{"id":10568,"date":"2016-04-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-enduring-legacy-of-the-twilight-zone"},"modified":"2021-05-26T16:10:04","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T20:10:04","slug":"the-enduring-legacy-of-the-twilight-zone","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-enduring-legacy-of-the-twilight-zone","title":{"rendered":"The Enduring Legacy of The Twilight Zone<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his 1961 address<\/a> to the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, Newton Minow famously offered a pessimistic assessment of America\u2019s most exciting new industry. Television, declared Minow, was turning into a \u201cvast wasteland\u201d of \u201cblood and thunder\u201d and \u201cformula comedies.\u201d Minow, the recently appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, specified only one weekly series he found \u201cdramatic and moving,\u201d a hopeful sign of what broadcast television could become. This was The Twilight Zone<\/i>, which its creator and chief writer, Rod Serling, described as \u201ca series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Twilight Zone<\/i> won numerous industry awards and wide critical praise during its five-season run from 1959 to 1964 on CBS, confirming Serling\u2019s place as one of the most prolific and innovative writers and producers to emerge from the live-drama era of the 1950s, television\u2019s original \u201cgolden age.\u201d But by the time he died in 1975, Serling was probably less well known for his writerly creativity than as the host of a quiz show and as the face of TV commercials for cigarettes and cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened? How did the man who longed to be<\/a> \u2014 and arguably was \u2014 television\u2019s answer to Arthur Miller end up instead as an edgier version of Ed McMahon?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exhaustion played a part. In a 1959 interview<\/a> with Mike Wallace, Serling said he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on The Twilight Zone<\/i>, seven days a week, even as he kept other projects simmering. \u201cWhen I bend down to pick up a pencil,\u201d he joked on another occasion, \u201cI\u2019m five days behind.\u201d At least one of his biographers, Joel Engel, also blames a growing taste for what Serling himself called the \u201ccrazy, pink, whipped-cream world\u201d that media fame opens up. Serling\u2019s late career as a \u201ccommercial huckster,\u201d \u201cham actor,\u201d and \u201cprofessional celebrity,\u201d Engel writes in his insightful Last Stop, the Twilight Zone<\/a><\/i> (1989), grew out of an \u201caddiction to fame \u2014 and fortune \u2014 that cost him his chance at true greatness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it is also true that by the time The Twilight Zone<\/i> left the air, the trends that had worried Minow in 1961 were even easier to discern. During the 1950s the commercial networks were still burnishing television\u2019s image, hoping to prove that this new and relatively expensive device was far more than an \u201cidiot box\u201d or a \u201cboob tube.\u201d Commercial television supplied culture as well as vaudeville \u2014 Shakespeare and Beethoven as well as Sergeant Bilko and Gorgeous George. In the late 1950s, when The Twilight Zone<\/i> debuted, Omnibus<\/i> was still on the air; that show had aired lectures, interviews, and performances of original screenplays as well as abbreviated versions of such classic works as King Lear<\/i> and La Boh\u00e8me<\/i>. Richard Burton appeared as Heathcliffe in the DuPont<\/i> Show of the Month<\/i> production of Wuthering Heights<\/i>, and Leonard Bernstein gained national fame because CBS broadcast his Young People\u2019s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic from Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by 1970, if not before, almost none of the TV industry\u2019s leaders really believed, with Minow, that they were \u201cpublic trustees\u201d who should have faith in \u201cthe people\u2019s good sense and good taste,\u201d shunning \u201ca relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator.\u201d Television now demanded celebrity, not literary ability \u2014 probably the main reason Serling shifted from scriptwriting to shilling, lending his distinctive persona to the makers of toothpaste and beer and many other products. Of course it was ironic that the man who once compared television\u2019s endless advertisements to \u201ctraveling snake-oil shows<\/a>\u201d should end up as Madison Avenue\u2019s go-to guy. But it was probably inevitable too, given the economic factors and programming assumptions shaping network TV. \u201cWe had tilted at the same dragons for seven or eight years,\u201d Serling said about the early television dramatists who, like himself, had battled publicly for quality TV. \u201cAnd, when the smoke cleared, the dragons had won.\u201d Serling\u2019s idealistic career, turned tacky in the end, reflects the direction of American television during its formative years.<\/p>\n\n\n

