Columbia
Missourian, August 15, 1993
In
1956, television’s most successful writer, Rod Serling, wrote a
teleplay for CBS’s United
States Steel Hour
based on the lynching of a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi. The
network balked, forcing Serling to make changes. As he later said,
“the black [man] was changed to suggest ‘an unnamed foreigner,’
the locale was moved from the South to New England—I’m convinced
they would have gone to Alaska or the North Pole and used Eskimos
except that the costume problem was of sufficient severity not to
attempt it. But it became a lukewarm, emasculated, vitiated kind of a
show.”
The
paradox of Serling’s career rests on the fact that he was committed
to writing topical, controversial material, yet his talent was best
suited for television, the most censored and regulated mass medium.
As biographer Gordon Sander shows, Serling engaged in an ongoing
battle with network censors, earning him the label “television’s
last angry man.” Thus while Serling was winning six Emmy awards,
the president of his own network was determined to drive him off the
air.
Serling’s
stroke of genius, what allowed him a respite from
the censors, was his series The
Twilight Zone
(1959-1964). When he first announced his intention to do a fantasy
series, many accused him of selling out. But The
Twilight Zone
allowed Serling to tackle issues
like
nuclear war, racism, blacklisting and lynching in allegorical
fashion. As his wife, Carol, said, “Rod felt
that drama should be an assertion of social conscience. He found that
in The
Twilight Zone,
through parable and suggestion, he could make the same point that he
wanted to make with straight drama.”
Sander
traces Serling’s journey to The
Twilight Zone
in a way that highlights the major influences on his career. Except
for a cloying, pretentious introduction in
which,
in
New Journalism fashion, Sander reads himself into Serling’s
thoughts at a certain point in his career, the author presents
Serling’s life in a straightforward manner. He devotes chapters to
Serling’s childhood in Binghampton, New York, his service as a
paratrooper in World War II, his years at the liberal arts Antioch
College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and his early career in radio and
television in Cincinnati, showing
how
these experiences shaped Serling’s art and world view.
In
an excellent chapter on television’s short-lived “Golden Age,”
Sander recreates the excitement surrounding the era when people were
beginning to grasp the medium’s possibilities. At the center of
this creativity were talented screenwriters such as Gore Vidal, Paddy
Chayefsky, Earl Hamner, and Reginald Rose. According to director
Arthur Penn, the principle for television’s success was to “get
the good writers, and the good writers will bring the good actors,
and the good actors will bring the good directors. And there we were,
that’s how we became a circle. Each one of us would stimulate the
other.”
Through
the early years
of television’s “Golden Age” Serling had built up a reputation
as a talented screenwriter, but a success on the scale of Chayefsky’s
1953 drama Marty
eluded him until 1955 when Kraft
Television Theater
presented his teleplay Patterns.
The script was about the psychological underside of the era’s
celebrated “man in the gray flannel suit.” Most effective was
what critic Andrew Sarris called the play’s “anti-cliché
ending to end all anti-cliché
endings,” in which the idealistic younger executive confronts the
company’s ruthless head. The boss refuses to atone for his
viciousness, offers the younger man a chance to stay, and the
honorable man accepts.
Patterns
catapulted Serling into prominence as television’s leading writer.
He followed it with other excellent plays, most notably Requiem
for a Heavyweight
for
Playhouse
90
in
1956. But while Serling was at the top of his profession, many of the
medium’s other leading writers
were leaving the business, incensed by sponsor interference with the
content of the shows. Advertisers wanted upbeat programs,
reasoning these would sell more products. By 1959, CBS was under the
dominion of network president James Aubrey whose business philosophy
was “The more interesting the programming content of a television
show is, the more it interferes with the commercial message.”
In
this atmosphere it is amazing that
CBS accepted
The
Twilight Zone.
The network brass probably were relieved Serling would be preoccupied
with his fantasy series. But the show remained topical. It was, for
instance, the first time television portrayed a nuclear war in the
1959 episode Time
Enough at Last.
As Carol Serling said, “The TV censors left him alone, either
because they didn’t understand what he was doing or believed that
he was truly in outer space.” But Serling earned the enmity of
Aubrey, who was determined to rid CBS of The
Twilight Zone.
After
the show’s cancellation in 1964, Serling never recaptured the form
that had made him the top in his profession. Sander traces his last
years until his death in 1975, where
Serling was reduced to shilling products
like
Anacin, Crest and Echo Floor Wax, as well as hosting such insipid
game shows as Rod
Serling’s Liar’s Club.
In a Twilight
Zone-style
twist, Serling seemed caught in one of his own plays, like Mountain
McClintock, the former boxing champion reduced to working as a
professional wrestler in Requiem
for a Heavyweight.
Or, as one character warns the successful television writer in
Serling’s 1959 play The
Velvet Alley,
“You know how they do it? They give you a thousand dollars a week,
and they keep giving it to you until you can’t live without it.
Then they start to talk about taking it away, and there isn’t
anything you won’t do to keep that thousand dollars a week.”
Serling
ranks in importance with such people as Edward R. Murrow, Lucille
Ball and Ernie Kovacs as a television pioneer. Sander provides a
useful introduction to Serling’s legacy, as well as the growth of
the medium that has revolutionized virtually every facet of American
life in the past 50 years.
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