Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone is a television anthology series created (and often written) by its narrator and host Rod Serling. Each episode (156 in the original series) is a self-contained fantasy, science fiction, or horror/terror story, often concluding with an eerie or unexpected twist. more...

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Although advertised as science fiction, the show rarely offered scientific explanations for its fantastic happenings and often, if not always, had a moral lesson that pertained to everyday life. The program followed in the tradition of earlier well written radio programs such as The Weird Circle and X Minus One. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to serious science fiction and abstract ideas through television and also through a wide variety of Twilight Zone literature.

The success of this original series led to the creation of two revival series (a cult hit series that ran for several seasons on CBS and in syndication in the 1980s, and a short-lived UPN series that ran early in the new millennium), a feature film, a radio series, a comic book, a magazine and various other spinoffs that would span five decades.

Writers for The Twilight Zone included leading genre authorities such as Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner Jr., Reginald Rose and Ray Bradbury. Many episodes also featured adaptations of classic stories by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Lewis Padgett, Jerome Bixby and Damon Knight.

The Zone

Throughout the various introductions for the original series, the Twilight Zone is described as another dimension. It is "a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind", "a place of things and ideas", "between the pit of Man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge".

Television history

"The Time Element" (1958)

CBS purchased a teleplay in 1957 that writer Rod Serling hoped to produce as the pilot of a weekly anthology series. The Twilight Zone: "The Time Element" marked Serling's first entry in the field of science fiction.

The story is a time travel fantasy of sorts, involving a man visiting a psychoanalyst with complaints of a recurring dream in which he imagines waking up in Honolulu just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "I wake up in a hotel room in Honolulu, and it's 1941, but I mean I really wake up and it's really 1941", he explains, concluding that these are not mere dreams; he actually is travelling through time. Taking advantage of the situation, he bets on all the winning horses, all the right teams and, eventually, tries unsuccessfully to warn others —the newspaper, the military, anyone — that the Japanese are planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Read more at Wikipedia.org