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R<\/span>odman Edward Serling, born in 1924, grew up in Binghamton, New York, the son of a butcher who was also an amateur inventor whose most inspired idea \u2014 the \u201cfrankburger,\u201d a hamburger-shaped hot dog \u2014 somehow failed to catch on. By his own account Serling enjoyed a pleasant childhood. He was popular and athletic, active at the Jewish Community Center and at Binghamton Central High School, where he was a member of the debate team and a frequent performer in student plays. A lingering nostalgia informs several well-known Twilight Zone<\/i> episodes, including \u201cWalking Distance,\u201d in which a workaholic advertising executive, a stand-in for Serling himself, goes \u201clooking for sanity\u201d in his old hometown, where he finds himself face-to-face with his boyhood self and discovers that, alas, one cannot escape the present by retreating into a vanished past. It is one of Serling\u2019s favorite themes on The Twilight Zone<\/i>, which deals frequently with failure, regret, and loss. This \u201csentimental streak,\u201d writes his daughter Anne Serling in As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling<\/a><\/i> (2013), was \u201calmost as intense as his crusading moralistic streak.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1943 Serling joined the U.S. Army\u2019s 11th Airborne Division. Standing five foot four, he barely qualified. Assigned to the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Serling saw action in the Philippines during the fierce closing months of the war. He took part in the Battle of Manila, where American casualties were high. Serling was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and, according to his daughter, when he returned to the States he suffered from what used to be called \u201cshell shock.\u201d In her memoir she writes that, as a child, she often heard her father scream out in the middle of the night. For years in his dreams he continued to fight the Japanese. He turned to writing, he admitted, as \u201ca kind of compulsion,\u201d a \u201cterrible need for some sort of therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attending Antioch College on the G.I. Bill, Serling studied literature and imitated Hemingway: \u201cEverything I wrote,\u201d he later recalled, \u201cbegan, \u2018It was hot.\u2019\u201d Serling\u2019s other models included the radio dramatist Arch Oboler, whose highly inventive horror series Lights<\/i> Out<\/i> almost certainly helped inspire The Twilight Zone<\/i>. After graduating in 1950, Serling worked as a copywriter and, in his spare time, managed to place some of his own rather melodramatic scripts with popular radio serials like Dr. Christian<\/i>, about a small-town physician. As his skill and confidence improved, Serling turned to television, where an urgent demand for original material allowed a now-legendary cadre of young writers \u2014 which also included Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose \u2014 to start their careers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serling quickly sold television plays to the better New York-based anthology programs. His first real hit, \u201cPatterns,\u201d was a character-driven big-business drama broadcast live on the Kraft Television Theatr<\/i>e<\/i>; it was, New York Times<\/i> critic Jack Gould wrote<\/a> a few days after its broadcast, \u201cone of the high points in the TV medium\u2019s evolution.\u201d In that age before reruns, \u201cPatterns\u201d became the first television drama to get a second airing \u2014 by having the original cast reassemble a few weeks later for a second live performance. It earned Serling his first Emmy, and would later be adapted into a film<\/a>. Serling soon succeeded again with \u201cThe Rack\u201d (1955), about an American soldier \u201cbrainwashed\u201d as a prisoner during the Korean War; this teleplay, too, was adapted into a movie, starring Paul Newman. Serling\u2019s second Emmy came for \u201cRequiem for a Heavyweight\u201d (1956), a grimly sentimental portrayal of an aging prizefighter scrapping to save his dignity in a sport long marked by corruption and betrayal. A 1957 adaptation of Ernest Lehman\u2019s short story \u201cThe Comedian,\u201d which featured Mickey Rooney as a cruel and vulgar TV funnyman \u2014 a sort of sadistic Sid Caesar \u2014 brought Serling Emmy number three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Young and articulate, Serling was widely interviewed and profiled for many leading newspapers and magazines. \u201cAll of a sudden,\u201d he remembered<\/a>, \u201cwith no preparation and no expectations, I had a velvet mantle draped over my shoulders…. Like a good horse, or a swivel-hip halfback, I was the guy to watch.\u201d Offers flowed in, including offers to write for film, but somehow it never really worked out. Engel suggests that Serling was too cocky and impatient to find \u201cthe time and care it takes to develop a worthwhile film.