I’d put The Twilight Zone in my top 5 TV series of all time. I grew up watching the 4th of July, Halloween and New Year’s Day TTZ marathons on the SYFY Channel.
I could go on and on about how influential TTZ was and still is, but I’d be treading on well worn territory. I don’t think I can add to that part of the conversation. Yeah, it ruled. There aren’t that many tv shows from the 50’s/60’s that are very rewatchable, even for me, a freak who loves vintage entertainment unironically.
I can throw on an episode of TTZ while getting ready in the morning and still be like “aw hell yeah, it’s the other Shatner episode that’s not the good one. It’s the boring one where he goes to the diner and becomes obsessed with the fortune telling napkin dispenser.”
Yeah, I even like the bad episodes.
The show is famous for a handful of iconic episodes that have shaped pop culture, but it was also on the air for 5 years and had plenty of mediocre episodes.
It’s tough to have the “shocking twist ending” be the thing your show is famous for, because you always have to top yourself.
Every show has peaks and valleys.
Season 1 has its moments, but is still finding it’s footing. The late 50’s were the best time in America for short story writers to get their work adapted for television, and television was mostly “teleplays.” Combine that with the rise in science fiction and horror genre popularity, and you’re in the twilight zone, baby.
Stills for "Where is Everybody?", "Time Enough at Last", and "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"
Season 2 is mostly good. It has the highest density of episodes that defined what the show was at it’s best. It also has 6 episodes that were shot on tape to save money that are unwatchable. The other thing about the show that speaks to TTZ’s longevity is the way it looks. It’s shot on film, in a studio with a single camera, and most of the directors had careers in hollywood previously, directing genre films in the 40’s/50’s before transitioning to tv.
Stills from "Eye of the Beholder", "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?", and "The Howling Man"
Season 3 is the best consistent season, but a few boring ones slip through. True heavy hitters, but the funniest bad ones.
Stills from "To Serve Man", "The Dummy", and "Nothing in the Dark" Season 4 changed the format to hour long episodes, and they are all bad. The pacing of the show is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. The premises are good enough to fill a 25 minute slot, but if you think about it too hard it starts to unravel at like… 35 minutes.
Stills from "He's Alive", "Printer's Devil", and "The Bard" Season 5 starts off with a few bangers, then gets worse as it progresses. They got back to what they did best, but you could tell Serling was kind of over it. The show that started off with a bang in 1959 fizzled out and dissipated in the summer of ‘64.
Stills from "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet", "Living Doll", and "The Masks"
The final broadcast episode of TTZ aired on June, 19th, 1964. It was called “The Bewitchin’ Pool” and I think it’s the worst episode of the series simply because of the production errors.
Let’s go through it.
The episode was written by Earl Hamner, Jr. and Directed by Joseph M. Newman.
Earl Hamner, Jr. would go on to create shows like Falcon Crest and The Waltons.
Joseph M. Newman was twice nominated for an academy award in the now defunct Assistant Director category.
This episode does something the show never did before; they show the last scene first.
The guest stars for this episode are Mary Badham as Sport Sharewood and Jeffrey Byron as her brother Jeb, two rich kids playing in their home swimming pool, whose parents (played by Tod Andrews and Dee Hartford) are going through an ugly divorce.
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The kids get upset and dive into the swimming pool, but they do not come back up. The parents are freaking out. The dad dives in to get them thinking they’ve drowned. He comes back up confused and screams “they’re not down there!”
The camera whips over to Rod Serling, who drops the following narration;
A swimming pool not unlike any other pool, a structure built of tile and cement and money, a backyard toy for the affluent, wet entertainment for the well-to-do. But to Jeb and Sport Sharewood, this pool holds mysteries not dreamed of by the building contractor, not guaranteed in any sales brochure. For this pool has a secret exit that leads to a never-neverland, a place designed for junior citizens who need a long voyage away from reality, into the bottomless regions of the Twilight Zone.
Mary Badham played Scout Finch in movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird starring opposite Gregory Peck as her dad, Atticus Finch, and was the youngest actress nominated for an academy award at the time, at 10 years old. This episode was her next project.
Jeffrey Byron was some nepo baby child actor, whose mom was british actress Anna Lee.
