23. The Man Behind 'The Twilight Zone'

Few people have made an impact on our screens as profound and lasting as Rod Serling, creator and host of The Twilight Zone, in which he and his team would interpret anxieties about human nature, nuclear war, the problems of power, and many more universal themes through genre exercises that exaggerate, allegorize, and depoliticized its subjects just enough to get by network censorship across the 1950s and 60s. And, since The Twilight Zone ended its original run in 1964, it has been rebooted in various forms: as an anthology film in 1983, a second TV series in 1985, a TV movie in 1994, another TV reboot in 2002, and finally a streaming series co-created by Jordan Peele in 2019. But none of these reimaginings caught on, perhaps for the simple reason that none of them had Rod Serling.

So who was Rod Serling? How did he accomplish what he did, what some have described as fundamentally changing the television landscape? And what should we make of a new short story from Serling’s archive that has plenty of horror but nothing supernatural? In today’s show, we hear an excerpt from a newly published story from Serling’s archive, “First Squad, First Platoon,” read by Matthias Jeske, followed by Nicholas Parisi, author of Rod Serling: His Life Work, and Imagination, and then Jodi Serling discusses her father’s legacy beyond The Twilight Zone.

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