Danse Macabre

Most Night Gallery episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn.

"On his fortieth birthday," Naha says, "Serling made his first parachute jump since World War II." Serling's reason? "I did it," he said, "to prove that I wasn't old." But he looked old; a comparison of his early Twilight Zone publicity photos and those taken on the Night Gallery set before those mostly idiotic paintings shows a change which is nearly shocking. Serling's face had become lined, his neck wattled; it is the face of a man who has been partially dissolved in television's vitriol. In 7972 he received an interviewer in his study, which was lined with framed reviews of Requiem, Patterns , and other teleplays from the early days.

"Sometimes I come in here just to look," he said. "I haven't had reviews like that in years.

Now I know why people keep scrapbooks-just to prove to themselves it really happened.” The man who jumped from a plane on his fortieth birthday to prove to himself that he wasn't old refers to himself constantly as old in the Linda Brevelle interview some nine years later; she characterizes him as "vibrant and alive" during their meeting at La Taverna, Serling's favorite L.A. watering hole, but again and again those disquieting phrases crop up; at one point he says, "I'm not an old man yet, but I'm not a young man, either"; at another he says he is an old man. Why didn't he get out of the creative demo derby? At the end of Requiem for a Heavyweight , Jack Palance says he must go back into the ring-even though the whole thing is fixed-because the ring is all he knows. It's as good an answer as any.

Serling, a fierce workaholic who sometimes smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, suffered a crippling heart attack in 1975 and died following open-heart surgery. His legacy consisted of a few fine early plays and The Twilight Zone , a series which has become one of those peculiar TV legends, like The Fugitive and Wanted: Dead or Alive . What are we to make of this program which is so revered (by people who were mostly children when they originally viewed it) ? "I guess a third of the shows were pretty damned good," Serling told an interviewer.

"Another third would have been passable. Another third are dogs.” The fact is that Serling himself wrote sixty-two of the first ninety-two Twilight Zones typing them, dictating them to a secretary, talking them into a dictaphone-and, of course, smoking nonstop. Fantasy fans will recognize the names of almost all the other writers, those who contributed the other thirty episodes: Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner, Jr., Robert Presnell, E. Jack Neuman, Montgomery Pittman, and Ray Bradbury.* The simple fact is that most of the bow-wows which escaped the ke

Even the recollection most people seem to have of The Twilight Zone has always bothered me; it is the concluding "twists" that most people seem to remember, but the show's actual success seemed to be based on more solid concepts, concepts which form a vital link between the old pulp fiction predating the fifties (or those Thriller programs which used the pulps as the basis of their best stories) and the "new" literature of horror and fantasy. Week after week, The Twilight Zone presented ordinary people in extraordinary situations, people who had somehow turned sideways and slipped through a crack in reality . . . and thus into Serling's "zone." It is a powerful concept, and surely the clearest road into the land of fantasy for viewers and readers who do not ordinarily care to visit that land. But the concept was by no means original with Serling; Ray Bradbury had begun putting the ordinary and the horrible cheek-by-jowl in the forties, and when he began to move on into more arcane lands and to use the language in more and more novel ways, Jack Fi

*Bradbury adapted his own short story, "I Sing the Body Electric," for the program. It is, to the best of my knowledge, Bradbury's only screen credit following an odd but rather magnificent adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick for the John Huston film.

In many ways, Fi

And yet Fi

And still, the program left us with a number of powerful memories, and Serling's analysis that a third of the shows were pretty damn good may not have been far from the mark. Anyone who watched the show regularly can remember William Shatner, held in thrall by a pe

The Twilight Zone also showcased a wide range of performers (Ed Wy

It was a pretty good show, the way the most fondly remembered TV series are pretty good shows . . . but ultimately, no better. TV is the endless gobbler of talent, something new and poisonous under the sun, and if Zone is ultimately weaker than our fond memories of it would like to allow, the fault lies not with Serling but with TV itself-the hungry maw, the bottomless pit of shit. Serling wrote a total of eighty-four episodes, something like 2,200 pages of script according to the screenwriter's rule of thumb that one page of script equals one minute of video. This is a staggering pile of work, and it really isn't surprising that the all-too-occasional clunker like "I Am the Night-Color Me Black" got through. Rod Serling was only able to do so much in the name of Kimberly-Clark and Chesterfield Kings. Then television ate him up.

6

And as far as TV is concerned, I guess it's time for everybody to get out of the pool. I don't have enough John Simon in me to really enjoy shooting TV's creative cripples as they crawl and squirm around in the great TV Cancellation Corral. I've even tried to treat Kolchak: The Night Stalker with affection, because I certainly feel a degree of affection for it. Bad as it was, it wasn't any worse than some of the Saturday matinee creature-features that enlivened my life as a kid-The Black Scorpion or The Beast of Hollow Mountain , for instance.