Anyway, we turn back the clock, and we get another opening narration from Serling, this time off camera;
Introduction to a perfect setting: Colonial mansion, spacious grounds, heated swimming pool. All the luxuries money can buy. Introduction to two children: brother and sister, names Jeb and Sport. Healthy, happy, normal youngsters. Introduction to a mother: Gloria Sharewood by name, glamorous by nature. Introduction to a father: Gil Sharewood, handsome, prosperous, the picture of success. A man who has achieved every man's ambition. Beautiful children, beautiful home, beautiful wife. Idyllic? Obviously. But don't look too carefully, don't peek behind the façade. The idols may have feet of clay.
Just in case you didn’t get it the first time, Serling makes sure to hammer the themes extra hard. You gotta love these high falootin Serling monologues.
Sport and Jeb are playing by the pool, while their parents are having an awful fight.
Suddenly a little Tom Sawyer looking kid named Whitt (Kim Hector) pops out of the swimming pool and tells Sport and Jeb to follow him.
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The kids come up from under the water, and suddenly they have been transported to some sort of rustic homestead bordering a river, in what looks like a true old timey '“swimming hole.” A friendly old woman who goes by “Aunt T” (Georgia Simmons) welcomes the children and invites them into her home for cake and pie.
Maybe it’s the way the Aunt T was directed, but Aunt T is so suspicious you’re SURE the twist is going to involve her being a witch or something, but spoiler alert, she’s not. There is something about her performance that makes it feel like she has an ulterior motive, but no she’s just a kind old southern lady feeding children who have run away from their homes.
The big production screw up on this episode is the sound. For a reason I have not been able to figure out in my research, the studio lot over at CBS was particularly noisy that day. All the audio at the pool was unusable and had to be redubbed. Mary Badham was unavailable to redub her own voice, so professional voice over artist, June Foray, famous for voicing Granny from the Looney Tunes and Rocky from Rocky and Bullwinkle stepped in and provided 10 year old Badham’s voice for all the scenes outside. She sounds exactly like Rocky Squirrel.
The only useable sound in the entire episode was the stuff in Aunt T’s house, which sounds fine, but you keep expecting something to happen. This is the Twilight Zone, after all. Nothing is what it seems! So where’s the twist?
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The kids spend the day with Aunt T and Whitt baking pies, telling jokes, and fixing all these shoes lying around the floor. Immediately a red flag. A strange exchange of dialogue follows;
Sport: “What’s with all these shoes Aunt T?”
Aunt T: “They’re for the children. All children need shoes.”
This never pays off or comes up again.
Aunt T asks the kids to do more chores. The kids ask why they have to do chores and Aunt T says;
Aunt T: Chores give children a sense of purpose, and teaches them the joy of labor.
Also, weird, but then again it was the 60’s.
Sport gets suspicious and insists she and Jeb leave. Aunt T tells them if they leave now, and if their parents love them, they’ll never be able to come back. The kids swim back home.
We come back to where we started the episode and we see the parents telling Jeb and Sport that they’re going to get a divorce. The dad puts it brutally;
Dad: The decision is yours. Do you want to live with me? Or do you want to live with… (staring daggers) her?
The mom is worse.
Sport: You guys fight because we're bad right? It's our fault, isn't it?
Mom: Well, I’ll tell you something; we wouldn’t have stayed together as long as we did if it wasn’t for you, so show a little appreciation.
The kids are fed up. They realize their parents are selfish assholes who don’t love them. They dive back into the swimming pool, and don’t come back up.
The episode ends with Sport, Jeb, Whitt and Aunt T eating pie and laughing. What we walk away with is that Jeb and Sport’s parents didn’t love them because they fought all the time, and Aunt T does love them because she gives them cake to eat and shoes to polish.
Serling closes the show with one hell of a monologue;
A brief epilogue for concerned parents. Of course, there isn't any such place as the gingerbread house of Aunt T, and we grownups know there's no door at the bottom of a swimming pool that leads to a secret place. But who can say how real the fantasy world of lonely children can become? For Jeb and Sport Sharewood, the need for love turned fantasy into reality; they found a secret place—in the Twilight Zone.
If they put “Don’t Stop Believing” at the end of the episode, it would honestly fix all the problems. Audiences would have lost their minds.
The Twilight Zone is available to stream on Paramount+.