So was another classic AHP episode: “Lamb To Slaughter”. Dahl and Hitch manage the near impossible: to be suspenseful AND funny at the same time.
Hitchcock’s writers were certainly on a par with TZ’s. AHP dramatized several stories by the late great Stanley Ellin, my favorite being “The Specialty of the House” with Robert Morley.
Lamb Amirstan. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Who’s up for seconds?
Hitchcock had a somewhat sadistic sense of humor, especially when it came to his actors. It may have had something to do with his father, who thought it was a great practical joke to arrange for his son to be arrested and thrown into jail when he was five years old.
Alfred was terrified of policemen for the rest of his life! :eek:
Whaaaaat?!? :eek:
You obviously weren’t watching them correctly. You have to be alert to catch the hint as to what’s eventually going to happen that they give in the first two or three minutes of the show, and then wait to see if your guess was right. 
The best episode ever, and a fantastic performance by Barbara Bel Geddes (“Miss Ellie” on Dallas)!
It was in the top three or four, but I don’t know that it was the best (in the way that “Good Life” was with TZ. 
)
The best bit of acting was when Bel Geddes got told by her scumbag husband that he’s leaving and taking all the money and stuff, but hey! She could keep the baby and maybe he’d send her a few bucks every now and then. Her expression and subsquent performance for the next few minutes is amazing. You can see the moment when she just snaps and loses it. Just amazing acting without saying a word
Many of the original TWZ episodes were simple Aesop fables.
And then you get the Rod Serling epilog lecture to push the point home. Except for the one about not smoking for every second you are awake.
I love the way…
she goes about the rest of the deception so coolly, as though it’s something that happens every day. And the giggle at the end is just the icing on the cake!
The other two episodes that come to mind (other than the one with Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre) are (a) the one where the husband and wife each hire someone to whack the other and (b) the one where one guy kills his brother, and the police nail him with a petal from his boutonniere.
We are working our way through box sets of TZ and waiting for season 5 to show up. I can hardly believe how I was absolutely terrified of this show as a child, even the opening music gave me the creeps. And here it is decades later and I find most of the episodes rather dull - the scary ones still stand out. Most are kind of fun to watch just to get a glimpse of the past, and try to guess the ending.
Y’know what them shows needed? More cats suddenly jumping out at people. THAT’S scary!
So don’t fucking use it.
I did a scan of season 2 (once the show settled in) on IMDb.
29 episodes. 12 I would consider top level for the series, 5 are duds and the other 12 are okay. That’s a pretty good batting average, esp. for an anthology. But towards the end, the numbers wouldn’t be so good.
I noticed that A Hundred Yards Over the Rim and* The Rip Van Winkle Caper* were back-to-back. Both involve time travel (of sorts) in a desert area.
One thing about episodes such as these is that I remember so much about them decades later. I even remember watching the first one at a semi-relative’s house while on a family vacation. We had A&W root beer that night and played foosball.
This is what watching the show as they aired did. Many episodes just haunt you for the rest of your life. Very few episodes of most shows had this effect.
But not too many cats 
I judge a show by the “Rod Serling Standard”. He mentioned in an interview (In The Twilight Zone Companion? A Starlog article?) that he says a show could be considered a success if it had one third great episodes, one third good/acceptible, and one third stinkers. You’re always going to have stinkers. It’s inevitable by the nature of series television.
You evaluate some long running shows and you’ll see many don’t meet that standard. I think ST TOS probably just meets it, by TNG and DS9 exceed it. L&O mothership meets it, L&O CI exceeds it. I’m not sure about the Simpsons. Three’s Company, on the other hand…
Now, the 1986 revival? I think that show is about 50/30/20. It really has some great episodes. I’d put Her Pilgrim Soul against anything in the first run. (Admittedly, I’m a sucker for those kinds of stories, though.)
There were Twilight Zone episodes that haunted me my whole life…“Little Girl Lost” was one that terrified me, and I loved the one, maybe it was called “Printer’s Devil”, where the devil was the typesetter and what the newspaper printed became true, among others. Later looked up the short stories many episodes were based on…so many were so good.
However, while going through an antique store yesterday, I saw one of those 1950’s steam cabinets that had the controls on the outside, and immediately flashed back to the Alfred Hitchcock episode where someone was murdered in one of them. Remembering that this many decades later shows how effective it was.