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So television remained Serling\u2019s medium, and he used his new stature to emerge as one of TV\u2019s most eloquent champions. For example, in a 1957 essay<\/a> introducing a collection of four of his scripts, Serling argued that television was ideal for the sort of smart, provocative drama that he, Rose, and Chayefsky, among others, aspired to write. The movies may have had CinemaScope, but the small screen offered \u201cintimacy.\u201d The teleplay was nothing less than a \u201cnew art form\u201d featuring recognizable people in everyday settings. Television drama relied on close-up shots, facial studies, carefully chosen words; it \u201cwon\u2019t take stark villainy or lily-white heroism,\u201d as he put it in a 1955 newspaper article. The best television dramas \u2014 he was especially fond of Chayefsky\u2019s Marty<\/i>, about a homely butcher looking for love in the Bronx \u2014 dealt \u201cin all the grays that make up character\u201d in an effort to say something meaningful about the human condition. Even \u201ca few intellectual diehards,\u201d Serling observed, had begun to believe that \u201ca television play could come close to the legitimate theater, and even surpass it sometimes in terms of flexibility.\u201d At its best, TV combined \u201cthe immediacy of the living theater\u201d with \u201cthe flexibility of the motion picture, and the coverage of radio.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Radio, however, supplied an unfortunate precedent. For decades the big radio networks \u2014 CBS and NBC \u2014 had dominated the medium\u2019s programming, providing endless hours of drama as well as news, sports, and information. But almost no one, noted Serling, thought of radio as a medium for literary art. With the exception of Oboler, Norman Corwin, and a few others, radio\u2019s writers were complete unknowns. Even within the industry, Serling observed in that 1957 essay, they were considered \u201chacks\u201d whose scripts were mere \u201cappendage[s]\u201d to sales messages from Ivory Soap, say, or Fleischmann\u2019s Yeast. For the most part radio drama \u201caimed downward\u201d: it became \u201ccheap and unbelievable\u201d and \u201cwillingly settled for second best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serling worried that television would go the way of radio. The television sponsor also \u201cinvests heavily\u201d in a mass \u201corgan of dissemination,\u201d and without him, Serling conceded, that organ would \u201cwither away.\u201d But Serling wanted sponsors to think of television not as an animated billboard but a great national stage where dramatic entertainment could incorporate a more mature interest in social issues and more subtle themes. Like Minow, Serling urged the medium\u2019s leaders and funders to cultivate and liberate literary talent, much as certain theatrical producers or the funders of great orchestras saw themselves primarily as champions of crucial cultural institutions rather than as salesmen and entertainment profiteers. Too often, Serling complained, television\u2019s best programs were interrupted by \u201craucous singing jingles that dent the ears.\u201d As a result, \u201cthe audience must then make its own mental and emotional realignment to \u2018get back with\u2019 the sole object of its intentions. That it can do it at all is a tribute to mass intelligence and selectivity.\u201d \u201cNo dramatic art form,\u201d he added, \u201cshould be dictated and controlled by men whose training, interest and instincts are cut of entirely different cloth.\u201d This, he wrote, was rather like letting a beer baron manage a professional baseball team simply because his ads bankrolled their televised games.<\/p>\n\n\n

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F<\/span>rom the start, however, Serling faced intrusions great and small. In one early episode of The Twilight Zone<\/i>, for example, a sponsoring coffee company protested a scene in which a ship\u2019s officer called out for tea. Far worse, however, was an incident a few years previous involving a teleplay Serling wrote for a weekly show sponsored by U.S. Steel. Serling\u2019s script alluded to the 1955 lynching murder in Mississippi of the black fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. At the behest of the sponsor, the script was \u201cvitiated, emasculated,\u201d Serling remembered<\/a>, so that all references to racism in the South were generally expunged. Here is how Marc Scott Zicree recounts the incident in his Twilight Zone Companion<\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot concerned a violent neurotic who kills an elderly Jew and then is acquitted by residents of the small town in which he lives…. U.S. Steel demanded changes in the script. The town was moved from an unspecified area to New England. The murdered Jew was changed to an unnamed foreigner. Bottles of Coca-Cola were removed from the set and the word \u201clynch\u201d stricken from the script (both having been determined \u201ctoo Southern\u201d in their connotation). Characters were made to say \u201cThis is a strange little town\u201d or \u201cThis is a perverse town,\u201d so that no one would identify with it. Finally, they wanted to change the vicious, neurotic killer into \u201cjust a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Serling was left feeling he was \u201cstriking out at a social evil with a feather duster.