Twilight Zone sucks - spoilers for some episodes

Cafe Society
1

Ok, so I expected it to be hokey, I expected it to be dated, I expected the all-white cast. No biggie.

I didn’t expect it to suck so bad. I know it’s my jaded eyes looking at it, but the sheer haste people go to extremes befuddles me.

" * I shot an arrow into the air" * - they land on an asteroid and nobody knows where they are. It’s not twenty-four hours before the crew is practically eating each other. The officer has no control whatsoever of the situation and the insubordination of his junior Corey made my jaw drop. At one point he grabs the Colonel’s hand to stop him giving water to one of their injured. And these are not average Joes; these are astronauts, the most highly trained people on the planet. That whole thing in the movie about “Houston, we have a problem”? That was not exaggerated! They really are that calm!

And “The Lonely” - guy gets immortality and is bored with it lickety-split. So he tries to off himself. At one point he mentions he’s been in 14 accidents. If you give him one day per accident, he’s bored of his life in FOURTEEN DAYS! It would take me at least a couple of hundred years to be bored of immortality.

“Walking Distance”, rated as the ninth best episode ever. If this is the height of this show, then this show sucks eggs. He practically starts attacking his dad, without any thought that maybe, just maybe, his dad is going to be freaked out by a 40 YO man coming to the door and yelling about being his son, and then he chases his younger self down, nearly getting himself killed, because he needs to tell the kid to “enjoy these days”.

How about “Time Enough at Last”? The anti-reading sentiment of this story is obvious. Contrary to popular belief, we readers can function in real life. I even go to work and go the whole day without picking up a book. Granted, I read every day, but I can survive. And they could have made him sympathetic so easily. Instead they make him into a crazy man who flagrantly disobeys his boss and reads at the teller station, making wrong change on more than one occasion. And, when the world ends, he decides to sit on the library steps to read. No food or shelter. He’s a reader! He should be intelligent, or at least well-read enough to know about survival. He read all those classics, didn’t he read Robinson Crusoe?

Yeah. I’m probably attacking a sacred cow (says the lapsed Hindu, ha-ha). And don’t get me wrong, I expected it to be dated and hokey. I just didn’t think it would be this bad. A show I thought I kind of liked, no less.

2

I still love How to Serve Humans.

3

I thought I had seen most episodes, but the only one that sounds familiar is Enough To Last. I think that was more anti-obsession than anti-reading. I loved the ones with the Sound of Music guy hounded to death by household machines, the one with Telly Savalis killed by a taking doll, and the one with Billy Mumy as an eight year-old monster.

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Quite a twist, huh? Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

5

I love the show, but some of the episodes hadn’t aged well. Some of the episodes were ‘stinkers’ to begin with. And some of the episodes had the same twists at the end, (It was Earth all along, you damn dirty apes!)

For it’s time, however, it really set the stage for other Sci-fi and Fantasy stories.

6

I always felt the episode was overrated. There were plenty of ways he could have survived, and his fate was just gratuitously nasty.

I’m not a fan of “Eye of Beholder,” though it’s probably lost most of its impact over time. But it’s blatantly obvious what’s going on when you notice the camera work: no one’s face is ever shown until the end.

I also agree that “I Shot an Arrow” is just plain bad. They’re in space for no time at all; where else could they have been except for Earth?

The sentiment behind “A Stop in Willoughby” is repulsive: the way to be happy is through suicide.

“The Howling Man” – about the man imprisoned by monks – is stupid and obvious and it’s just a soggy religious fantasy.

Not that there aren’t some good, and even great episodes, but there were plenty of duds.

7

It’s funny, I just started watching TTZ instantly on Netflix (as did you, I assume) and I had pretty much the opposite reaction. I was expecting it to be hokey and cheesey, but was surprised at the quality of the story-writing, acting, and production. I think it holds up remarkably well. The writers on the show came up with good, original stories for each episode, and each episode needed a new cast and different sets (although I have noticed some of the sets being reused). Some episodes are stronger/weaker than others, and I actually more or less agree with what you say about We shot an arrow into the air and The Lonely, but taken as a whole I think the series is fantastic.

Some of my favorite episodes: The Invaders, in which a woman living in a rustic farmhouse is terrorized by tiny beings from another planet. The special effects are laughable, but the entire episode is tight and suspenseful, despite not a single word being said until the last minute.

The Big Tall Wish: A good treatment of the “wishes come true if you really believe” theme. A break from the “white actors only” rule you mentioned.

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IIRC, that episode has no lines and only one person in it. I remember watching it, not being able to put my finger on who the actress was. It wasn’t until the end when she screamed and I finally got to hear her voice that I figured it out. Agnes Moorehead/Endora From Bewtiched.

9

I was completely unsurprised when I found out Planet of the Apes was written by Rod Serling.

In defense of the show, it’s hard to tell a truly mind-blowing story in half an hour. The characters were grotesque caricatures, so that things would proceed so quickly.

And I think many of them weren’t meant to have a BIG SOCIAL MESSAGE - in fact, I think a lot of sci-fi suffers from feeling the need to teach the audience an IMPORTANT LESSON. I think a lot of the episodes are meant to just leave you slightly creeped out (and that took a lot less creeping 50 years ago), and maybe thinking “sure sucks for that guy, huh?”

Having said all that, I kind of agree with you. Some of stuff is just eye-rolling.

10

bup, if they had just thrown in a line that said “It’s been six months since…” whatever catastrophic event occured. It would have at least made me feel better. I mean, they land on an asteroid (so they think) with earth-levels of air! That is an amazing discovery! But they are the worst trained astronauts ever. The average army grunt (no offense to army grunts) has more discipline than that.

