That voice, those looks, that groundbreaking show...that can only be Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone . It captivated millions, and still to this day, through its 156 episodes available to stream on Paramount+. You can also buy The Twilight Zone: The Complete Series on Blu-Ray. This Christmas marks what would have been Serling's 100th birthday. We caught up with his daughter Anne, who wrote a memoir honoring the legacy of her dad, and Marc Scott Zicree, author of the popular The Twilight Zone Companion to celebrate the man, the myth, and the legend this holiday season.
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00:00Hi, I'm Mark Scott Zickrey, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, and you are watching
00:04Life Minute TV.
00:05Hi, I'm Anne Serling, and you're watching Life Minute TV.
00:10You're traveling through another dimension.
00:16That voice, those looks, that groundbreaking show that can only be Rod Serling's The Twilight
00:22Zone.
00:23It captivated millions, and still does to this day, through its 156 episodes available
00:30to stream on Paramount+.
00:32You can also buy The Twilight Zone The Complete Series on Blu-ray.
00:36This Christmas marks what would have been Serling's 100th birthday.
00:39We caught up with his daughter Anne, who wrote a memoir honoring the legacy of her dad, and
00:44Mark Scott Zickrey, author of The Popular Twilight Zone Companion, to celebrate the
00:49man, the myth, and the legend this holiday season.
00:52It's stunning to think that my dad would be 100 years old.
00:56I can't even imagine him as an old man.
00:58He was only 50 when he died.
01:01And my last image of him is this tan face, and this wavy hair, and not looking old at
01:09all.
01:10So it's stunning, but it's also lovely that people remember him so fondly.
01:14I'm really glad that we're commemorating Rod's 100th birthday.
01:17Again, there's always the bittersweet quality that Rod died at 50, and now here we are at
01:22100.
01:23And even as a 100-year-old, I'm sure he would have had a lot to say about the current situation.
01:29But his work has lasted.
01:30And when you realize this is from the late 50s and early 60s, and yet it's still every
01:36bit as timely, every bit as powerful as it was when it initially aired, I think that's
01:40a testament to one of the great artists who's worked in any medium, actually.
01:46He's television's Leonardo da Vinci, really.
01:48And I think Rod is famous in two ways.
01:50One is that he was this amazing writer, this amazing creator of television, that was his
01:54art form, but also this phenomenal media personality.
01:58There's only a handful of them, James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, but Rod Serling, he's
02:04beloved and recognizable by millions of people around the world.
02:09It's phenomenal.
02:10I've had people tell me that they thought of my father as their father, and several
02:16actually that said they had tumultuous childhoods, and that my dad got them through watching
02:22his episodes and seeing him introduced.
02:26And no one would be more surprised than my father, who's remembered like this.
02:31People who are young now don't really understand the incredible power of television when there
02:35were only three networks.
02:37Everyone watched pretty much everything, one way or another.
02:40You knew who all these people were, and because they came into your home every week, they
02:45did have a feeling of being your family, a feeling of great familiarity.
02:47But with Rod, I think it's even more than that, because there's a feeling of authenticity.
02:52The man who's there on the screen, you feel that if you ran into him in a restaurant or
02:57a bar, you'd love to just sit down with him, and that he'd be as wonderful in person as
03:02he was on screen.
03:03And that's why Anne's memoir about her dad is so wonderful, because she takes us into
03:09that world, and we get to know so much more about Rod, and I'm so glad you wrote that
03:13book, Anne.
03:15Sometime after he died, I started another book called In His Absence, and I hadn't even
03:21begun to navigate the grief.
03:24So it took me years to write as I knew him, and again, one of the reasons was I find writing
03:30cathartic as my dad did, and so it was a way to work it out.
03:35I also wanted to know more about the professional side of my dad, and lastly, I wanted to address
03:44how some people had thought he was this dark, tortured soul, because my father was the
03:48polar opposite.
03:49He was silly, he was funny, he loved the Flintstones, he loved animals, he was a practical joker,
03:59just the opposite of what one would imagine.
