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Happy Birthday to Jack Klugman, one of the most prolific starring performers of The Twilight Zone!

5.01 In Praise of Pip

Director: Joseph M. Newman

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“Submitted for your approval, one Max Phillips, a slightly-the-worse-for wear maker of book, whose life has been as drab and undistinguished as a bundle of dirty clothes. And, though it’s very late in his day, he has an errant wish that the rest of his life might be sent out to a laundry to come back shiny and clean, this to be a gift of love to a son named Pip.”

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The Incredible World of Horace Ford premiered on this day in 1963!

4.15 The Incredible World of Horace Ford

Director: Abner Biberman

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“ Mr. Horace Ford, who has a preoccupation with another time, a time of childhood, a time of growing up, a time of street games, stickball and hide-‘n-go-seek. He has a reluctance to go check out a mirror and see the nature of his image: proof positive that the time he dwells in has already passed him by.”

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The Big Tall Wish first aired OTD in 1960!

1.27 The Big Tall Wish

Director: Ron Winston

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“Little boys. Little boys with their heads full up with dreams. When do they find out, Frances? When do they suddenly find out that there ain’t any magic? When does somebody push their face down on the sidewalk and say to them, ‘Hey, little boy, it’s concrete. That’s what the world is made out of, concrete.’ When do they find out that you can wish your life away?”

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Sounds and Silences premiered on this day 60 years ago!

5.27 Sounds and Silences

Director: Richard Donner

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“This is Roswell G. Flemington, two hundred and twenty pounds of gristle, lung tissue and sound decibels. He is, as you have perceived, a noisy man; one of a breed who substitutes volume for substance, sound for significance, and shouting to cover up the readily apparent phenomenon that he is nothing more than an overweight and aging perennial Sea Scout whose noise-making is in inverse ratio to his competence and to his character. But soon our would-be admiral of the fleet will embark on another voyage.”

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The Masks first aired 60 years ago on this date!

5.25 The Masks

Director: Ida Lupino

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“Mr. Jason Foster, a tired ancient who on this particular Mardi Gras evening will leave the Earth. But before departing, he has some things to do, some services to perform, some debts to pay—and some justice to mete out.”

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A World of Difference originally aired OTD in 1960!

1.23 A World of Difference

Director: Ted Post

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“The modus operandi for the departure from life is usually a pine box of such and such dimensions, and this is the ultimate in reality. But there are other ways for a man to exit from life.”

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1.03b Children’s Zoo

Director: Robert Downey

Writer: Chris Hubbell & Gerrit Graham

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Summary:

A little girl (Jaclyn Bernstein) purposefully tidies her room to the soundtrack of her parents (Lorna Luft & Steven Keats) having a shouting match elsewhere in the house. She removes a scroll from her dresser drawer—it’s a very exclusive invitation to the Children’s Zoo. She takes the scroll and her favorite teddy bear in hand and makes one last appraisal of her room. Above her dresser is a banner with “Welcome” written in large capital letters.

She enters the kitchen where her parents continue to argue crudely about seemingly anything and everything. She interrupts them and hands her mother the invitation. As one might expect, they now argue about the invitation and its stipulation that both parents must accompany the child.

They load into their station wagon and arrive at a brightly-colored facade—the exhibits are all indoors. The girl enters through a child-sized door on her own, meanwhile the parents do not cease their quarreling at any moment. The woman running the zoo herds the parents to their special Parents’ “waiting room.”

The girl heads down a darkened hallway toward the first exhibit. Behind a large, circular glass window is a haggard looking man and woman. They beg the girl desperately to free them.

At the next exhibit, she finds a couple anxiously trying to find an escape from their room. When the girl activates the intercom, the man (Wes Craven) spouts off threats at her.

The next is a couple sleeping. This is followed by a couple ready to bargain with her like used-car salesmen desperate to drop a lemon. They promise her all the cookies and ice cream and delayed bedtimes her heart desires. She moves on.

Finally, the girl reaches an exhibit with a couple that speak to her calmly and explain that they’ve learned their lesson and speak with regret of their seven-year-old son who dropped them off there. The girl has made her choice.

The girl leaves the zoo with her new parents, as her discarded parents look on in dismay and shout for her to come back.

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More about Children’s Zoo:

Children’s Zoo was written by the team of Chris Hubbell and Gerrit Graham. For both writers, TZ ‘85 is their first screenwriting credit.

Yes, this Gerrit Graham.

They would go on to write two more stories for TZ ‘85 and also do some work for Disney films later. Hubbell also did some writing for children’s television in the 1990s. 

Here’s the thing: Children’s Zoo is the best segment of the three scripted by Hubbell and Graham. One, Opening Day (1.10c), is easily one of the worst segments from TZ ‘85 and the other, Still Life (1.14a) is also pretty rough. Not a great track record, but I’ll talk about the other stories more as I work through the series chronologically. For this episode, I don’t have much behind-the-scenes material to report on, so I can’t say for certain why this story was bought or commissioned. 

