Thanks, Rod

Hi. Settle in; this is a long one, but the subject deserves the attention.

Fifty years ago on this date, Rod Serling led TV viewers into the Twilight Zone for the very first time.

Unlocking the door to that realm wasn’t easy, even with his formidable key of imagination. The odds were against the show succeeding beyond its first season. (These days, it would be canned after two weeks much less 26.) Even with Serling’s Emmy Award-winning reputation for creating some of TV’s finest hours, CBS, the network, the public – they just didn’t quite get what he wanted to do. Then, Serling’s “The Time Element” was broadcast as part of Desilu Playhouse. It could been a TZ story. The audience response to it was highly positive, and that helped Serling open the door to five years of wonder (and, for him, brain-breaking work writing most of the show’s stories and overseeing the whole universe).

Anyway, there was a great interview between Serling and Mike Wallace from the night before TZ premiered. Bear in mind that, at this point, Serling had written some of the greatest teleplays in what would become The Golden Age of Television. He was considered an "artist". (Many TV writers were at the time; times change, huh?)

The full text is transcribed at RodSerling.com, and you can actually see it on the TZ DVD box sets, but I want to share these particular excerpts:

***

Mike Wallace: Herbert Brodkin, a TV producer associated with some of your earlier plays, has said this about you. He said, "Rod is either going to stay commercial or become a discerning artist, but not both." Now, has it ever occurred to you that you're selling yourself short by taking on a series which, by your own admission, is going to be a series primarily designed to entertain?

Rod Serling: ... I presume Herb means that inherently you cannot be commercial and artistic. You cannot be commercial and quality. You cannot be commercial concurrent with, have a preoccupation with the level of storytelling that you want to achieve. And this I have to reject. ... I don't think calling something commercial tags it with a kind of an odious suggestion that it stinks, that it's something raunchy to be ashamed of. ... The essence of my argument, Mike, is that as long as you are not ashamed of anything you write if you're a writer, as long as you're not ashamed of anything you perform if you're an actor, and I'm not ashamed of doing a television series. ...  I think innate in what Herb says is the suggestion made by many people that you can't have public acceptance and still be artistic. And, as I said, I have to reject that.

***

Did you get that? You can be an artist AND make a buck without "selling out." Serling proved it.

In doing so, he didn’t just raise the bar; he created an altogether different one that others would try – are STILL trying -- to reach. Very few have. Even Serling missed it a few times with some clunkers.  (“Cavendish is Coming”, anyone?) But he believed in what he was doing, he didn’t underestimate the intelligence of his audience, and he had their respect and affection right up to his sudden death in 1975. TZ earned him a decent five-year run and, although he didn’t know it at the time, one of the highest pedestals in pop culture history.

But most relevant to our discussion here: Rod Serling inspired boobs like me to create and share their own pocket universes with a mass audience on the Internet. Well, I know my audience doesn’t have much mass, but I still don’t underestimate your intelligence. (Especially if you actually listen to the show.)

I’ll close with a Serling closing from my all-time favorite TZ, “Walking Distance”. Whenever Martin Sloan goes back to the Homewood of his youth, I go back to the Wildwood, NJ, of mine -- and I still can't read this without choking up.

***

“Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.”

***

This may be the first thing I ever heard on TV that made me say to myself, “I wish I’d written that.”

I still do.

Thanks, Rod. I won't even come close to "Walking Distance", but I’ll keep walking anyway. I'm enjoying the trip too much to stop now.

-- L.