The golden anniversary of The Twilight Zone has just come to pass. And two generations later, we writers who set out to follow Rod Serling still haven’t caught up with him. He will forever be five minutes and one hundred steps ahead of us, tantalizing us to try ever harder.

Conventional wisdom holds that a genre anthology show could never gain traction in this age of season-length story arcs and continuity-obsessed fandom. If so, it is a loss, because there is a lot that writers can learn from developing the skill to create a consistent world, populate it with compelling characters, establish a dilemma, and resolve it in 25 minutes — and then do it again. Each episode of The Twilight Zone, even the ones that reached for the easy tropes (“You can’t go home again after all.” “They’re not who/what they think they are.” “They’re dead but they don’t know it.” “They’ve time-traveled into the future/past.”) still had to grab people’s attention and keep them from changing the channel. They are all compact, portable writing lessons.

The allegories were my favorites. Chief among them is certainly The Obsolete Man:

I came of age when the new series debuted. I loved it, and still do. It’s not as well regarded by fans as the original, but it should be; most of the stories were as good as any from the original series. My favorite? Unquestionably To See the Invisible Man:

So thanks, Mr. Serling. Qui audet adipiscitur.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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