It’s not an especially strong script or story, but Children’s Zoo has two saving graces: it’s a shorter segment and it’s directed by Robert Downey. 

Downey clearly envisioned an appropriate level of absurdity for the concept and had the skill as a director to execute it with enough style to make Children’s Zoo just over the top enough and still be coherent. While it isn’t as humorous as it might be, the soundtrack of arguing was very effective, and I think Luft and Keats do a good job of crafting cartoonishly bad parent characters in a very short span of time.

As for the short runtime, this is another instance of the final presentation of a story benefitting from the flexibility the showrunners had in regard to length of segments. 

(As a refresher, the team was able to produce all of the segments for this season and then arrange the segments to fill an hour time slot, before the show went to air. It’s very uncommon to be given this much time in TV production btw.) 

The short runtime may have helped Children’s Zoo as a standalone story, it doesn’t really jive with the other stories in this episode in any meaningful way. I’m speaking in comparison to the previous episode’s short, Dreams for Sale (1.02b), which created a nice thematic and tonal bridge between the two longer segments. Children’s Zoo however feels more like the non-sequitur-esque shorts of Night Gallery (1969). Even though I personally enjoy some of the humorous padding segments in Night Gallery, that’s not a compliment here. 

Something that concerned me—both when watching this series for the first time but also when researching the production—was that it seemed too informed by Night Gallery. Not only is it a very different show than the TZ ‘59, it also wasn’t nearly as well-received. Additionally, Rod Serling did not have much creative control over Night Gallery, and he disliked the shorts, but didn’t have the authority to nix them. All that is to say that Night Gallery is not a particularly smart place to pull inspiration from for a revival of The Twilight Zone. Additionally, Night Gallery had been canceled for low ratings only ten years before TZ ‘85’s initial production was launched. I suppose network executives have short memories. 

Considering Night Gallery’s influence on this show, it’s strange that Philip DeGuere, the showrunner for the first season of TZ ‘85, gave as a reason for the show’s failure (in the ratings) that people weren’t attuned to anthology shows anymore and didn’t get the format. Again, Night Gallery went off the air in ‘73. Also, the very successful Tales from the Darkside premiered in 1983 (although with a more economical budget/production model) and that was created in the wake of the popularity of Creepshow (1982), which was an anthology film. In short, that’s a cockamamie reason for TZ ‘85 not performing to expectations. 

Apologies for the slight tangent! The most obvious original TZ episode that comes to mind to pair with Children’s Zoo is The Bewitchin’ Pool (5.36). Of course, there’s a dash of I Sing the Body Electric (3.35) in there too. [If Children’s Zoo had a stronger script it might have been great to include the emotional resonance of either of those TZ ‘59 stories. But, I stand by the fact that Downey’s absurdist take was likely the right call for the script he was working from.]

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1.03a Healer

Director: Sigmund Neufeld Jr.

Writer: Alan Brennert (credited under the name “Michael Bryant”)

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Opening narration: 

“Ah, Jackie, Jackie, you're a small-timer. A roof crawler, a poke pincher, a nickel and dime drifter with salt in your dreams and ashes in your pocket. Don't cut that wire...Jackie, don't open that window. You won't be able to jimmy yourself out as easily as you got in. That's not the big score in there. It's the Twilight Zone.”

Summary:

Jackie Thompson (Eric Bogosian) is busy at work burglarizing a museum. In an exhibit of objects on loan from El Museo Nacional de Arqueología in Mexico City,* Jackie finds a gleaming crystal. Jackie accidentally trips the alarm when opens the case for the crystal and is chased by a guard. Jackie is shot, but escapes. Hiding in an alley outside of the museum, Jackie clutches the crystal, which begins to glow. Suddenly, his wound is healed.

Later at his apartment building, Jackie’s friend and neighbor, Harry (Vincent Gardenia) has dropped dead. Jackie quickly runs to retrieve the crystal and uses it to bring Harry back to life. When Harry wakes up, he tells Jackie about his near-death experience and the two begin to hatch plans for this new-found power.

Skipping ahead, Jackie, now going by “Brother John,” and Harry have started a thriving televised faith-healing operation. Backstage, it’s clear that Harry’s mind is solely focused on growing the business, while Jackie/John is interested in helping as many people as possible. 

Here enters Duende (Joaquín Martínez), who requests that Jackie return what was stolen, explaining that it is an important object for his people** and it was only temporarily on loan to the museum. Jackie is at first amenable, but Harry shuts it down. Duende warns Jackie that this refusal was a turning point.

Back at their new mansion, Jackie and Harry get an unexpected visit from a crime boss, Joseph Ribello (Robert Costanzo). Jackie once worked under Ribello, who was a cruel employer. Now, Ribello has learned that he has lung cancer and he’s come to Jackie to ask for healing. Jackie makes Ribello grovel and asks for two million dollars payment. But, when Jackie goes to heal Ribello, the crystal doesn’t light up. Nothing happens.

