Been watching TZ lately while on breaks at work.
It got me to thinking, considering the time this show came out, it seems rather dark. Lots of episodes have no resolution. (Just finished "wished it into the cornfield kid. Nobody ever had the guts to bash that kid in the head)
So… were they pretty much ground breakers on that front?
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. First aired in 1955. Lotsa dead folks.
Hell, the Honeymooners didn’t even have happy endings all the time.
But did they ever end up with the earth drifting away from the sun, growing ever colder, until all life on earth was extinguished? Did the four of them find out that they were really toy dolls in a box? Did Ralph make a deal with the devil to live forever, and then get sentenced to life imprisonment? Were they all suddenly transported to a strange land where a small boy dictated their every move, and mere bad thought was enough to get you sent to the cornfield? Was Ed Norton really Santa Claus? Wait, that last one isn’t actually a downer.
Well no, but plenty of non-happy endings.
I haven’t actually seen the TV version, but some of the episodes of the radio version of Gunsmoke had non-happy, somber endings; and I believe some of the radio episodes were adapted for TV.
Speaking of radio, old-time radio had plenty of horror/dark fantasy series that were in much the same vein as The Twilight Zone, and “non-happy” endings were common there.
But usually at the end of the show Mr. Hitchcock would inform us that the bad guys/girls got their comeuppance. I guess that’s not so much a “happy ending” as a “justice is served,” but he didn’t leave you with a story that someone got away with something.
I think that’s because of the censorship code of the time (which may have been relaxed by the time of The Twilight Zone), that forbade allowing criminals to get away with their actions.
Hitchcock was well acquainted with that–it’s why he had to change a major plot point in Rebecca from the novel so that Maxim de Winter hadn’t shot Rebecca dead in a moment of rage, but had been in a confrontation with her when he approached her threateningly, she backed up, slipped, hit her head and died instantly. I can understand why they changed it, but it leaves a pretty major plot hole–if she’d died accidentally of a fall instead of being shot, why would he have gone to all that trouble to cover it up instead of just saying, “I came to the boathouse and found her like this–she must have fallen while getting ready to go out for a sail.” Instead, he went to extremes to cover it up and made himself look guilty when he wasn’t!
There were quite a few early thriller or SF anthology shows that fit the bill.
Take Lights Out. Originally a radio series that was turned into a TV serial intermittently ran from 1946 to 1952. Sample episode.
One Step Beyond started the same time as TZ. Sample episode.
A short lived SF series was Out There starting in 1951. Adapted some stories from top notch writers. Happy endings? Pfft.
A real odd duck: The Veil hosted by Boris Karloff. Episodes were taped starting in 1958 but they weren’t made available until the 90s. Not to be confused with his later series Thriller.
I’m racking my brain trying to remember another series that MeTV or some such was playing a while back.
One of the last two Old-Time Radio (OTR) shows was Suspense, which focused on suspense thrillers. The show ran more than twenty years, from June 17, 1942 to September 30, 1962. It was revived with new scripts for Sirius XM Radio for a while, but it never had a TV spinoff.
Side note: The other last OTR show was Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which was “the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account – America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator.” It also ran for over a decade, from February 18, 1949 to September 30, 1962, and it also never had a TV spinoff. And, yes, September 30, 1962, at 7:00 PM Eastern, when the last episode of Suspense ended, is the end of the Golden Age of Radio or Old-Time Radio. There were OTR shows made after that, like CBS Radio Mystery Theater, but they were nostalgia efforts done over a decade after the fact (1974-1982, in this case) and not part of the cohesive OTR era which stretched unbroken from the 1920s to 1962. A Prairie Home Companion was created as a nostalgia piece in that mold, and is by far the most successful unless one of the podcasts, like Welcome to Night Vale, has an exceptionally long and well-regarded life.
In 1950, years before he shot to fame on Star Trek, Deforest Kelley stuck his head in an oven and turned on the gas. On a TV show. In what shockingly turned out to be its only episode, Suicide Theatre (the European spelling lets you know it’s art) followed our young hero through a day the Biblical Job would have called “pretty shitty”. At the end of the episode Kelley attempts suicide in the aforementioned oven, but fails even at that, having been too poor to pay his gas bill. I’m unsure if further episodes would have featured new suicidal characters each week, or just Deforest Kelley trying and failing to kill himself in increasingly elaborate ways.
Depending on your point of view, this was either super depressing or a very dark comedy.
Say it with me, everyone:
I’m dead, Jim!
(sorry)
Anyway, television and radio simply followed the tradition of folk tales with sad endings, which had perennial appeal for audiences.
There is for the wolf!
Good point!
But in the telling of the tale described on that site, there’s no happy ending for the character that is the protagonist. (Of course it’s perfectly possible to write a story from the viewpoint of the carnivore that consumes the other characters, and no doubt this has been done many times.)
The very first one was like that. When they remade it for the revival, they removed the moral ending.