An entire generation came to know Rod Serling through syndicated reruns of The Twilight Zone, and specifically through the annual marathons that local UHF stations broadcast throughout the '80s on Halloween, Friday the 13th, or New Year's. In single doses, The Twilight Zone gives viewers a little eerie drama with a pleasant tingle at the end, but taken in bulk, it has the power to knock them off their moorings, pushing them to see irony in every uncanny twist—on the show, and in real life. Serling had penned plenty of hard-hitting, socially relevant television dramas by the time The Twilight Zone premièred in 1959, but the half-hour science-fiction format best suited his florid prose and dime-store philosophy. His obsessions prop up stories like "Time Enough At Last," which is a classic not just because of its O. Henry ending, but because when meek bookworm Burgess Meredith steps out onto a depopulated, post-apocalyptic city street, his reaction encompasses all the loneliness—and paradoxical yearning for loneliness—that was the show's recurring theme.
The new "definitive" DVD box set of Twilight Zone's first season includes a copy of Marc Scott Zicree's essential book The Twilight Zone Companion, plus newly recorded commentary tracks, archival interviews conducted by Zicree, and excerpts from a Serling college lecture series. Alongside such all-time favorites as "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" and "The Hitch-Hiker," the first season encompasses more sublime episodes like "A Stop At Willoughby," in which a neurotic executive escapes in his mind to an idyllic turn-of-the-century small town, and "The Lonely," in which an isolated prisoner of the future has to choose between his robot companion and a full pardon. Just about every other episode of The Twilight Zone's first season begins with a character in a place that looks vaguely recognizable yet essentially unfamiliar, what Serling describes as "places of non-activity that should have activity."
Along with the original Twilight Zone, Image Entertainment and CBS are releasing the lesser-seen and largely underrated 1985-86 version of the show, which relied too much on weird shocks and cheap gags, but also had its share of excellent segments, directed by the likes of Wes Craven, Joe Dante, Martha Coolidge, Peter Medak, and William Friedkin. The 1980s' Twilight Zone lacked Serling's unified sensibility, though more than one episode deals with post-Vietnam anxiety, like Friedkin's riveting "Nightcrawlers," but the stories were lively and well-acted, and they provided a bittersweet shot of pessimism in the thick of the go-go Reagan years. The DVD set adds a strong slate of commentary tracks, including a handful by creative consultant and contributing writer Harlan Ellison, who's typically frank in his dismissal of incompetent directors and selfish actors.
But even Ellison can't top Serling, who in his mid-'70s lectures invites students to rip apart the old shows, insisting that most of his Twilight Zone work has aged like bread. ("It's got bacteria on it.") It's left to Zicree's book, and commentaries by cast members like Kevin McCarthy and Earl Holliman, to champion Serling's understanding of Eisenhower-era alienation. In his preoccupation with how the normal could shift and become abnormal, Serling turned small towns, suburban homes, and city streets into staging grounds for the nightmares his audience was already having.