Jackie and Harry leave for their TV broadcast, but Jackie is panicking that the crystal isn’t working. Harry collects someone from the line of people waiting to be healed, a deaf child. It’s now five minutes to air time, but the crystal has gone totally dark. 

Once again Duende appears backstage and explains to an angry Jackie that the healing only works permanently if the intentions of the user are unselfish—this was the turning point Duende referenced earlier. 

Jackie’s gunshot wound reappears. Jackie runs to find Harry and asks him to use the crystal on him, but Harry is too far gone. Harry plans on letting Jackie die and keeping their earnings for himself. 

Jackie collapses, but he’s been followed by the deaf child. The child heals Jackie using the crystal. And, now that he has learned his lesson, Jackie is able to grant the child hearing. Jackie returns the crystal to Duende and walks away from the theatre with a new lease on life.

Closing narration:

"Now, he is John—no longer Jackie. Perhaps not Brother John, brother to all men, but at least fit to walk among men who care. Because caring is part of the secret, the secret we all learn, that the heart cannot heal what the eye cannot see. Not even, in the Twilight Zone."

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*It isn’t spoken in the episode that the artifact came from a museum in Mexico City, it’s visible on a sign in the establishing shot of the exhibit. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the artifact is specifically from the area of CDMX. 

**When Duende is talking to Jackie here, he does not specify who precisely his people are. I bring this up to point out the awkward indigenous stereotypes at work in this episode. Duende is not a full-fledged character in this episode and his appearances and disappearances are presented as if they are vaguely mystical.

More about Healer:

I’m disappointed to say this so early on in my review of this series, but Healer is the first proper dud of TZ ‘85. There are worse episodes later on, but this one just doesn’t match the quality of the previous stories.

Reportedly, Alan Brennert, the writer of Healer, is in agreement with me. Brennert reworked the story for a prose short story later. I hope I can get my hands on a copy to maybe get some insight into what specific faults Brennert found in this story. Brennert places some blame on the segment’s director, Sigmund Neufeld Jr. Seeing that this is Neufeld’s only episode of the series, Brennert likely wasn’t alone in his dissatisfaction.

Healer is somehow underbaked and overdone at the same time. A cat burglar with a heart of gold, his father figure with a two-bit mindset, a particularly unkind mob boss being forced to face his own mortality are all potentially interesting archetypes to weave into a story about a stolen object with supernatural powers—but all this gels into nothing much at all. The undoubtedly talented cast is doing the best with what they are given, but there’s just not enough time given to explore anything fully. Robert Costanzo’s mob boss only has one scene! The characters never properly transcend their typage, even though, in the case of Bogosian’s Jackie, that transcendence is key for the story—as it’s told here at least.

That said, the story additionally dabbles in stereotypes of mystical indigenous people. In a different take on this story, there could be potential for some kind of conversation about cultural appropriation vs. appreciation. However, in this form, there is no attempt to address, avert, or subvert the insulting mysticizing of indigenous people and cultures.

Taken all together, the moral fable element of Healer is too shallow and polluted by stereotypes. This episode is the first indication—there’s more to come unfortunately—that TZ ‘85 doesn’t consistently reflect a progressive humane worldview for its time—something that was a fundamental aspect of TZ ‘59. (I’ll reflect more on this aspect later, as it’s a major factor in Harlan Ellison’s exit from the show.) The opening to this episode has a very direct analogue in the original series in A Nice Place to Visit (1.28). The rest of the story however, has a lot of Prime Mover (2.21) in it and touches of A Kind of a Stopwatch (5.04).

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1.02c Chameleon

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: James Crocker

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Summary:

In orbit above the earth, a spacewalking astronaut notices a strange blue light flashing off part of the space shuttle Discovery. When the shuttle returns to earth, two engineers, Brady (John Ashton) and Gerald (Steve Bassett), are asked to inspect one of the exterior cameras after it malfunctioned in orbit. When Brady removes the camera, he is engulfed in blue light and disappears—leaving just the camera. The camera is moved to a sealed observation lab where a team of NASA scientists can securely examine it. Dr. Curt Lockridge (Terry O’Quinn) and his team try to reason through what happened while they wait for consultation from a higher ranking scientist, Dr. Vaughn Heilman (Ben Piazza). 

The camera flares up in blue light again, but now the observation lab is occupied by, what appears to be, Brady. “Brady” pleads with them to let him out. They attempt to reason with him, but “Brady” becomes increasingly irate. In a fit of desperation, “Brady” shape shifts into the form of Brady’s wife, Kathy (Lin Shaye). Kathy then pleads the case to the scientists to let “Brady” go home. This reveals that when this shapeshifter absorbs someone, it also absorbs their knowledge and memories, as the real Kathy is safe at home. 

