I only discovered it this morning while listening to a habitual podcast called On the Media. It was already in syndication when I was a kid and they made a mediocre movie based upon four episodes in the Eighties; at least it created a great joke in the Nineties for the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. Hard to believe the program isn’t older. Why? Well, it’s in black and white which usually gives it the automatic (mis)perception of it being a Fifties show even though most television programming didn’t go 100 percent color until late Sixties, unless it was intentional.
Much of Rod Serling’s opus holds up and it’s probably even more relevant in recent years with the finger pointing by certain angry, dumb pundits named Rush and Glenn. Rod was certainly the master of the twist ending that M. Night Shyamalan only pulled off once. My favorite wasn’t on Zone sadly. It was the big ending to The Planet of the Apes which blew my mind as a kid and inspired a song by LRB called “Statue of Liberty” (no joke, it’s in the liner notes to their 20th anniversary collection). He wrote the screenplay but the movie became too expensive to produce as the apes’ civilization was equivalent to the near future of the Sixties; personal helicopters, jetpacks, videophones, etc. This is how the original novel went. So everything got retooled to accommodate the more primitive look we are all familiar with. Serling’s memorable conclusion remained.
Maybe I should look into renting or borrowing this through NetFlix, once I get through all the other junk we have on DVD.
There’s a good article here from the NY Times.