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A later script for Playhouse 90<\/i>, also based on the Emmett Till story \u2014 this time retelling it in a Western setting \u2014 was altered as well. \u201cThey chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer,\u201d Serling complained. Years later, he would say that, \u201cFrom experience, I can tell you that drama, at least in television, must walk tiptoe and in agony lest it offend some cereal buyer from a given state below the Mason-Dixon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In politics Serling was a Kennedy Democrat ardently supportive of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Hollywood chapter of Citizens for a Sane Nuclear Policy. After Kennedy was assassinated Serling wrote a short documentary<\/a> for the U.S. Information Agency; it was intended to portray \u2014 especially for foreign viewers \u2014 the new president, Lyndon Johnson, as a gruff but humble man, a paternalistic populist who, with the help of the United Nations, would work to abolish poverty and end war. By 1968, like many others in Hollywood, Serling was denouncing Johnson\u2019s Vietnam policies while hailing<\/a> \u201cthe goals and aspirations of America\u2019s young.\u201d And yet, as Anne Serling recalls, her father wore his silver paratrooper\u2019s bracelet for the rest of his life, calling himself a patriot of the old school. \u201cI will salute our flag and stand for our anthem,\u201d he told a college audience in 1968. \u201cThis, on the face of it, removes me from the pale of the New Left.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, he was a liberal whose moral convictions influenced the tales he wanted to tell and how he wanted to tell them. But overt stories of social criticism risked raising problems with the sponsors and the network censors. This was a major motivation for the creation of The Twilight Zon<\/i>e<\/i>: allegories, science fiction, and unusual premises not only allowed complicated moral and political stories to be distilled to a potent purity, but they could liberate Serling from some of the limitations of drama on commercial television. \u201cA Martian,\u201d he noted, \u201ccan say things that a Republican or Democrat can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After initial hesitance, CBS in 1959 welcomed the new weekly series, presumably hoping to capitalize on Serling\u2019s high-toned reputation and on the growing appeal of books like Ray Bradbury\u2019s The Martian Chronicles<\/a><\/i> (1950) and Richard Matheson\u2019s The Shrinking Man<\/a><\/i> (1956), and on such similarly cerebral science-fiction movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still<\/a><\/i> (1951) and Forbidden Planet<\/a><\/i> (1956). Moreover, the network had considerable success with Alfred Hitchcock Presents<\/i>, which also served up a fairly sophisticated mix of dark irony and suspense. The network was less certain about using Serling, \u00e0 la<\/i> Hitchcock, as the face of the show, opening and closing each episode with wry, scripted remarks. Although telegenic in his way, Serling was less recognizable than the rotund director. And he looked nothing like the typically nondescript on-camera host. He looked like a well-tailored young rabbi, upright but hip, delivering droll sermons through clenched teeth in a clipped and alliterative style. CBS hedged its bets, scheduling The Twilight Zone<\/i> against relatively light competition on late Friday nights, the fringe of primetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mike Wallace was also skeptical. In his interview with Serling \u2014 conducted just days before The Twilight Zone<\/i> premiered \u2014 Wallace implied that writing about flying saucers and time machines for the new show was something of a comedown for the man whose incisive character studies, realistic in approach, had become touchstones for quality television. After all, science fiction on television heretofore meant shows like Flash Gordon<\/i> and Rocky Jones, Space Range<\/i>r<\/i> \u2014 kiddie stuff made on the cheap. Serling, Wallace implied, would be turning out \u201cpotboilers\u201d now, and laughing all the way to the bank. But Serling was adamant: The Twilight Zone<\/i> was a \u201chigh-quality\u201d anthology series, as \u201cadult\u201d in its way as other TV drama had been.<\/p>\n\n\n