The scientists catch the shapeshifter up in its misunderstanding. It morphs back into its Brady form and begins to lash out. They decide to forcibly sedate the Brady-Thing, and Heilman enters the room to examine it. The Brady-Thing wakes up and absorbs Heilman. Rather than taking on Heilman’s form, it morphs into a bomb with a clock counting down to detonation. As it turns out, Heilman used to work in weapons R&D. Lockridge decides to enter the room himself as a sign of trust, to reason with it and set it free. When the countdown reaches zero, another flash, and out of the room runs the shapeshifter, now in the form of Heilman. 

Lockridge chases after it, out onto the tarmac of the airfield. The shapeshifter explains to Lockridge that it ended up on earth out of pure curiosity and assures him that Heilman and Brady are not being held prisoner. Unable to explain its nature in human language, it offers Lockridge the opportunity to merge with it as well, and travel the universe. Lockridge declines and the shapeshifter transforms into a swirling ball of light, launching itself into the open night sky.

Closing Narration:

“Imagine yourself a visitor to many worlds, drifting on the solar wind, a thousand voices singing in your memory. Now imagine you're this man, who can only guess at the wonders he might have known, wonders that exist for him now only as a riddle... from The Twilight Zone."

More about Chameleon:

Chameleon was conceived and written by supervising producer James Crocker. On the DVD commentary for this episode, Crocker explained that his inspiration for writing this story was simply that he liked shapeshifter stories. It was refreshing to hear to be honest, as sometimes producers who envision themselves as creatives build up grandiose creation myths for their creative output. Anyway, I think that this approach worked out well for Chameleon as a Twilight-Zone story. Crocker successfully took inspiration from  preexisting stories about shapeshifting alien beings and synthesized something original from it. (My assumption is that his inspirations were The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Thing (1982) (or The Thing from Another World (1951)), and maybe just a touch from the Star Trek TOS episode “The Squire of Gothos.” But, that’s just my speculation!) 

Superficially, Chameleon reminded me more of a story that might appear on The Outer Limits. However, the shorter runtime of the episode gives it a Twilight Zone-y flair of presenting the viewer with a strange premise for them to mull over on their own. That is, Chameleon is relatively fantastic, rather than explicative, which would be more in line with the more sci-fi leaning Outer Limits. 

No specific episodes of the original series immediately come to mind to pair Chameleon with, which is a good thing. If every episode had an analog in the original series, this reimagining of the series wouldn’t be showing much imagination! However, if I’m pressed to pair it, I’d go with The Lateness of the Hour (2.08) for depicting the panic response of suddenly not comprehending who or what you are or The Invaders (2.15) for depicting a fundamental difficulty in communicating between people from different planets. While this isn’t a Twilight Zone episode, The Outer Limits episode Corpus Earthing also came to mind when watching this story for the first time.

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1.02b Dreams for Sale

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Writer: Joe Gannon

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Summary:

On one sunny afternoon, a family is enjoying an idyllic picnic in the country. Mom (Meg Foster) and dad are setting out lunch while the twins play monkey in the middle with their golden retriever. It’s a celebration for the family as they’ve bought a new house and dad got a pay raise at work. Strangeness seeps into what should be a perfect scene when mom’s brain starts playing tricks on her. She could have sworn that she heard dad open the bottle of champagne twice. She could have sworn she already set the chicken out on the blanket, but it’s still wrapped up in the basket. These glitches in perception amp up until mom can’t take it anymore. She screams and wakes, as if from a nightmare, in a pod hooked up to a computer, in a row of pods hooked up to computers. Screens advertise “Fully Interactive Dreams” including a “Country Picnic.” She steps out of her pod to find a massive enclosed facility in varying shades of gray and slate blue. A technician approaches her and quickly diagnoses the problem. He assures her that he’ll get the machine up and running so that she can finish the last six minutes of her allotted dream time. Then, of course, she has to get back to work. Mom wakes up on the picnic blanket, her head resting on dad’s lap. She tells him about the horrible dream she just had. Back at the facility the dream machine has had a major malfunction and the technician calls for help, but it’s too late—she’s dead.

More about Dreams for Sale:

When the first season of TZ ‘85 was made, the team had the luxury of putting together each of the stories before the series went to air. This had two distinct advantages within the show’s anthology format: 

1. flexibility in the lengths of the stories and 

2. ability to mix and match which stories to pair up. 

Approaching each segment as a standalone short film without a hard runtime to stick to meant that no story was forced to overstay its welcome, and no story would have to be jammed into too short of a time slot. Thinking back to TZ ‘59, there are stories from seasons 1-3 & 5 that could be even better with a shorter or longer runtime. There are also plenty of stories from season 4 that were detrimentally inflated to fit the longer time slot. Having the freedom to tell the chosen stories in the amount of time that the creative team felt was appropriate must have felt like a real boon. Overall, I think it works, though perhaps it was too much of a departure from the format of the original TZ for audiences. After all, the third season of TZ ‘85 returned to the 30-minute format of the original series and that season’s ratings grew as it aired. Maybe the format reminded the contemporary TV audience of Night Gallery (1969) more than Twilight Zone? It’s speculation of course, but as I’ll delve into further as this project continues, the viewing public’s expectations for anything branded with The Twilight Zone, can be very particular. 

