Rod Serling

The War in the Suitcase

Rod Serling ended World War II with a knee shattered by shrapnel and nightmares that would haunt him until the day he died in 1975. This Jewish paratrooper from New York had no thirst for fame when he began writing scripts for radio in Cincinnati. He just wanted to release the horror he had witnessed in the Pacific.

And he did it with a literary edge that nobody expected from 1950s television.

In 1955, the premiere of Patterns won him his first Emmy and put him on the radar of major New York studios. But Serling hated the sponsors. Those suited men censored any mention of racism or politics so as not to upset buyers in the American South.

He wrote Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1956 to show that a washed-up boxer could be a tragic hero. It was a huge success. But cigarette and detergent brands kept striking lines from his scripts because they feared social realism would tarnish their products. Serling realized that to tell the truth, he had to lie.

A Corner in the Fourth Dimension

On October 2, 1959, the first episode of The Twilight Zone aired. CBS had little faith in a project that mixed fantasy with gray morality. But audiences were hooked on that dark-suited narrator who chain-smoked in front of the camera.

He wrote 92 of the 156 episodes of the original series. He worked by dictating dialogue into a recorder while walking through his California garden. It was a brutal production pace that required him to deliver a new script almost every week.

It was a physical and mental beating.

In 1964, the series ended after five grueling seasons. Serling sold the franchise rights to CBS for a ridiculously low sum because he believed the format had no future in reruns. It was the biggest financial mistake of his life.

The Weariness of the Angry Man

In the final years of the 1960s, he turned to teaching and work-for-hire scripts. In 1968 he wrote the original screenplay for Planet of the Apes. Although the ending at the Statue of Liberty is his (one of his obsessions with the Last Judgment), the rest of the script was almost entirely rewritten by other writers.

He tried to repeat the formula for success with Night Gallery in 1970. But this time he had no creative control, and the quality of the stories was uneven. He felt like an outsider in an industry that was beginning to value special effects more than the moral dilemmas of a solid script.

Rod Serling smoked three packs of Chesterfield cigarettes a day.

His heart stopped on June 28, 1975, at a hospital in Rochester during a bypass operation. He had suffered two heart attacks in the preceding weeks. He was 50 years old.