...bwha? The Original Twilight Zone is generally awful. Th' hell??

Cafe Society
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Let’s be clear: there are some stunning episodes of Twilight Zone–maybe 3 or 4 per season and “It’s A GOOD Life” is possibly the best single episode of an anthology show ever. But…

I just watched all of seasons 3-5 of the Twilight Zone and maybe 4 seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I’d seen occasional episodes of each, but not full seasons.

While the AHPs only have maybe one really magnificent episode per season (“Lamb To Slaughter”, “Bang, You’re Dead”, “The Schartz-Metterklume Method”, the one with Peter Lorre as a gambler and Steve McQueen as a patsy, etc.), the acting’s consistently better, the camera direction was far better than TZ’s.

Meanwhile, good God…the Rod Stirling’s preachy, overwrought, overwritten narratives are terrible. So many dumb morality tales*, bloated and terrible dialogue (“Five Characters in Search Of An Exit” sounds like a Goth teen who’d seen “Waiting For Godot” and only got the pretentiousness) and just dumb plots (there’s at least two or three where the characters are toys or treated as toys by giants) just permeate the meat-and-potatoes episodes. “In Praise of Pip” is such an overwrought melodrama and Jack Klugman is so over-the-top that it’s somewhere between cringeworthy and campy.

This isn’t a case of “Eh…“I Love Lucy” or “Seinfeld” are old-fashioned because everyone else has done it.” Alfred Hitchcock Presents is contemporary with Twilight Zone and does not have these problems.

And AHP consistently got more from their actors. For example AHP and TZ both did comedy episodes (several). In one case, TZ got Carol Burnett and AHP got Dick Van Dyke–very comparable comedians at similar stages in their careers and similar styles. TZ got a terrible performance out of Burnett and AHP had some laugh-out-loud funny moments with Van Dyke.

Hell, AHP had Dick York in a half-dozen episodes and…who knew? He can do comedy, be sinister as fuck and be a mild-mannered Caspar Milquetoast type. I didn’t know he could do more than Angry Darrin the one-note-wonder. He was really allowed to exercise his range. Ditto with the guy who’d go onto play “Ol’ Inspector Luger” on Barney Miller. He appeared in a bunch of AHPs and showed a wonderful range that I didn’t know he possessed, and in the one (two?) TZs, he was in, he was flat and very wooden.

(Also, Stirling really, really loves Westerns and The Civil War. He must have done 15-20 episodes in that setting (including a ghastly/treacly one where the Civil War dead march past some lady’s house and the final dead guy is Abe Lincoln).)

I was really surprised at this. I’d thought TZ was the gold standard of anthology TV, but AHP is (to me, at least) far better overall, even if it doesn’t hit as many perfect home runs as TZ.

Anyone else have this reaction?

*Mostly with broken Aesops. “Don’t Drive Drunk or you’ll end up as dolls for a giant alien girl” doesn’t actually show a consequence from drunk driving. (Stirling actually says this is the moral)

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We’ve discussed this before.

We love it because we remember its best episodes. Tons of terrible ones, too.

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Rod Serling.

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When you compare the best Twilight Zone episodes with some of the weaker ones, the weaker ones stand out. However, the worst Twilight Zone, even The Bard, is still much better than most television.

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One of the problems with Twilight Zone was its incredible shrinking budget. CBS pressured Rod Serling to produce episodes on videotape, which was far more crude than film at the time. That was so unsuccessful they let him switch back, but it left a bunch of episodes that, 50 years later, simply don’t look or feel right.

In addition, as has been discussed to death with Star Trek, shrinking budgets mean lower production values, less polishing for scripts, more rushing to get scenes in one take, and general shortcuts. That’s why a number of episodes come off more like a one-act play produced by a college experimental theater.

Nevertheless, Serling reached high. When you do that, your successes are great and your failures are magnified.

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:smack: I hate my spell-checker.

So very, very much, I hate it. :smack:

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But when you compare the (say) 25 average episodes/season (out of 30-some episodes) of TZ and the 25 average episodes/season of AHP, the AHP ones are consistently better.

