In a 1981 cover story, “The Great Twilight Zone Revival: Why Rod Serling’s TV Classic Lives On,” Alternative Media magazine noted that this first Thanksgiving marathon, only eight hours long, received a 16% share.īut just as the New Year can bring both excitement and anxiety, so can the Twilight Zone Marathon. “The first one we did was on Thanksgiving in 1980,” said KTLA program director Mark Sonnenberg in a 1991 article in the LA Times. The origins of The New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon are in bit of a twilight zone of their own no one knows which regional TV station syndicating Twilight Zone reruns started them – New York’s WPIX (Channel 11) or Los Angeles’ KTLA?-or whether they even began on that holiday at all. If you don’t like one episode, drink another cup of egg nog, take a nap, go out for a smoke, come back in a half-hour-a “good one” might come on next. So there’s something for everyone in The Twilight Zone Marathon. One thing both camps agree on is that the series’ actors were a Who’s Who of Hollywood big and small-screen stars-to-be, like (in alphabetical order) Charles Bronson, Carol Burnett, James Coburn, Robert Duvall, Buddy Ebsen, Peter Falk, Anne Francis, James Franciscus, Dennis Hopper, Jack Klugman, Martin Landau, Lee Marvin, Patrick Macnee, Roddy McDowall, Martin Milner, Elizabeth Montgomery, Billy Mumy, Leonard Nimoy, Warren Oates, Sydney Pollack, Donald Pleasance, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Don Rickles, Cliff Robertson, Telly Savalas, William Shatner, Inger Stevens, Dean Stockwell, Lee Van Cleef, Dennis Weaver, and Dick York! Collectively, they make watching the Twilight Zone Marathonalso a sidegame, “Guess the Twilight Zone Actor’s Future Movie or TV Series.” Read more: How The Twilight Zone Inspired Modern TV and Film One man’s great episode (say, “Twenty-Two,” the hospital morgue episode with the immortal line, “Room for one more”) is another’s worst (“But the acting by the female lead is too shrill!”). Serling, who wrote a whopping 89 of the series’ 156 episodes (science-fiction luminaries like the recently-passed Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont scripted a bulk of the others), wrote some of the greatest (number one for years on TZ fan polls, the eerie “Eye of The Beholder,” or as you might know it colloquially, “the pig faces episode”) and some of the worst (pick any last-season episode, like “The Fear”-the only thing it has in common with its title is how frighteningly talky it is, the downside of Serling’s habit of dictating his scripts on a tape recorder).Īnd while there seems to be a general consensus amongst Twilight Zone fans on the “good ones”- Burgess Meredith breaking his glasses in the malevolent universe of “Time Enough at Last” to the “It’s a cook book!” punch line ending of “To Serve Man” (a dark horse episode that has emerged in recent years to top “Beholder” and “Time” in many a poll, probably due to its basic plot being lifted twenty years later for the sci-fi television series V, both the ’83 original and its 2009 “reimagining”)-there’s less agreement on the bottom 156. Henry-like comeuppances had worn thin and predictable (the anthology series, at least in its weekly, half-hour form, didn’t survive beyond The Twilight Zone either). But eventually the pressure to create original, quality half-hour anthology drama burned Serling out, and Twilight Zone started showing cracks in its Emmy Award-winning (two for Serling and his writers, one for George Clemens, TZ’s cinematographer, the Gregg Toland to Serling’s Orson Welles) patina, and fairly early on (Serling’s 1960 second-season opener, “King Nine Will Not Return,” is essentially a rewrite of his own pilot episode of a year before, maybe the best pilot episode in television history, “Where is Everybody?”).īy the last season (Fall ’63), the series was repeating itself with alarming regularity (writer and future creator of The Waltons Earl Hamner’s “Stopover in a Quiet Town” is his own take on “Where…”), and the TZgimmick of surprising, ironic twist endings and O. Twilight Zone fans tend to break down the series’ 156 episodes into “good ones” and “bad ones,” the inevitable wheat/chaff ratio resulting from churning out any weekly television series (and an anthology one at that), a format Serling honed during the 1950’s “Golden Age” of live, 90-minute TV drama, and then perfected with the filmed, half-hour Twilight Zone episodes.
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