I’ve not heard that before, yet no doubt. “The Monsters are Due On Maple Street”, which I read his screenplay of in some Junior High class, is like something you dream of and write ASAP.
And you can easily tell which ones those are, because every character talks like…Rod Serling.
Once you notice it, it will ruin the episode. 
In terms of the original show they did a few of those. But Serling was simultaneously the executive producer and head writer. He wrote (or co-wrote) 96 of 156 original episodes and his scripts tended to lean into some general tropes. He liked morality tales (mimicking his own values) and he loved “sting-in-the-tail” endings where often the immoral got their just desserts. See for example one of my favorite episodes by Serling - The Masks. Some of his stuff works, some doesn’t (by the way I also actually sorta like Five Characters in Search of an Exit - when I was twelve I thought the ending was creepy and sad, not stupid 
). But he certainly wasn’t a genius writer and as noted above he churned those things out to meet the deadlines of writing for the massive seasons common in that era. For Serling quantity had a quality all of its own - you try churning out 36 quality episodes a season 
.
First time I watched it I liked it, but it repeats so much I can see the weaknesses.
Some epis just dont stand re-watching.
I don’t recall a thread where my mileage has varied so much from everyone else’s. The way some folks are picking apart the science, character motivations, etc. of the eps is making me wonder if make believe is not really their thing. However, I do agree with some of the nominations for the worst so I’ll concentrate on that.
Least worthy of praise:
The Bewitching Pool
I Sing the Body Electric
Mute
The ones with Jack Klugman (I like JK but hated his eps)
Four O’Clock (obsessive, hate filled busybody spies on his neighbors and messes with their lives)
Any of the ones that start off with whimsical music, signaling it’s a lighthearted ep. I don’t like lighthearted in my TZ eps.
The Howling Man Oddly enough, though this is one of my least favorites, one of my favorite horror movies - I Trapped the Devil- is based on the same premise.
The one where the monks in the remote monastery have the devil locked in a room: I never could get past the notion where he’d be locked in a room, yet the monks don’t spend all their waking hours entombing him under a mountain of rock. Why would there even be the ability for the door to be opened in the first place? That he could sweet talk some stranger into letting him out is change channels dumb.
Tsk. It’s not an engineering exercise, it’s a faith exercise. You MUST give the Devil the opportunity to be released to properly test of the limits of the human spirit .
Actually, if the stranger hung around for a while, and noticed that the devil didn’t need to be fed, that would be a clue. But if the monks fed him for some reason, that would be another unforgivable layer of dumb.
Was I the only kid who watched this episode and assumed that the Devil could leave at any point if he cared to? But it was important to him that he be able to convince an otherwise innocent person to freely choose to let him (evil) out. The whole situation was staged for that one purpose.
The fix was in, If the devil wasn’t loose, the Church had no hold over anyone, Big Religion needs the devil. They wanted him to escape.
Hey, how did they get the devil into that room to begin with? That’s not the first story I’ve seen where some ancient people manage to trap an evil entity. That part of the story is always vague.
Indeed, god fixed his canon so that it would be so. Without god, he who is supposed to have chosen for all of us when he separated the waters of the deep from the waters of heaven and brought forth day and night, there is no evil in this world.
For some reason evil entities always seem to have a problem transiting thresholds unassisted.
Wasn’t June Furay (the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel) also dubbed for the little girl’s voice? Annoyed me a lot, and I hated this episode as a kid, as well.
The root cause of that family’s problems was the selfishness of the parents. They wouldn’t have been any happier if they’d stayed married. Divorce may have been the better option.
In The Twilight Zone Companion, Hamner admitted that he had just moved to CA from ‘Walton’s Mountain’, and may have been heavy-handed with his message.
Just one more flaw in a lousy episode.
I think I remember reading that-- but I don’t remember the reason.
Ah, found it.
The actress playing the girl was Mary Badham, also of To Kill a Mockingbird. All the audio for the outdoor scenes turned out to be unusable because of planes flying overhead, so it had to be redubbed, in a studio, by actors watching the show on a screen, not necessarily responding to other actors-- and Foray was apparently the only trained voice actor.
When the cast was called back to redub the episode, Mary Badham was not available, so the producers decided to use a voice actress to imitate Badham specifically, hoping they would just have to dub the outdoor scenes, instead of hiring a girl to dub all of Badham’s lines.
I guess knowing that might not work out, and they might need to dub the whole thing, an adult actress could put in the hours, while a child was legally limited, and they were under a time crunch.
Also, Foray had a track record with TW-- she’d been the voice of Talky Tina in a very successful episode.
Probably not, but maybe if the outdoor scenes had not been so poorly executed, with such poor performances due to the redubbing, the episode would play better.
There’s a project for someone: see if the original footage still exists, and if the sound can be cleaned up with 2025 technology.
Here’s a clip of an outdoor scene from “The Bewitchin’ Pool” that shows how awful the acting is just due to the dubbing.
My favorite TZ episode is one of his, A Game of Pool. SyFy cuts a bit of the dialog when they show that ep, and it pisses me off.
Thank you for reminding me about that, I went ahead and ordered another copy- I had lent mine out decades ago.
A good one, I concur.