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Personally, I think that when the arts have a wider range of quality, with higher highs and lower lows, that’s a good thing, especially for unconnected works like the episodes of an anthology show. The bad ones, we can just go ahead and forget, and so their low quality hardly matters, while we keep and treasure the good ones, so their good quality does.

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Don’t take this the wrong way…seriously I don’t mean it. I just love TZ so

Mr. Garrison: “You die! You go to Hell!”

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In Praise Of Pip is one of my favourite episodes.

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Chronos: Excluding “It’s A Good Life” (which is in a class of it’s own), while TZ has more stellar episodes per season, the level of great episodes are about equal–That “gambler” episode of AHP (“Man from the South”) is as good or better than, say, “Terror at 20,000 Feet” (a great ep, excluding the terrible costume**). Or “Bang! You’re Dead”** is as good as “The Shelter”

It’s the average episodes where TZ fails. An average ep–not great, not terrible–of TZ is way below the average ep of AHP (IMO). And the more Serling preaches/moralizes, the worse the episode is. (That terrible one where black clouds cover any place where there’s hatred, for instance is just stinky beyond belief)
*The episode is the one where Peter Lorre bullies Steve McQueen into a bet; if McQueen’s lighter lights 10 times in a row without fail, Lorre will give McQueen his brand new car. But if it doesn’t, Lorre gets to chop off McQueen’s finger.

**Which I don’t really blame them for.

***Stunning episode, and possibly the most suspensful half-hour ever. A little kid (maybe 4) is into playing cowboys and keeps pointing his gun at people and shouting “Bang! You’re dead” and people play along because this is the '50s and it’s ok. But when the kid’s uncle gets back from Korea (with a detour in Africa) things go awry. Uncle tells the kid that he can get a present from his suitcase. He intends for the kid to find a shrunken head or something, but instead, the kid finds Uncle’s service revolver and a bullet. The last 2/3d of the episode has the kid wandering around with a gun with a single bullet and pointing it at people while mom, dad and uncle frantically search for the kid. The suspense is breathtaking. And it’s not preachy.

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NM

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No love for the cornfield?

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I’m hoping that there’s a grain of truth to the idea that you could be a heinous criminal, and the hell you’re consigned to consists of living in a luxurious hotel suite forever.

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Well, I’m normally not one to pile on…but…

I say we declare the OP and those who agree with them obsolete.

No, like Dale Sams and his quote, I don’t really mean that…but at the same time, I’m one of those people who is of the belief that there was never necessarily a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, just that some ideas were executed better than others.

BTW, and it’s purely opinion, but tape quality/being video taped versus filmed shouldn’t be held against at least two of the episodes, “Long Distance Call” (which also featured Bill “It’s A Good Life” Mumy) and “Twenty Two”.

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Ok, I normally don’t double-post, but when I do…

…it’s to tip my hat to things/episodes/what have ya I thought I was the only one to appreciate. As someone who has considered changing her title to ‘Rocky Valentine’s Accomplice’ at another board, I salute you Son Of A Rich! :cool:

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I’ve seen this episode. It is quite good. The little boy, of course, was Billy Mumy, who also played little Anthony Fremont in It’s a Good Life. The girl in the supermarket was played by Marta Kristen, who later went on to play Judy Robinson, big sister to Mumy’s Will Robinson on Lost in Space.

Mumy tells the anecdote that when he was on the set with Alfred Hitchcock, he kept missing his mark and Hitchcock grew impatient with him. According to Mumy, the director told him, “Young man, if you don’t start hitting your mark, I shall nail your foot to the floor until the blood flows like milk.”

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Agreed, “Long Distance Call” is scary…but damn ugly.

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I never saw many of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes because the ones I did see bored me so much I switched channels halfway through.

The same cannot be said of The Twilight Zone. There are episodes I’ve seen dozens of times and I still watch them because they are entertaining.

So, Twilight Zone wins. Case closed. Although Hitch’s jabs at his sponsors were cuter than Rod’s pontifications, I’ll give you that.

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Original short story by the great Roald Dahl :). I was tickled when I discovered some years back that he wasn’t just a great youth author, but also had written some pretty twisted adult fiction as well. He also was Rod Serling at the same time as Rod Serling.