Movies - TV
One Of Rod Serling’s First Twilight Zone Interviews Didn’t Age Well At All
By WILLIAM BIBBIANI
In the beginning, television seemed like a flash in the pan to some, but Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," a sci-fi anthology series, made its mark and remains influential today.
Before the show’s premiere, Serling spoke with newsman Mike Wallace about his past run-ins with network sponsors and how he didn’t expect that to happen with "Twilight Zone."
Known for hard-hitting, serious teleplays, Serling told Wallace his half-hour scripts of "Twilight Zone" were not "vehicles for social criticism" and "strictly for entertainment."
Wallace asked him what would become a badly aged question, "For the time being and for the foreseeable future, you've given up on writing anything important for television, right?"
Serling said, "If by 'important' you mean I'm not going to try to delve into current social problems dramatically, you're quite right." Yet viewers of the series know he did.
During the interview, it sounded less like he was taking a break from writing quality television and more like working with the sci-fi milieu made sponsors easier to work with.
Serling believed in television, except corporate interests were holding it back, and over the course of his five seasons with "Twilight Zone," he made it into a powerful art form.