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S<\/span>hot at MGM, The Twilight Zone<\/i> employed the talents of several accomplished Hollywood veterans, including the directors Mitchell Leisen, Joseph Newman, and Ida Lupino; the composer Bernard Herrmann, famed for scoring Citizen Kane<\/i> and various Hitchcock hits; and George Clemens, who would win an Emmy for his cinematography on the series. Actors from across four generations appeared on the show, from respected senior figures like Buster Keaton, Gladys Cooper, and Agnes Moorehead, to character actors like John McGiver and Ed Wynn, to up-and-comers like Burt Reynolds, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, William Shatner, Robert Redford, and a young Ron Howard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serling himself wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show\u2019s 156 episodes, but not every episode was a gem. Some were \u201creal turkeys,\u201d he admitted, such as \u201cMr. Dingle, The Strong,\u201d a second-season episode in which a two-headed alien walks into a bar \u2014 perhaps an attempt, one of several on Serling\u2019s part, to imitate the writings of Fredric Brown, popular in the Fifties for mixing comedy and science fiction in such offbeat classics as Martians Go Home<\/a><\/i> (1955). But for the most part The Twilight Zone<\/i> was written \u201cwith an eye towards the literacy of the actor and the intelligence of the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Minow\u2019s analysis in 1961 now looks unduly pessimistic, or perhaps premature. The Twilight Zone<\/i> belongs in some ways to a golden age of its own. To be sure, by the late 1950s, the networks were cutting links with New York\u2019s art and theater scene and turning almost exclusively to Big Hollywood for their most popular shows. As a result, the live drama showcases disappeared, along with Omnibus<\/i> and other up-market offerings. But in retrospect, the growing role of Disney, Warner Brothers, and Universal seems inevitable. The nation\u2019s fifty million television owners (up from around three million when the decade began) wanted programs that were less like off-Broadway productions and more like the movies, with bigger design budgets, higher production standards, and more recognizable faces. Moreover, the networks were discovering that filmed series (like old movies) could rerun on television repeatedly, for years, sold in syndication packages to affiliates across the country and independent stations around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly, most of the popular dramatic serials of the late 1950s and early 1960s were not much noticed by what Serling called the \u201cintellectual diehards.\u201d Instead, those shows were considered middlebrow entertainments assembled to connect advertisers with a mass audience and to give those viewers generally happy endings and fairly static heroes symbolizing bourgeois virtue and civic order. Still, the best of them \u2014 including Perry Mason<\/i>, Naked City<\/i>, The Defenders<\/i>, Gunsmoke<\/i>, Bonanza<\/i>, even The Untouchable<\/i>s<\/i> \u2014 were artful in their way. They were well-acted, well-directed and often surprisingly well-written, and, like most Hollywood movies, required a certain amount of concentration to be fully enjoyed. During much of the 1960s, the television networks still assumed that most viewers were probably also readers, not of Henry James perhaps, but of Erle Stanley Gardner or Zane Grey. They read bestsellers like The Caine Mutiny<\/i>, Peyton Place<\/i>, East of Eden<\/i>, and On the<\/i> Beach<\/i>, as well as the short stories in Collier\u2019s<\/i>, The Saturday Evening Post<\/i>, and Ellery Queen\u2019s<\/i> Mystery Magazine<\/i>. For such viewers, then, good popular fiction need not be sensational or simplistic, but it did require, even within well-worn genres, compelling characters and reasonably fresh storylines. Viewers would welcome shows that avoided juvenility and that aimed to \u201csay something\u201d in a reasonably intelligent way. \u201cIt\u2019s our thinking,\u201d Serling insisted in a short promo film aimed at potential sponsors, \u201cthat an audience will always sit still and listen and watch a well-told story.\u201d Besides, as he told Wallace, \u201cI don\u2019t think calling something commercial tags it with a kind of an odious suggestion that it stinks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not surprisingly, the stories on The Twilight Zone<\/i> are replete with postwar liberal themes. Several of them attack prejudice, which Serling later called \u201cthe singular evil of our time\u201d and the one from which \u201call other evils grow and multiply.