Sixty-five years ago, on October 2, 1959, network television underwent a seismic change, even if no one knew it at the time. Why? The Twilight Zone premiered on CBS. Created and hosted by Rod Serling, who also wrote 92 of an eventual 156 episodes, the series was a weekly half-hour anthology of science fiction, horror, and fantasy tales, many of which were allegorical and ended with both a twist and a moral.
Serling, who’d become one of TV’s most acclaimed writers for his socially conscious dramas like Patterns and the Emmy-winning Requiem for a Heavyweight, thought he could get around network censors and leery sponsors by couching controversial topics in fantastical stories. “A Martian,” he once said, “can say things that a Republican or Democrat can’t.”