04:01Yeah, and I'd like to add something to that, because again, there were several biographies
04:06that sort of positioned Rod as this dark, tragic figure who was so disappointed in life
04:11and so broken by life, and it's a total fiction, and very unfair to Rod, because he had an
04:19astonishing life force, both creatively and personally.
04:23He was so alive and so active, and such a great dad, such a wonderful person.
04:29When I was a kid, the three shows that made me want to be a writer were the original Star
04:32Trek, the original Outer Limits, and the original Twilight Zone, and by the time I got out of
04:37college with my art degree, I knew I wanted to be a writer-producer working in television,
04:41but there were no classes in that, there was no way to learn it, and it was two years
04:44after Rod's death, and I thought, well, maybe I'll be able to learn how to make great television
04:49by exploring the greatest show ever made, and beyond that, I was a huge fan of the show,
04:55of course, how could you not be?
04:57And I met one of the writers, George Clayton Johnson, when I was 16, at a convention, because
05:02I noticed that the same writers' names were on all these different shows, and they were
05:06the writers who were writing the books that I was reading, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson,
05:09Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury.
05:13So I wanted to meet these people, and so I met George Clayton Johnson, he wrote Kick
05:16the Can and Nothing in the Dark, two great Twilight Zone episodes, and he was very encouraging,
05:22and so when I came up with the idea of doing The Twilight Zone Companion, George introduced
05:26me to a couple of other people, Buck Houghton and Jerry Soule, and then I reached out to
05:30others who had worked on the show, and before I even approached Anne's mom, Carol, because
05:34she had already turned down major journalists, and I had like one short story credit, I interviewed
05:3830 people for three months who had worked on the show before I even went to Carol, and
05:43if Carol had said no, it would have been no, but I thought, look, I've got to know what
05:47I'm talking about, and I have to know how I'm going to be able to do this book.
05:50I was 22 years old at the time, and she said, yes, you have access to everything, which
05:55was incredibly gracious and generous of her, and so I was crawling through, the house was
05:59exactly as Rod had left it in Pacific Palisades, the room full of Emmys and all the other awards
06:06he had won, and the attic full of his scrapbooks and scripts, and all of these things, even
06:12his dog was still there, the Irish Setter, well, the book was rejected by 25 publishers
06:16over a two-year period, if not for my wife saying, keep going, and let's figure out what's
06:20not working here, a lot of editors who hadn't grown up watching The Twilight Zone said,
06:25well, why would anyone want a book on a show that's gone off network 15 years ago, and
06:30they didn't understand that there was an enormous audience, and so once The Twilight Zone was
06:34published, The Twilight Zone Companion was published and was a success, that did open
06:38the gates for every show imaginable, fans writing for those shows, and the reason I
06:43wrote the book was I wanted to learn how these men who wrote The Twilight Zone came to have
06:51minds like that, how they, what shaped them, what made them who they were, and these incredible
06:55brilliant writers, and Rod Serling, you know, wrote the majority, he wrote 92 of the 156
07:01episodes.
07:02You know, he dealt with the human condition, and sadly, so many of these issues are still
07:08so prevalent and so relevant.
07:11And I think the other thing is that Rod, as well as having a phenomenal, brilliant mind,
07:17he also had an incredible heart, and that heart comes across, I mean, you know, people
07:21talk about someone wearing their heart on their sleeve, well, Rod was handing his heart
07:24to the audience, basically, he was saying, you know, and he was not a cynic, he was not
07:28a pessimist, he was an optimist, he was hopeful about the human condition, he was always
07:33rooting for the little guy, and that comes across, and I think you can watch Twilight
07:37Zone episodes again and again because of their compassion, because of their humanity, because
07:41of the truth, the authenticity in them, it's not about the twist ending, if it was just
07:47about that, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because it would have come and gone, because
07:51it would be trivial, but The Twilight Zone is not trivial, it speaks to all of us in
07:55a deep way, and, you know, you can't watch an episode like Monsters Who Do on Maple Street
08:00without a profound understanding of how mob hysteria works, and, you know, and I think
08:06Rod's message is always, if we can do better, let's do better, and, you know, we just love
08:11him for that.