Dreams for Sale is the first shorter segment of the series that went to air. One could certainly build the story out to something longer—it has more than a little in common with the feature-length film The Matrix (1999)—but it’s very striking as a vignette. 

Dreams for Sale works well as a segue between the other two segments of this episode. (In contrast to Night Gallery’s use of shorts, which always feel like non sequiturs.) The previous segment, Wordplay, has a similar progression to Dreams: very grounded, relatable moments where the protagonist questions their perceptions ramping up to a preternatural degree. Tonally, however, it has a bit more in common with the following segment, Chameleon. Both are more inclined toward science-fiction and the challenge to the protagonist’s understanding of the world results in a reshaped concept of their lived reality. 

One last note: This was the first story to air not directed by Wes Craven. Instead, this installment was done by Tommy Lee Wallace, director of the unjustly maligned Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and the justly maligned It (1990). Since this post is going up in the middle of Spooky Season, I’m gonna take a second to recommend Halloween III for seasonal viewing. (Not if you’re afraid of bugs though!) Halloween III was an interesting but failed experiment to take the Halloween franchise in a broader direction. BUT, I think if you take Season of the Witch on its own terms as a horror movie set at Halloween, and not as part of the franchise, it’s enjoyable and strange. It’s got a real eerie vibe and a way-too-catchy commercial jingle.

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1.02a Wordplay

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: Rockne S. O’Bannon

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Summary:

After pulling a late night to study a new medical supply line that his company is selling, Bill Lowery (Robert Klein) wakes up in an armchair in his living room, tucked in with his study binders by his caring wife, Kathy (Annie Potts). As the family goes through their typical morning routine, Bill finds out that their son, Donnie,  is showing signs of the flu and is mildly confused when his wife says that the doctor filling in for their regular pediatrician is called “Dr. Bumper.” Bill heads to work, but stops to greet his neighbor (Robert Downey), who happily tells Bill that his pet “encyclopedia” successfully gave birth to a litter of nine. At the office, struggling to keep up with his clients and all of the new products he’s meant to hawk, the communication stumbling blocks keep on coming. When Bill heads home for lunch, his wife confirms that he didn’t mishear anything and that the typical word for a midday meal is, in fact, “dinosaur.” Bill tries his hardest to make it through the day, but quicker and quicker his ability to comprehend English degrades. In a single conversation with the office secretary, he goes from “Mr. Lowery” to “Mr. Thunder.” Distressed, he retreats home early but is met with his panicking wife. Donnie’s illness has taken a bad turn and they rush him to the hospital. Bill has to rely entirely on Kathy by this point to communicate with the hospital staff. Bill and Kathy wait desperately to see if their son is going to pull through, while the linguistic barrier that has suddenly cut Bill off from the rest of the world looms in the backs of their minds. Thankfully, Donnie is going to be okay and the Lowerys are able to go home to what is probably the quietest and strangest dinner of their lives. Bill then makes his way to Donnie’s room, where he pulls out a learn-to-read book, mirroring how he ended the previous day, but this time with a more momentous assignment facing him.

Closing Narration: 

“A question trembles in the silence: why did this remarkable thing happen to this perfectly ordinary man? It may not matter why the world shifted so drastically for him. Existence is slippery at the best of times. What does matter is that Bill Lowery isn't ordinary. He's one of us—a man determined to prevail in the world that was, and the world that is, or the world that will be...in the Twilight Zone."

More about Wordplay:

Wordplay started out as an unsolicited script that Rockne S. O’Bannon was shopping around early in his TV writing career. The strength of the script got him the job of Story Editor for the series. And a strong script it was! 

Wordplay has a fantastic build from a mundane occurrence escalating to a preternatural level. The way Philip DeGuere, TZ ‘85’s showrunner described Wordplay was that the story captured a feeling of everyone being in on something that you’re not, and not finding any way out of it. That’s a sound strategy for creating a suspenseful story, but the emphasis on the humanity of the characters involved make Wordplay especially effective. O’Bannon, Craven, and the cast created a lived-in world for the Lowerys. Even though the story is told in such a short amount of time, Bill and Kathy are clearly in tune without any histrionics or romance overselling their care for one another to the viewer. The segment communicates to us how comfortable their domestic situation is through little touches like Kathy covering Bill up when he fell asleep working or the moment when they rush Donnie into the emergency room, and Bill so quickly defers to Kathy when he can’t communicate to the nurse. You feel how much they trust and rely on one another. This is communicated subtly (often not using words, haha!) but the tension of this life being ruined by this sudden-onset aphasia is more deeply felt. Klein is cast against type here, but he truly knocks this performance out of the park.

Wordplay feels like more of a departure from TZ ‘59 than the previous two stories, but the underlying experience that DeGuere pointed out is certainly familiar. Based on that principle, the first original TZ episode that came to mind to pair it with is Mirror Image (S1E21), but I’d love to hear if it evoked any other stories for you! Maybe Sounds and Silences (S5E27), but inverted to be about a likable character in a happy marriage?

