Unbeknownst to Alan Sepinwall, the author of “Serling,” he was about to enter another dimension. This dimension is not only the dimension of vision and sound, but also the dimension of the soul. There are also unexpected connections in his narrative. The scene is in Los Angeles, where a veteran television critic (who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine) is hosting a 20th anniversary panel for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” While chatting with series star and creator Rob Mack in the green room at the event, Sepinwall casually mentioned that he was writing about Twilight creator Rod Serling.
Suddenly, Mike’s face lit up. “Alan,” he said, “you have to talk to me about this book. Rod Serling was my guy. Rod Serling had a huge influence on me.”
“I was thinking, OK certainly“I had my doubts,” Sepinwall recalled, “but I thought, OK, I’m going to indulge him because I like Rob. We’ll see what happens.”
Once they started talking, Sepinwall’s doubts disappeared. Instead, he ended up seeing Mac’s show in a new light. “There’s definitely Twilight DNA in ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and ‘Mythology’ and a lot of other stuff he did,” Sepinwall said. “That’s what happens to me most.”
As long as television exists, The Twilight Zone, which premiered on October 2, 1959, is unlikely to disappear completely. Heck, Bernard Herrmann’s creepy theme song alone will outlive humans.
But if some disaster causes the show to fade into the fog of oblivion, its creator’s influence will forever be woven into the medium, Sepinwall argues in his upcoming biography, “Selin: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with Television’s First Visionary.” From the greatest genre dramas to less obvious connections like the ridiculous shenanigans at Paddy’s Pub, Serling left his mark on screens big and small and on American audiences.
Since Sepinwall wrote the book on television — no, really, he co-wrote Television: The Book with critic Matt Zoller Seitz — who better to parse the nature of Serling’s evergreen appeal? That’s our recent conversation on Zoom about the mythmaker, writer, and actor who has haunted us for the better part of a century by making television better.
The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
(Courtesy of Alan Sepinwall)
After researching your book, what did you discover about popular perceptions of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone that might not be entirely accurate?
I think people assume that the person who created Twilight, and this creepy, ominous host, must have been a very dark and tortured person. Clearly there was something dark inside him; he came back from World War II too scarred to really cope. . . But he’s also a very outgoing person. You know, he’s a fun-loving, warm, funny dad who had an idyllic childhood and was a very popular, likeable guy who you wouldn’t expect from his portrayal.
When people think of Rod Serling and his impact on television, they basically associate him with genre television like Lost. But they wouldn’t necessarily think of a show like It’s Always Sunny . Are there any other places where you’re surprised to find Twilight DNA when you look closely?
Well, that’s not something I’m surprised to find out, since it’s been referenced a few times in the show, but it’s still like a less obvious one: “The Sopranos.” David Chase is obsessed with “The Twilight Saga.” One of the reasons he wanted to be a writer was because he thought Rod Serling was the coolest guy on the planet. So I would say that’s one.
by Pamela Adlon, author of “Better Things” and many other works. I mostly knew she loved Twilight, but I didn’t realize the depth of it to the point where she named one of her children after a character from the Twilight series.
So yeah, it’s everywhere. These include J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof’s “Lost” and Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror.” But you look at “All in the Family” or “Hill Street Blues” or a lot of other things, and it’s hard to imagine in what form they would have existed without Rod Serling in the ’50s, especially “The Twilight Zone,” which said television could ask these bigger questions, could grapple with tougher moral questions, and could really challenge people to reopen their brains and not just fold laundry, you know the context of it.
One of the things you write about at the beginning of the book is that he does have a bias against nostalgia.
I mean, he had a very complicated relationship with nostalgia because on the one hand, he had an idyllic childhood in Binghamton, New York, you know: doting parents, popular kid, dating everywhere. Binghamton largely resisted the effects of the Great Depression. He then immediately went from there to Hell on Earth to fight in the Pacific. . . The shock of going from one to the other really affected everything he wrote for the rest of his life.
On the one hand, part of him wished that he had never left Binghamton, that he could go back to this time before the war, before humanity dropped atomic bombs on civilians, before there was constant fear of nuclear holocaust and all the other things that people began to worry about in the ’50s and ’60s and during the Cold War.
On the other hand, he knew it was a bad idea. You can’t go backwards; you have to go forward. In those moments, while life was great for him, it wasn’t great for everyone else. He constantly strives to move humanity forward. He would argue on behalf of civil rights and nuclear disarmament and all the other causes he cared about. So almost every time you do a Twilight episode, if someone goes back in time, or to their own childhood or even earlier than that, it doesn’t go well for them. The past is not the place for you to be.
What do you think is the underlying message in each episode that makes The Twilight Zone forever relevant?
Because people are people, we keep making the same mistakes and facing the same challenges, even if sometimes we do better than others. But when you watch these episodes, you see that he’s asking fundamental questions about human nature. Like being selfish versus trying to think about the world around you, or choosing the easy choice versus the hard choice. You know, racism, fascism – it’s so easy for us to succumb to the idea of conformity, to the idea of letting others do all the thinking for us.
That happened again and again. So you watch these episodes as if they were over 60 years old. They are black and white. Fashion is fashion, but over and over again it feels like, really, he could have written this yesterday.
Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary hits stores on Tuesday, October 13. You can reserve your copy via: Click here.
All five seasons of The Twilight Saga are available on Paramount+.
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Taken from Salon Culture Newsletter “The Swell”