He wasn’t sure he’d be able to develop his characters and stories sufficiently in that time frame. Serling was a famous dramatist who was used to writing TV scripts that ran at least an hour, and sometimes 90 minutes. It’s a sign, though, of how unsure CBS still was that they offered Serling only a half-hour slot in which to do his show - much to his chagrin. And the mysterious ending (which, in retrospect, is clearly very TZ-like) suggests that he actually was going back in time. He’s sure that he’s actually traveling back in time. Even more bizarre, the man believes it’s not a dream. The story concerned a man who tells his psychiatrist about a recurring dream, one in which he finds himself in Hawaii the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor.Īgain and again, he tries to warn people, but to no avail. Still, it took the ratings success of “ The Time Element“, a Serling script that was produced for Desilu Playhouse in 1958, to convince them. CBS wasn’t sure viewers would bite.Īs we now know, they needn’t have worried. Such fare isn’t unusual today, but in the buttoned-down world of the 1950s, it was pretty far out. He was giving viewers everything from alien visitors to parallel planes of existence. Serling, however, wanted to take audiences to different planets (at a time when the moon landing was still a decade away) and to different eras (via time travel). Hitchcock was trafficking in fiction, yes, but his stories weren’t supernatural. Part of the problem, as you can see from that last sentence, was the subject matter of Serling’s proposed series. “I wanted to do it for years, but they said no, no, no. “It was a show no one wanted to buy,” Serling later said. The writer then known as “TV’s angry young man” had to fight for it. You’d think the success of Hitchcock’s show (it had been on the air for exactly four years when The Twilight Zone premiered on October 2, 1959) would make CBS’s decision to approve Serling’s show an easy one. Sure, AHP lacked the color and wide-screen glamor of Hitchcock’s theatrical releases, but it brought the same cheeky attitude he was famous for to more modest tales of greed, obsession, and homicide. Hitchcock’s name on a movie meant long lines at the box office, so they banked on his name on a weekly TV show translating into people tuning him in at home. CBS was willing to take a gamble on Alfred Hitchcock Presents because the portly director’s fame would draw in curious viewers who had eagerly flocked to such thrillers as “Notorious”, “Strangers on a Train”, and “Rear Window”. That calls for a lot of trust on the part of the audience. Every episode brings a totally new cast and setup. They prefer to hook viewers with a strong situation and memorable characters - ones the audience can be sure will be there week after week. The networks have never been crazy about putting anthologies on the air. That’s really saying something, by the way. So it’s hardly surprising that they were behind the two most successful anthologies in the history of television. If anything, the intervening years have deepened my appreciation for their work. It’s hard to beat Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock. But you know what? My top answers are still the same today. If I were to list all of my favorites now, it would take a while. I’ve seen the work of many more directors since then, and quite a few more TV series. If you’d asked me to name my favorite director, I’d have said the man behind Alfred Hitchcock Presents. If you’d asked me when I was a teenager to name my favorite TV series, I’d have said The Twilight Zone.
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