Side note, but as someone with auditory processing disorder, I wonder if O’Bannon might also have it, because things like “fasten stepdad” and “Hinge Thunder” pretty precisely capture how I mishear things. It’s not always prisencolinensinainciusol. 

Before seeing this installment, I was already aware of Rockne S. O’Bannon because of Farscape (1999), but it was news to me that he also created Alien Nation (1989) and seaQuest DSV (1993). Like, how was I not aware that so many shows I loved in my childhood were the brainchild of this one guy?! Anyhow, it was very cool to look back at O’Bannon’s start in TV speculative fiction with the knowledge of what a huge creative force he would be in the following decades. I haven’t seen the show O’Bannon is currently working on, Evil (2019), but that also seems very up my alley! If you’ve seen it, let me know what you think! Is it worth checking out?

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1.01b A Little Peace and Quiet

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: James Crocker

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Opening Narration:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if, once in a while, everyone would just shut up and stop pestering you? Wouldn’t it be great to have the time to finish a thought? Or spin a daydream? To think out loud without being required to explain what exactly you meant? If you had the power, would you dare to use it? Even knowing that silence may have voices of its own.. to The Twilight Zone.”

Summary: 

Penny (Melinda Dillion) is at her wit’s end. Between four hyperactive children, a husband who acts like a fifth child, a dog whose mortal enemy is the telephone, and all of the cacophonies of modern suburban convenience, she can’t find a single second of peace. One typically loud suburban afternoon, while at work in her garden, Penny uncovers a small wooden box containing a golden pendant. Later, while wearing the pendant, Penny discovers that it has the unique ability to stop time when the wearer utters the magic words: “shut up.” She quickly starts using (and slightly abusing) this power to complete her daily tasks unbothered. The backdrop of her chaotic suburban life is the looming threat of nuclear war. Penny makes light of the idea of “World War III” and repeatedly refuses to give much thought to the bomb. Unfortunately, one night, while Penny luxuriates in a bubble bath, giggling to herself over her plans with the pendant, that threat presents itself at her doorstep. He husband frantically calls for her to hear the news that a bomb is headed straight for them. As Penny huddles on her bed with her husband and son, she cries out “shut up” in a last-moment litany. Now frozen in the moment before certain doom for Penny and the life she was only now finding contentment in, Penny walks the streets and spots the bomb hanging still in the sky.

More about A Little Peace and Quiet:

A Little Peace and Quiet was an original idea and teleplay by James Crocker, who was primarily a producer for TZ ‘85. Surprisingly, prior to this series, Crocker’s work in television, both as a writer and producer, skewed more toward the episodic detective genre. Following TZ ‘85 though, he worked on major speculative TV series such as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), The Outer Limits (1995), and the second reboot of The Twilight Zone (2002). 

It wasn’t until I sat down to write up the summary of this episode that I appreciated how densely packed the storytelling is in A Little Peace and Quiet. Specifically, Penny taking the bomb too lightly is reiterated at a regular pace throughout the runtime, starting with minor background elements that you might overlook, then growing into Penny’s outright rejection to engage with a pair of clipboarders. The episode is so laden with quirky frozen-time tableaus that you as the viewer become just as distracted from the worsening geopolitical situation happening in the background as Penny is. So, when the big finale comes, it’s a big gut punch to the viewer as well.

Perhaps the most obvious TZ ‘59 episodes to compare to A Little Peace and Quiet are A Kind of a Stopwatch (S5E4), an episode with a similar MacGuffin, or Time Enough at Last (S1E8), where the protagonist longs for some peace and quiet himself when he’s suddenly faced with an apocalyptic event. But, I think an additional companion episode to consider would be The Shelter (S3E3). In comparison, the changing attitudes of mainstream America from 1961 to 1985 really stand out—specifically attitudes toward the suburbs and toward the possibility of The Cold War turning hot. Whereas in 1961, it was subversive to suggest that the American suburbs were not, in fact, a place of harmony, by 1985, it was already a commonly-held opinion that suburbs were anything but peaceful. The protagonist of The Shelter diligently prepares for the potentiality of nuclear war while his friends and neighbors are woefully unprepared. Our protagonist in A Little Peace and Quiet, however, is framed as relatable in her lack of concern, maybe reflecting a growing indifference in the duck-and-cover generation after decades of Cold War.

Though this doesn’t specifically relate to The Shelter, another updated attitude reflected in A Little Peace and Quiet is the perception of the homemaker. I appreciate this story popping up so early in the reboot since Serling got a lot of flack when TZ ‘59 was on the air for how he wrote women. It’s something he tried to rectify in earnest, and it gets progressively better across the original series’ run. Here in Dillon’s Penny, we have a common Serling-like protagonist in that she is dissatisfied with her current lot in life and generally put upon. However she’s also a frustrated homemaker, who, in some of Serling’s less thoughtful stories, would be nagging the protagonist rather than be the protagonist. In A Little Peace and Quiet, Penny is framed as a character the viewer is meant to relate to—though whether one relates to her or not is obviously relative. All around, I guess what I’m getting at is that this installment feels heavily influenced by the original TZ, but thoughtfully contemporized and seasoned with an interesting reversal of archetypes.

