10 Days Before The Twilight Zone Premiered, Mike Wallace Asked Rod Serling A Question

[TMC]

...That Aged Badly

https://www.slashfilm.com/1444393/th...-bad-question/

BY WILLIAM BIBBIANI/NOV. 11, 2023 8:00 PM EST

Nobody can predict the future, but sometimes our predictions are way, way off. Back in 1946, 20th Century Fox studio executive and Oscar-winning film producer Daryl F. Zanuck said television was a fad that would run its course in six months. "People," he argued, "will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

Zanuck was wrong. Television not only changed the industry, it changed the world. And over time this medium that seemed like a flash in the pan developed its own identity, not just as an industry but as an art form. Brilliant writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling helped push the stories told on television into exciting and challenging directions, setting the stage for ambitious standalone and serialized entertainments that wowed audiences and made a genuine impact.

One television series that made its mark and remains influential and iconic today is Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," a sci-fi/fantasy anthology series featuring tales of irony and morality that gave popular culture some of its most enduring references, and helped establish sci-fi/fantasy in the mainstream as a serious artistic enterprise. "The Twilight Zone" is arguably one of the most important accomplishments in the history of television.

And yet, just ten days before the premiere of the very first episode (sort of), newsman Mike Wallace interviewed Rod Serling and asked him a question that he never would have asked if he could have predicted the future ...

'You've given up on writing anything important'

We have to set the stage here, because Mike Wallace's question came at an interesting time in Rod Serling's career. He had made his name writing hard-hitting, serious teleplays like "Patterns," about the intersecting evils of ageism and capitalism, and "Requiem for a Heavyweight," about a boxer with brain damage struggling to rebuild his life. He also wrote scripts like "A Town Has Turned to Dust," originally an allegory for the lynching of Emmett Till, until network sponsors demanded crowd-pleasing changes that undermined Serling's artistic vision.

The episode of "The Mike Wallace Interview" featuring Serling had already delved into his comically difficult wrestles with sponsors, who demanded bizarre changes to his many screenplays, and made it difficult to tell controversial stories. "The Twilight Zone," Serling himself argued, was designed in such a way that sponsors would have little to complain about. "We're dealing with a half-hour show, which cannot probe like a ninety [minute show], which doesn't use scripts as vehicles for social criticism. These are strictly for entertainment."

By this point Serling was well into production on the first season of "The Twilight Zone," and either he was fooling himself — which seems highly unlikely — or he knew he was about to get away with something. They were likely already working on "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," as damning an indictment of "Red Scare" McCarthyism as any ever filmed. Future episodes of "The Twilight Zone" would directly warn the audience of the rise of American white supremacist fascism, the painful scars left over from the Holocaust, and the dangers of capitalism replacing workers through automation.

Still, at the time, nobody had seen a frame, so Mike Wallace could perhaps be forgiven for asking, "For the time being and for the foreseeable future, you've given up on writing anything important for television, right?"