There was a trend in the early 1960s to expand successful, popular half-hour shows to an hour. CBS did this is with T-Zone, Hitch and Gunsmoke, and maybe others I don’t recall. It worked for Gunsmoke, which went on for another decade, but not so much for Hitch and T-Zone, which were much better off in the shorter form, not that there weren’t some good episodes of each here and there. Rod Serling was very much against it but was overruled.
Yeah, the hour long episodes didn’t work out well. I’m sure they didn’t look for better stories to fill the hour with, just told the writers not to do too much editing. Even The Outer Limits which managed a few decent hour long episodes usually ran too long and didn’t have enough content to fill an hour.
I’ll defend the eighties version, but nothing that came later. (Except the "Good Life sequel.)
Yeah, the 80s version had some good episodes - “Wordplay,” “To See the Invisible Man,” etc.
It’s just Sturgeon’s Law in effect: 90% of everything is crap. Thirty years from now all but one or two episodes of the recent editions of The Twilight Zone will be forgotten except by the geekiest of fans.
For that matter, 10% of the original Twilight Zone episodes would be 16 episodes. How many of us can remember clearly 16 of the original episodes?
Sure, Shatner episodes got a boost because of Shatner’s career. But do you remember the episode he was in that didn’t take place on an airplane?
The non-geek may remember the one with the cookbook, the one with the guy whose glasses broke, and a few more where someone starred who went on to some degree of popularity, but most of the episodes resembled each other (a small town, a train, back through the time barrier, etc.) but most of the original episodes fall easily under Sturgeon’s Law.
Yeah, the one with the little devil-headed fortune teller.
Too late to edit:
My sister recorded an episode from this year’s marathon, because the last time she mentioned it I had absolutely no memory of it. It was called The Ring-a-Ding Girl about an actress that collected rings, and how one ring led her into the Twilight Zone. It was a “nice” one. Sad, but with an overall good outcome. It was one of the 30 minute early season shows, so I likely did see it as a kid.
I vaguely remember that one, now that I read the summary
About remembering the Twilight Zone episodes, most of us (Geeky, and some less so) are well served by the fact that they showed up frequently as re-runs on local stations, and later on early cable services, before being available via streaming options and the like. Thus, a number of us have repeatedly seen episodes in ways that would not have been imaginable during the initial run.
And I’d say I’d remember (even with overlaps) a solid 20-30% of the episodes general themes and twists, but I’m in the more geeky than not category.
That there’s a 5th dimension, beyond which is known to man…
I just saw one of my favorites: ‘Two’ - Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery. More of a nice post-apocalyptic romance. I learned a male soldier knocking a female soldier unconscious and declining to sexually ravage her could possibly happen.
Yes, the 80s revival was great! It benefited from flexibility in length. You could have a 10 minute, a 15 minute, and a thirty minute story in the same episode.
Even Serling said that he thought if a show could do 1/3 great episodes, 1/3 fair, and 1/3 crap, it was a great show. I think that fits the original TZ. I happen to think the 80s version’s ratio was more like 40% great, 40% good, and 20% crap.
He didn’t just “knock her unconscious.” He decked her with a good blow to the jaw.
I think the 80s version is the best. They adapted some excellent stories and didn’t have to fit them into a set time slot (until they went into syndication).
The original is too often twists for twists sake.
In the original series many of the episodes stunk. The writing and/or direction in those was awful. It was early television, I think the budget was tight, so it was a good learning experience for actors and the rest of the crew, and it was new and different enough in the vast wasteland that critics enjoyed it. But critics often praise new and different while going easy on broader qualities. I don’t know how the performances of rising stars like Redford and Shatner were reviewed at the time, but some of their performances are better remembered than the stories themselves, as are some episodes that relied on veteran actors to carry the show. I think Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre that while Twilight Zone receives much acclaim from critics The Outer Limits episodes were better liked by the general public. The Outer Limits took similar themes but evoked more emotion in the story itself. The characters whether human or not were more relatable than the one dimensional characters on the Zone.
Yes. I know. I saw that.
When I was a kid my mind was completely blown by the episodes where two crashed astronauts turn out to be Adam and Eve and one where they think they are on another planet but were just in the Arizona desert. I had no idea that even then those were already hacky cliches in sci Fi. They worked on me completely.
Since this thread is drifting into gushing about the show, I read my copy of The Twilight Zone Companion until it fell apart and I had to get a new copy. I love this show. My favorite episode is “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”. My second is probably “Midnight Sun”. I always loved that when WPIX did their TZ Marathons they would play that episode at Midnight.
I learned that before Larry Tate ever met Samantha he was a widow with three kids and an electric grandmother. Maybe that explains why he never even noticed that Sam was doing all sorts of weird stuff.
I loved The Outer Limits. Really loved it. I liked most of the early TZs, but especially when the hour long episodes began I lost a lot of interest. There was one where two kids would dive into a swimming pool and end up in a swimming hole? in another place? It was a clunky sentimental episode, but what really spoiled it for me was the little girl character’s voice was dubbed by June Foray who was the original voice of Rocky the Squirrel and was easily recognizable as such. Not good.