Master World Builders: Rod Serling
Rod Serling had quite an influence on me as a young fan of science-fiction. I was eleven when I first discovered his show The Twilight Zone and became borderline obsessed with it. I scoured the TV listings looking for Twilight Zone reruns and even started clipping out the plot synopses so I would know which episodes I had already seen. I wanted to be Rod Serling; a mysterious, eloquent man in a black suit; an omniscient, foreboding guide to a dimension of imagination.
As an eleven year-old, the last thing I thought about when watching TV shows was who wrote and produced them, so it wasn’t until adulthood that I understood just how amazing Serling was. He wrote seventy of the first one hundred Twilight Zone episodes himself – an absurdly prolific feat – and still managed to deliver poetic dialogue and darkly innovative themes. He had final say on all aspects of production, and his unwillingness to compromise on quality drove him to work 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week.
More amazing still, in retrospect, is the incredible gamble Serling was taking by doing a science-fiction series at all. In 1959, when Twilight Zone began, he had already won three Emmys for writing critically acclaimed ninety-minute dramas, like “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”. He was respected as a television artiste, and science-fiction at the time was considered a trashy, pedestrian genre. Most of the world thought he was selling out.
In the end, Serling was vindicated for following his creative instincts. Twilight Zone was a commercial and critical success that ran for five years, garnering him two additional Emmy wins for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama. Though executive producer Buck Houghton deserves much of the credit for the timeless look and feel of The Twilight Zone, it was Serling’s creative vision that ultimately brought the show to life. His story settings were gritty and recognizable to us but were instilled with a powerful surreality. Viewers got the eerie feeling that at any time, by simply looking into a mirror, boarding a train, or answering a telephone, they could be transported to a place “beyond that which is known to man.” With his thoughtfulness and respect for the genre, Serling elevated science-fiction on television to a full-fledged art form.
Rod Serling was a man’s man; masculine and charismatic, but self-effacing, and with an insecure streak that always pushed him to do better and better work. He had the moral foundation of a small town boy and the unflinching realism of a soldier who won a Bronze Star fighting in the Pacific. He was a fearless opponent of censorship, an engaging college teacher, and a builder of compelling worlds that would stir imaginations for generations to come.
