The cover of Alan Sepinwall’s book, “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone With TV’s First Visionary.”
Picture, if you will, a writer, unrooted in time or space, facing that faceless eternity known as the audience, spinning a tale made of monsters, metaphors and cigarette smoke.
And you’ve just entered … “The Twilight Zone.”
It’s a television show that has been plagiarized and parodied endlessly, a cultural touchstone for more than 60 years. But what do you really know about the man who created it?
My former Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall fills you in with his new book, “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone With TV’s First Visionary” (Grand Central Publishing, 320 pp., $35).
Serling died in 1975, so Sepinwall — who will make appearances at the Words bookstore in Maplewood on Oct. 14, and the Wyckoff Public Library, Nov. 5 — had to work hard to report this. His conclusion?
Serling was, all in all, a pretty decent guy.
And a writer who still speaks to us today.
Q: Apart from your regular criticism, you’ve done a lot of book-length dives into a particular show, or era. But not only is biography a new challenge for you, you picked a subject where almost all the primary sources are dead. Was that a worry?
A: It was a huge worry. Because, yeah, I’ve done some reporting and a lot of interviewing, but I’ve never done anything that, even though it’s nonfiction, was still a long-form narrative. And as you said, a lot of the people who knew him were dead, and even more died during the course of reporting this, some before I’d gotten the chance to speak with them. So I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I hope I did.
Q: I think you did; it’s a compelling read. And one thing that quickly becomes clear is Serling’s own drive. He’s this little, motormouthed Jewish kid, but instead of turning into some Woody Allen nebbish, he becomes a boxer, he signs up to train as a paratrooper. Where did this push to prove himself come from?
A: You know, he was the star of the family, basically from the time he was a baby; everyone doted on him. And that continued as he got older. He had a natural charisma. In high school he wasn’t just class president and editor of the yearbook, he was a serious jock, and very popular with girls. And I think it became this feedback loop: I am the center of people’s attention, and therefore I have to do things to keep deserving that attention. I’m a short, skinny little guy — well, I’m going out for the football team. There’s a war on? I’m going to become a paratrooper, the most dangerous job I can find.
JOHN O'BOYLE
ALAN SEPINWALL
Q: And, talking about overachieving, there was his output as a writer. Starting out, he would send out dozens of scripts. Even after “The Twilight Zone” started, and he had other writers working for him, he was still writing more than half of it. Did he just love telling stories? Or was there more to it?
A: He loved telling stories, definitely. But it was also therapy. He went through a really traumatic time in the war, fighting in The Philippines, seeing friends die in front of him, getting wounded — he had a bad knee for the rest of his life from shrapnel. And then, when he was still overseas, his father dropped dead, and he couldn’t even get home for the funeral. Serling went from this really idyllic childhood to seeing people decapitated (on the battlefield). So, I guess it’s another version of that meme: Men would rather create “The Twilight Zone” than go to therapy.
Q: And the stories just continued to pour out of him.
A: He was always a workaholic. And when he discovered the Dictaphone, that just enabled it, because he could talk his scripts. A lot of them have been digitized — not “The Twilight Zone,” unfortunately, but the early work for TV, and some of the “Night Gallery” ones, and a lot of his letters — and they’re amazing to hear. The words just spill out, as if there’s no block between his brain and mouth — monologues, dialogue, stage directions. It all just flows.
Q: What was the lasting appeal of the show? More than 60 years later, it’s still a staple — on home video, on streamers, even on TV marathons.
A: Because the questions Serling was asking — about war and hate and life — are ones that are still, unfortunately, relevant. We’re still wrestling with them, and his genius was that he was able to marry that both to characters and to genre. I think that’s a big part of it. A lot of the dramas he wrote in the ’50s are incredible but they don’t have the shelf life that “Zone” has; once you take those themes and attach them to something like sci-fi, though, the audience is hooked before they know it. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” seems like it’s about aliens, and it is. But it’s really about paranoia, and McCarthyism.
Rod Serling, in a 1959 publicity photo.
Q: Why did those anthology shows disappear? There was “Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Thriller” — and then they all vanished. And apart from “Black Mirror,” I can’t think of any new ones that lasted, or even any reboots of “The Twilight Zone” that worked.
A: By the end of the show’s run, the networks were definitely shifting towards shows with continuing characters. It’s easier to market those to an audience than asking them to jump in every week for a new story and new stars; cheaper, too, to produce. And the attempts to reboot “Zone” … well, the problem is they didn’t have Rod. You watch the ’80s one, or the Jordan Peele one, and some of the episodes are fine, but you realize, he’s the secret sauce.
Q: An interesting point you make is the birth of the TV writer as auteur. Obviously you’ve written about creators like Steven Bochco and David Milch and David Chase – but would we have any of them without Serling?
A: We wouldn’t. Who were the showrunners before “The Twilight Zone,” writers who really supervised the entire thing? There was Gertrude Berg, who created “The Goldbergs,” but apart from her it was almost always a regular producer, someone who didn’t really write but knew how to deal with the network. But Serling was a rare case of a writer who came up with the idea and whose agent got him a great deal, and he ended up becoming the star of the show. And that was something new: “Wait, the writer is the most important person on a TV show?” And that eventually inspired other people, and that model continues to this day.
Q: What’s sad is that if you go back even to his earliest work, TV scripts like “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” they’re very well constructed. But his own life didn’t really have a third act. He had about a decade of amazing success, then a bit of a falling off, and then — boom. A heart attack and dead at 50.
A: I think if he hadn’t died when he did, he would have gotten that third act. Spielberg and Lucas and all those people who were just starting to hit — they idolized him. They would have been hiring him to write for them and with their direction he would have come back into vogue, definitely. You look at “Seven Days in May,” the one script of his that became a truly great film, and it’s because you had John Frankenheimer directing. Serling was a great writer but he wasn’t a particularly visual writer; Frankenheimer’s visuals are so dynamic it heightens everything.
Q: Speaking of third acts, I have to ask you: What’s next for arts journalism? We’ve both seen newspapers lay off staff, and websites wind down. Is there a future for critics?
A: It’s so depressing. A couple of days after I left Rolling Stone, or it left me, I was doing a show with Ethan Hawke and he said he remembered how every paper used to have a couple of movie critics, and a couple of TV critics, and the artists would get to know them as people, and the critics would basically have this middle-class job, with benefits and … yeah, all that’s pretty much gone. I’d been already been running a free newsletter to promote what I did for Rolling Stone, and afterwards I turned it into a subscription, and that’s been going well — but I understand people can only subscribe to so many of these things. I don’t know what the answer is. I was lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time, but now, when people ask me about going into criticism I have to tell them: Be prepared to do something else, too.
Alan Sepinwall will make appearances at Words in Maplewood, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. (visit wordsbookstore.com), and the Wyckoff Public Library, Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. (visit wyckofflibrary.org). For more about him, visit alansepinwall.com.
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