest of his work...I have no clue.

Had Rod Serling had an easy, painless career of telling the exact stories he wanted to tell in the way he wanted to tell them, I may never have ever head of him, or read a word of his work, or seen a single film/TV show produced from it. But because censorship drove him to create The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling's work is a part of me! It has irrevocably altered who I am, and who I will be! And if my daughter, or my friends or family or coworkers are at all altered by my presence in their lives, they are also altered by Rod Serling's work!

How amazing is that?!

So even though I'm sad about the grief Rod endured because of advertisers, I'm also kind of grateful. Those meddling bastards gave me The Twilight Zone, which is to say that they gave me the gift of Rod Serling!!!