08:12Well, he wanted to tell these important issues, you know, he wanted the story of Emmett Till
08:16out there, and the quote, and Mark, you've said this too, he realized that he launched
08:24into The Twilight Zone because he realized an alien could say what a Democrat or a Republican
08:29couldn't.
08:30Well, again, he was being so censored, I mean, it was fascinating, because it was really
08:34a gilded cage, he was, if he was writing about something that was not controversial, like
08:41an aging boxer, you know, like Requiem for Heavyweight, then there was no problem, but
08:46if he wanted to write about politics or about racial issues, you mentioned Emmett Till,
08:50the black teenager who was murdered, Rod tried a couple times to write a TV play about
08:55that, and it was so censored that it was meaningless, ultimately, and that's what drove him into
08:59The Twilight Zone, the fact that he had so much to say, and he was being muzzled, and
09:04he was right, that by writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, he could write about the
09:09threat of nuclear war, he could write about race relations brilliantly, and it would slip
09:13by the censors.
09:14I had not actually watched a lot of The Twilight Zone when my father was alive, and I only
09:20did, after he died, more to see him than the actual episode, and one of the ones I watched
09:27some time after he died was In Praise of Pip, and it was so interesting, because there's
09:33dialogue in there between Jack Klugman and Bill Mumy, it says, who's your best buddy,
09:38Pip, you are, Pop, and it was a routine that my father and I did, who's your best buddy,
09:44you are, so I literally found my dad, again, in The Twilight Zone, that episode, and Death's
09:52Head Revisited is an incredibly powerful one, Walking Distance, I think it's so relatable
09:59for so many people.
10:00These are great episodes, all of them, and again, they're so deeply personal with Rod,
10:07I mean, a lot of people don't know Rod was Jewish, and so the Holocaust had enormous
10:14power, meaning for him, and so Death's Head Revisited is about the ghosts of the concentration
10:19camp inmates coming back to exact justice on a commandant who comes back after the war
10:25out of nostalgia.
10:26It's a great episode, and In Praise of Pip is about a man who's willing to sacrifice
10:31his life to save his son who's been wounded in Vietnam, and I think it may be the first
10:36representation of Vietnam in an American drama series, but it's about the love of a father
10:43for his child, and I'm working with Bill Mumy now on the new show we're doing, Space
10:48Command, and I worked with him on Babylon 5, but I first got to talk with him about
10:53his work when I interviewed him for The Twilight Zone Companion, and he did three episodes
10:57of Twilight Zone, and he's terrific in all three of them, and In Praise of Pip is just
11:02Jack Klugman, when he was working with Bill Mumy, because he was a little boy at that
11:06point, this is before Lost in Space, and he said to Bill, he said, listen, I'm going to
11:11be very emotional, and I'm going to be really going through a lot of emotions, don't be
11:15upset by that, and he really walked with him through those scenes, because they are very
11:20emotional, because basically he sees his son as a little boy in this amusement park they
11:24used to go to, and it's just, it's beautifully shot, Klugman is incredible in that episode,
11:30and it's, yeah, these are jewels, these are amazing episodes if you've never seen them.
11:36I urge people to just go out and watch all of them, because they're just, they're classics
11:42because they deserve to be.
11:44On the Christmas day, I'm actually going to be on a coast-to-coast, this live radio show
11:47that I do with George Noory, who's a huge Twilight Zone fan, and we'll be commemorating
11:51Rod and taking phone calls and having people share their reminiscences, say he was a Christmas
11:55present that was delivered unwrapped.
11:58So Anne, do you have plans?
12:01We're just, we're going to be in Utah with our daughter and grandkids, and you know,
12:07I always take a moment on my dad's birthday just to be alone and to think about him.
12:13Yeah, and then happy birthday, Rod, and thanks for the wonderful Christmas present that you
12:18were and are and what you gave us.
12:23To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast, Life Minute TV on iTunes and all
12:27streaming podcast platforms.