When you’re a kid everything looks novel and original even if they weren’t for the time. And, if the episode was actually groundbreaking in any way, watching them now they look stale because so many people have copied them since.
I loved the old Twilight Zones, and still do. As a kid I thought of them all as simply stories with twist endings but seeing them as a grown up I realize that they’re much more than that. The “Eye of the Beholder” episode, for instance (the one with Donna Douglas as the pretty girl in a world of people with twisted faces) actually has a lot of dialogue about why her crime is being beautiful – the government in that world values conformity, and wants everyone to be the same. Her crime isn’t being beautiful, it’s being different. And that’s the message Rod Serling was selling. Ugliness isn’t bad, but forced conformity is.
Serling could fill a half hour with dialogue, usually compelling. But he didn’t write all the Twilight Zone episodes. A lot of them were written by Charles Beaumont and the legendary Richard Matheson. And a lot of the stories were adaptations of short stories from the science fiction pulps (which Beaumont and Matheson frequently published in). In the 1950s the short-short with a twist ending was a very common and popular form in the pulps, so it’s not surprising that the Twilight Zone episodes came out that way. “To Serve Man” started out as a Damon Knight short story from the magazine Galaxy in 1950. The aliens looked vert much like pigs in the story, but in the Twilight Zone the Kanamit are very tall guys with huge bald heads (the main one played by Richard Kiel, who went to to play “Jaws” in the James Bond films)
Yeah, I just suddenly realized while reading that, that Harry Bates’ Farewell to the Master would have been a natural for Twilight Zone if it hadn’t already been made (without the full twist) into a feature film. I don’t know if it would have been a good adaptation, it would doubtless have jettisoned a lot of plot unless they did it as one of those extended episodes like Of Late I Think of Cliffordville. But it would have fit the mold perfectly.