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1.01a Shatterday

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: Alan Brennert (teleplay) & Harlan Ellison (short story)

Cinematographer: Bradford May

Opening Narration: 

“Some push for what they need; some push for what they want. Some people, like Peter Jay Novins, just push. If they do it hard enough and long enough, something might just push back… from The Twilight Zone.”

Summary: 

One night, in a crowded Manhattan bar, Peter Novins (Bruce Willis) distractedly makes the mistake of dialing his own phone number. In an unexpected turn of events, Peter Novins, having a cozy night in, answers the call. Over the course of the next few days, the two Novinses battle for ownership of his life. Novins #1 closes out his bank account and cancels his grocery delivery all while locked out of his apartment by Novins #2. Novins #2 meanwhile pulls out of a deal to do PR for an environmentally destructive company, and takes decisive steps to repair relationships with his mother and ex. As the days go by, Novins #1 shows distinct signs of illness and of wasting away, while Novins #2 becomes more vibrant and vigorous. Through phone conversations, the Novinses argue over what they’re experiencing, Novins #2 posits that Novins #1 had been leading a life filled with self-serving cruelties and that maybe this split was Novins’ personified last shred of decency taking a stand. In the end, when they finally meet face-to-face, Novins #1 comes to terms with his loss, and Novins #2 sympathetically casts off his old self.

Closing Narration: 

“Peter Jay Novins, both victor and victim of a brief struggle for custody of a man’s soul. A man who lost himself, and found himself, on a lonely battlefield, somewhere… in The Twilight Zone.”

More about Shatterday:

One of the guiding principles at the conception of TZ ‘85 was that it was going to be a writer’s TV show. The writer’s voice was going to be paramount in the creative vision of the show. Alan Brennert, TZ ‘85’s Executive Story Consultant, chose the short story “Shatterday” by Harlan Ellison for adaptation. Ellison, who was already a big name in speculative fiction, had also been hired on as a Creative Consultant for the series. While Brennert wrote the teleplay for this episode, Ellison contributed to the script and was on set for filming. (Though Ellison stated later that he didn’t contribute much on set as he didn’t quite jive with the episode’s director, Wes Craven.)

Shatterday serves as a great kick off to the series—it shows so much promise in capturing that elusive Twilight Zone-iness. The story is effectively wrought with a lot of great visual storytelling elements to contrast the two Novinses. The music gives the right eerie discordant tones at the right moments. The character journey of Novins #1 is essentially grieving over the loss of his own life and Willis’ performance is pitch perfect. Willis captures the disbelief, anger, desperation, and resignation of Novins #1, while on the flip side capturing Novins #2’s calm determination.

Shatterday is a familiar type of speculative story for The Twilight Zone. A preternatural challenge to the natural order is introduced and the story then follows a person’s journey to cope with it and/or reevaluate their perceptions. A factor that I think is important to this type of story from the original TZ is its shorter length at ~24 minutes. When executed well, you are left with plenty to mull over or expand your imagination with, but it’s told in a short enough burst that too many thoughts of practicality don’t seep in and distract you from the point of the story.

The TZ ‘59 episodes that Shatterday most reminded me of were Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room (S2E3) and In His Image (S4E1), particularly the element of someone choosing to make a foundational change in the way they live their lives necessitating the old version of themselves becoming just a memory.

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A Return to The Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone in Close-Ups began as a means to explore my hypothesis that every episode of the original series could be summed up through close-up shots due to the reliance on highly evocative close-ups in the cinematography. 

I was also inspired by Bela Balasz’s writing in Theory of the Film: 

“Facial expression is the most subjective manifestation of man, more subjective even than speech, for vocabulary and grammar are subject to more or less universally valid rules and conventions, while the play of features... is a manifestation not governed by objective canons, even though it is largely a matter of imitation. This most subjective and individual of human manifestations is rendered objective in the close-up."

Given that some of the core themes and motifs that Serling & Co. investigated in TZ were the nature of humanity, reality, and identity, it’s not a stretch to assume that close-ups could be a pivotal part of the storytelling. The close-ups not only enhance the depth of the emotion of the characters’ reactions to their often unusual surroundings and situations but also strengthens the connection we as viewers make with these characters and their experiences in The Twilight Zone. So, when we review each episode via ten stills of close-ups, that emotional thread pulls that story right to the forefront of our minds. After recording every single close-up over the course of 156 episodes, I’m comfortable saying that, yeah, the hypothesis bears out.

