![]() By his own account Serling enjoyed a pleasant childhood. Rodman Edward Serling, born in 1924, grew up in Binghamton, New York, the son of a butcher who was also an amateur inventor whose most inspired idea - the “frankburger,” a hamburger-shaped hot dog - somehow failed to catch on. “And, when the smoke cleared, the dragons had won.” Serling’s idealistic career, turned tacky in the end, reflects the direction of American television during its formative years. “We had tilted at the same dragons for seven or eight years,” Serling said about the early television dramatists who, like himself, had battled publicly for quality TV. But it was probably inevitable too, given the economic factors and programming assumptions shaping network TV. Of course it was ironic that the man who once compared television’s endless advertisements to “ traveling snake-oil shows” should end up as Madison Avenue’s go-to guy. Richard Burton appeared as Heathcliffe in the DuPont Show of the Month production of Wuthering Heights, and Leonard Bernstein gained national fame because CBS broadcast his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic from Carnegie Hall.īut by 1970, if not before, almost none of the TV industry’s leaders really believed, with Minow, that they were “public trustees” who should have faith in “the people’s good sense and good taste,” shunning “a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator.” Television now demanded celebrity, not literary ability - probably the main reason Serling shifted from scriptwriting to shilling, lending his distinctive persona to the makers of toothpaste and beer and many other products. In the late 1950s, when The Twilight Zone debuted, Omnibus was still on the air that show had aired lectures, interviews, and performances of original screenplays as well as abbreviated versions of such classic works as King Lear and La Bohème. During the 1950s the commercial networks were still burnishing television’s image, hoping to prove that this new and relatively expensive device was far more than an “idiot box” or a “boob tube.” Commercial television supplied culture as well as vaudeville - Shakespeare and Beethoven as well as Sergeant Bilko and Gorgeous George. Serling’s late career as a “commercial huckster,” “ham actor,” and “professional celebrity,” Engel writes in his insightful Last Stop, the Twilight Zone (1989), grew out of an “addiction to fame - and fortune - that cost him his chance at true greatness.”īut it is also true that by the time The Twilight Zone left the air, the trends that had worried Minow in 1961 were even easier to discern. “When I bend down to pick up a pencil,” he joked on another occasion, “I’m five days behind.” At least one of his biographers, Joel Engel, also blames a growing taste for what Serling himself called the “crazy, pink, whipped-cream world” that media fame opens up. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, Serling said he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on The Twilight Zone, seven days a week, even as he kept other projects simmering. ![]() ![]() What happened? How did the man who longed to be - and arguably was - television’s answer to Arthur Miller end up instead as an edgier version of Ed McMahon?Įxhaustion played a part. The Twilight Zone won numerous industry awards and wide critical praise during its five-season run from 1959 to 1964 on CBS, confirming Serling’s place as one of the most prolific and innovative writers and producers to emerge from the live-drama era of the 1950s, television’s original “golden age.” But by the time he died in 1975, Serling was probably less well known for his writerly creativity than as the host of a quiz show and as the face of TV commercials for cigarettes and cars. This was The Twilight Zone, which its creator and chief writer, Rod Serling, described as “a series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of nature.” Television, declared Minow, was turning into a “vast wasteland” of “blood and thunder” and “formula comedies.” Minow, the recently appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, specified only one weekly series he found “dramatic and moving,” a hopeful sign of what broadcast television could become. In his 1961 address to the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, Newton Minow famously offered a pessimistic assessment of America’s most exciting new industry.
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