I’ll try a few more, I guess. Maybe some of the ones referenced in this thread. The Invaders, maybe, and Eye of the beholder. And maybe the talking doll. Talking dolls always creep me out.

I feel like it’s no wonder sci-fi has always been a marginalized genre, if this is the kind of quality stuff it started out with.

11

‘Five Characters in Search of an Exit’ & ‘A Penny for Your Thoughts’ were good ones IMHO.

12

I watched Twilight Zone as a kid, and loved it. Still do. In part it’s because it proved that good science fiction and fantasy isn’t a product of special effects — they were able to do a lot with a little.

Some episodes were pretty dumb, a thing I realized evebn as a kid. People on asteroids with earth-strength gravity? People who travel into space and don’t know where they are?
On the other hand, there were plenty of good and thoughtful episodes. Some of the best were straight adaptations of SF short stories published in the pulps – “To Serve Man” was a Damon Knight story. "I Sing the Body Electric’ was Ray Bradbury. “It’s a Good Life” was Jerome Bixby. Lots of the others were scripted by Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were being published at the time.
Matheson’s Steel was good, and was recently the basis for a movie. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is a classic. There are plenty of others that worked well, too.

A lot of them were really social commentary. Everybody remembers the pig-faced doctors from “Eye of the Beholder”, but when you watch it again, it’s really about conformity and repression/. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is about irrationality and hysteria.

The fantasy was straight, and often pretty god. “What You Need” is based on a Henry Kuttner/Catherine L. Moore story. “A Passage for Trum[pet” was pretty slick. “Penny for your thoughts” was cute.
I don’t think it’s aged badly at all. Rod Serling could spin a helluva story to fill 30 minutes. Pe0ople can learn a lot from his scripting.

13

I love the old pulp magazines from the inter-war years. Science fiction as well as detective, war, adventure, etc. It was written to enjoyed, not to carry big messages. Pulp fiction was full of Chinese pirates and Martian Invaders and shrunken heads, and hard-bitten broads, and everything that promised that the world was an exiting place. I think Rod Serling wanted to co-opt all that for its popular appeal, but, like all pseudo-intellectuals, he had to show that he felt himself above it all.

Killer orangutangs are cool because, hey - killer orangutangs! If that was good enough for Edgar Allen Poe, who the Hell was Rod Serling think such things should really be better serving the purpose of Higher Moral Instruction?

14

You have to remember that 1) many of the episodes are just pulp sci-fi stories and 2) a lot of the things we think of as cliches today are so because of those stories. If you read through the synopses of all The Outer Limits episodes you’ll see a lot of the same themes repeated (they seemed very fond of “…and then the protagonists accidentally doomed the Earth” stories), and I think any sci-fi editor from any point from about 1930 onward would complain about receiving an endless stream of short stories with an “Adam and Eve” twist (best lampshaded by Alan Moore in *Futureshocks *where the survivors of a global catastrophe are “Adam and Mavis”) or the aforementioned “it was Earth all along”. You just have to appreciate the good stories where they happen and try not to mind the stinkers.

15

No idea what this means.

16

Serling was constrained by the medium within which he was working. The FCC, the networks, and the sponsors would not have tolerated actual pulp style stories. Remember that it was a time of what we would consider heavy censorship. Some of what he slipped by impresses me to this day.

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I’m heavily biased in that I grew up watching this show and consider it a landmark of televised speculative fiction, so I won’t go into detail trying to defend its every foible. But I do maintain that Serling, Matheson, and Beaumont (the principal writers) were very good (some might say great) writers. I think The Twilight Zone suffers somewhat from what one might call the Citizen Kane Effect; there are many things that it did first (especially for television) or best, and the subsequent promulgation of those themes, storylines, and morals through time has made the original seem cliché or mundane.

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While it’;s true that he was constrained by TV broadcasting standards of the time, it’s not true that this prevented him from putting on pulp SF and Fantasy – as I’ve pointed out, a lot of the episodes were pulp sf and fantasy (my list is by no means complete). In addition, although you could get away with more in print than onscreen (big or small), the magazines were still pretty conservative. There were plenty of stories from the magazimnes they could have presented.

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small obstacle occurs
character: Oh, what a dreadful calamity, surely one could never surmount it! dies

the sheer haste with which people leap to extremes sans justified motivation.

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I was reading “adult” SF about the time* Twilight Zone* came out. (Before Philip Jose Farmer, “adult” just meant that longer words were used & the protagonists were grownups. Very little sex!)

The SF of the 1950’s & early 60’s was moving beyond the pulps. The nuclear threat was a big theme. So was conformity–if you were different, did that mean you were a commie or an alien–or just a human repressed by the suburban, ad-driven culture of the 1950’s? Here’s one of my favorites: Fritz Leiber’s The Creature from Cleveland Depths. (A little too much sex & humor for Rod–who didn’t always credit the ideas he used.) Fritz also wrote harder SF & urban horror–& invented the phrase “sword & sorcery.” But the problems with Thrilling Planet Tales or Heroic Fantasy (even with the satirical Leiber touch) were TV production limitations. Twilight Zone reproduced a certain strain of SF, tailored for the TV. Star Trek came along with larger scope (& color!) but the stories were still about contemporary issues–In Space!

Star Wars was great fun, although it was old-fashioned Space Opera–because you saw those alien worlds in gritty detail. SF & Fantasy TV (& film) have continued to evolve–technically & thematically. But I also encountered Cordwainer Smith & R A Lafferty in those days; neither of whose work has ever hit a screen, small or large.

I haven’t really felt a need to go back to Twilight Zone. But it was pioneering & even occasionally mind-blowing–back in the day.