Now, that’s obviously a pretty specific thing to focus on for a 5-season-long television series, but the way The Twilight Zone was filmed is an undeniable factor in why the show stood out in its time and why it continues to engage people. Additionally, something that’s always fascinated me about The Twilight Zone is how often people try and struggle to put their finger on what exactly makes The Twilight Zone special.

Buck Houghton, producer on the first three seasons of TZ, once said of the show:

“The operative word is that basically nobody understood what made The Twilight Zone work except Rod.”

Now that we’ve had three reboots and a movie, none of which did all that well critically or popularly, maybe Houghton was right? Regardless, each subsequent Zone has presented us with different creative interpretations of what The Twilight Zone is supposed to be, in essence.

Leaping forward to the 1980s, it’s been twenty years since TZ first aired and now we have a generation of people working in TV and movies that grew up on the original show and revere it. CBS has owned the rights to TZ since 1965. Steven Spielberg aimed at a film adaptation from a sense of nostalgic appreciation for the show (and yes it ended up a mess) but then took what he learned and channeled it into (the much better) Amazing Stories (1985). George A. Romero worked up Tales from the Darkside (1983) as a sort of Creepshow TV adaptation, but skillfully melded in a heavy dose of Twilight Zone inspiration. That’s only a couple examples of the genre anthology revival of the 1980s.

However, when The Twilight Zone (1985) was greenlit, it was as an in-house project of a VP at CBS, Carla Singer. By all signs, Singer made a great call. The audience seemed primed to accept a new Zone in 1985. She assigned the project to Philip DeGuere, a reliable TV writer and producer. They hired a number of skilled writers and directors and purchased the rights to adapt stories from top authors in speculative fiction. As a result, there are plenty of good episodes across all three seasons. But, network meddling was intense and, as it was an in-house production, there was only so much the creative team could do. Singer moved on to other projects after the first season and network involvement in production ramped up as the show wasn’t meeting their expectations in the ratings. For the second season, the format was changed and the episode number was truncated. For the third season, the entire production was changed, the budget was slashed, and it was shot entirely in Canada. So, how exactly were viewers at the time supposed to get invested in the new TZ, if each season was a departure from the last? (Funnily enough, the Canadian season had growing appeal when it aired, but CBS had already decided that the revival project was over as soon as they had enough episodes for syndication.)

Was it really that Serling was the only one who got why The Twilight Zone worked? Or was it that Serling was given the necessary freedom to stay true to the principles on which he had conceived the show for the show’s entire run?

Please stick with  me while I continue this project through the first reboot of The Twilight Zone. I’ll still be attempting to capture each story in 10 close-ups, but with a little more detail on each episode included, since this show is not as extensively known as the original series. Let’s see if together we can figure out some things about where that Twilight Zone magic lies!

Important Content notes: 

While all episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone were shot on film, the finished episodes only persist on video tape, so all digital transfers have been made from those tapes. Therefore, the image quality is nowhere near as high as what we have for the original series. Frankly, I’m just happy that this show isn’t lost media!

For the first season, the show was made as an hour long show with multiple stories, so each installment of TZ in close-ups will represent one story, rather than one episode. Depending on my output capacity, that will result in 2-3 stories per week, that is, one episode per week.

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The first installment “Shatterday” starring Bruce Willis will go up on Tuesday, September 27. (The 37th anniversary of its debut!)

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And with that, the original series of the Twilight Zone, as told in close-up, is finished!

I’ve been working on this project on and off for a few years now and I sincerely hope you’ve all enjoyed it! Potential next phases for this project are under consideration already—further updates on that soon!

Also, in the interim, I might just have a little something exciting planned to celebrate completing the original series... Keep your eyes peeled!

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"Facial expression is the most subjective manifestation of man, more subjective even than speech, for vocabulary and grammar are subject to more or less universally valid rules and conventions, while the play of features... is a manifestation not governed by objective canons, even though it is largely a matter of imitation. This most subjective and individual of human manifestations is rendered objective in the close-up." - Béla Balázs from Theory of the Film

5.36 The Bewitchin’ Pool

Director: Joseph M. Newman

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“A brief epilogue for concerned parents: Of course, there isn’t any such place as the gingerbread house of Aunt T, and we grownups know there’s no door at the bottom of a swimming pool that leads to a secret place. But who can say how real the fantasy world of lonely children can become? For Jeb and Sport Sharewood, the need for love turned fantasy into reality.”

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5.36 The Bewitchin’ Pool

Director: Joseph M. Newman

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“A brief epilogue for concerned parents: Of course, there isn't any such place as the gingerbread house of Aunt T, and we grownups know there's no door at the bottom of a swimming pool that leads to a secret place. But who can say how real the fantasy world of lonely children can become? For Jeb and Sport Sharewood, the need for love turned fantasy into reality.”

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5.35 The Fear

Director: Ted Post

Director of Photography: Fred Mandl

“Fear, of course, is extremely relative. It depends on who can look down and who must look up. It depends on other vagaries like the time, the mood, the darkness. But it's been said before with great validity that the worst thing there is to fear is fear itself.”

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