We live in the post-MADD world; if you’re younger than about 40, you’ve pretty much never known any other world. Not only was drunk driving tolerated to an insane degree as late as 1980, but the further back you go the more it was encouraged. Having parties in the 1950s with gallons of booze and then packing everyone off to their cars was common, with wink-winks about everyone having adventures getting home. Drunk drivers were a staple of humor.
Until drunk driving was socially nullified by the efforts of MADD and others in the 1980s, it wasn’t anything noteworthy. Especially not in a ca.-1960 TV show.
The advantage of AHP was that it had a bigger budget and Hitchcock was involved. No matter what his personal quirks, he was a fine director (he directed 17 episodes, including “Lamp to the Slaughter” and the delightful “Back for Christmas”). While he wasn’t a writer, he did know a good script, too.
TZ was definitely uneven and far too dependent on the “Jar of Tang” twist. Too often, they were twists for the sake of a twist; the one at the end of “All the Time in the World” is just plain nasty, and others seem obvious to a modern eye (“Eye of Beholder”).
Probably the worst was the one where there’s an problem with a space probe that lands – after a couple of hours out – on a planet. The big twist is that they had returned to Earth, which should have been their very first thought. Where else could they be?
There was too much “life’s a bitch and then you die – and death is a bitch, too” throughout the show.
Not that there weren’t excellent episodes. “Nick of Time” is brilliant. So is “It’s a GOOD Life” and “To Serve Man.” “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is great, but it wasn’t made for the show (it was a French short film that Serling bought to fill the schedule).
I’ve seen more disappointing TZ episodes than disappointing AHP ones.
I’m not going to argue every episode is a classic but its batting average is really high and Serling was a genius at writing. Sometimes it’s a little on the nose but TV was a young medium at the time; its cliches hadn’t been invented yet, for the most part. In fact TWZ suffers from the “Casablanca Effect” where it gets penalized by modern viewers for the cliches it itself invented or made popular.
I would submit (natch) that the episodes “Number 12 Looks Just like you” and “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” are smarter commentary on current day America than 90% of the rest of TV.
Yeah–I get that. And humor is just fine. But that episode isn’t trying to be funny, Serling delivers a preachy and annoying moral at the end. It’s clearly an anti-drunk driving “message” show, even without the long-winded speech at the end. Which makes the moral “Drive drunk and end up as a kid’s toy” so freakin’ weird.
There was another show–I don’t think it was AHP, but it could have been–where a guy drunkenly runs someone over (maybe) and slowly goes mad trying to decide whether or not he actually did hit anyone. That worked and it was from the same era. There’s a TZ where a guy hit-and-runs a kid and his car becomes haunted until the guy turns himself in. That worked.
In a story, the effect needs to follow from the cause. If you do a story about “Stealing newspapers is wrong”, the moral can’t be “…because if you steal newspapers, squirrels start eating bananas and now there’s a banana shortage.”. It’s like Serling rolled on a random outcome table: Starting premise “Drunk Driving=Bad”. Roll 2 10 sided dice, check table. Result: “Therefore if you drive drunk, you’ll become pets of a giant alien girl.” There’s absolutely no connection between the drunk driving and the alien abduction and being sober wouldn’t have changed things.
No laughs, no irony, just stupid random outcome made stupider by the closing, o-so-sincere moralizing in the finale.
"The moral of what you’ve just seen is clear. If you drink, don’t drive. And if your wife has had a couple, she shouldn’t drive, either.
You might both just wake up with a whale of a headache in a deserted village in the Twilight Zone." (actual quote–I just transcribed it).
BTW–the ep in question is “Stopover in a Small Town”
As an aside, when binge watching, this episode is just another of the weird fetish Serling had for people being terrorized by giants. The “Five Characters In Search of Good Dialogue” one where…surprise! they’re toys, this one, the one with the agoraphobic woman and the guy who are terrorized by a giant alien with an eyeball for a head (that turns out to be just a balloon made by tiny aliens who are terrorized by the giant humans), the one where the rocket captain and the crazy first mate crash on an (?) asteroid and the crazy first mate discovers a near-microscopic civilization and starts stomping on it to terrorize them until giant aliens show up and squish him, etc. And there’s at least a few more. What’s up with that?
It’s a little-known fact, one that was covered up by clever camerawork, but Rod Serling was only seven and a half inches tall.