\u201d Thus in one of the show\u2019s most memorable episodes, \u201cThe Eye of the Beholder,\u201d the victim is a young woman, beautiful by our standards, who lives uneasily in a society where \u201cnormal\u201d citizens have large bent mouths and pig-like snouts \u2014 a twist cunningly hidden until near the episode\u2019s close. In other episodes, the underdogs are slightly comical types who, in an era of gray flannel suits and organization men, insist on pursuing harmlessly eccentric ways. The title character in the episode \u201cMr. Bevis\u201d cannot hold a job or pay the rent. He reads Dickens, listens to zither music, and plays street games with the neighborhood children. The modern world has little use for Mr. Bevis, who will never be powerful or rich. Mr. Bevis \u2014 like Carol Burnett\u2019s hapless Agnes Grep in the episode \u201cCavender is Coming\u201d \u2014 gets some nudges from a guardian angel, but ultimately chooses to stay true to his misfit self. Without the likes of Mr. Bevis, notes Serling in his intro voiceover, the world might be \u201ca little saner\u201d but \u201cwould be a considerably poorer place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fifth-season episode \u201cThe Brain Center at Whipple\u2019s,\u201d something of a remake of Dickens\u2019s Hard Times<\/i>, the outcasts are factory workers who, in the name of progress, are replaced by \u201cautomatic assembly machines\u201d that work nonstop, without complaint, and \u2014 as the company\u2019s president happily points out \u2014 without the bother of pensions, coffee breaks, or powder rooms. Like much science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, The Twilight Zone<\/i> looks frequently at the bewildering effects of science and technology, including the \u201cbattle between … the brain of man and the product of man\u2019s brain,\u201d as Serling puts it in the episode\u2019s opening. And yet the series largely avoids the easy portrayal of modern machinery as monstrous and threatening; generally, as in \u201cWhipple\u2019s,\u201d technology is dangerous only when it is misused by foolish people who fail to appreciate the power of their tools. Wallace V. Whipple, the antagonist here, is a humorless numbers man who, over the protests of his loyal employees, clearly savors the delicious sense of power that comes from slashing costs and making \u201cthe stockholders cheer.\u201d He fires his foreman and chief engineer who, in passionate speeches worthy of Clifford Odets, protest the heartless dismissal of \u201cmen who have worked here for twenty to thirty years.\u201d \u201cYou can\u2019t pack \u2019em in cosmoline like surplus tanks!\u201d shouts the foreman. But the sight of the sleek new machines whirring away simply intoxicates Whipple \u2014 until he too is replaced by a stout robot (the famous \u201cRobby<\/a>,\u201d first featured in Forbidden Planet<\/i>) shown busily ensconced in the executive suite in the final scene. Serling remarks in closing that man too often \u201cbecomes clever instead of becoming wise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wallace V. Whipple (foreground, played by Richard Deacon) pokes at his beloved computer
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T<\/span>he Twilight Zone<\/i> is famous for its twist endings \u2014 its unexpected inversions and ironic moral lessons. In \u201cThe Rip Van Winkle Caper,\u201d a clever scientist and his criminal cohorts steal a fortune in gold bars and then, to escape, enter a series of hidden chambers designed to keep them in a state of suspended animation for a hundred years. When they do emerge, after a century of sleep, they eagerly grab their stashed gold \u2014 only to discover that the metal, now industrially produced, has virtually no value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cTime Enough at Last,\u201d perhaps the most famous Twilight Zone<\/i> episode, a myopic bank clerk \u2014 the bookworm Henry Bemis, played unforgettably by Burgess Meredith \u2014 hides from his boss by ducking into the bank\u2019s vault to read in peaceful solitude. A nuclear bomb falls. Bemis survives the blast and finds food enough to last him for years, but his terrible aloneness and boredom in the wreckage lead him to consider suicide. A moment before he pulls the trigger and permanently depopulates the planet, Bemis sees in the rubble what remains of a public library. \u201cBooks, books \u2014 all the books I\u2019ll need!\u201d he says. He arranges the volumes in stacks, planning a reading schedule that will keep him occupied for years to come. \u201cAnd the best thing, the very best thing of all, is there\u2019s time<\/i> now. There\u2019s all the time I need and all the time I want.\u201d But his eyeglasses fall from his face and shatter. \u201cThat\u2019s not fair!\u201d he cries, as the camera pans out, leaving him a tragicomic symbol of the blindness of man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) reading in the bank vault before the blast
(\u201cTime Enough at Last,\u201d 1959).
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The anxieties of the nuclear age loom large in many other episodes as well. In fact, among popular television programs of the era, only Star Trek<\/i> (1966\u201369) made so much use of such apocalyptic themes. When the third-season Twilight Zone<\/i> episode \u201cThe Shelter\u201d begins, some friendly neighbors are shown celebrating the birthday of a local physician. The mood darkens, however, when radio bulletins begin warning of an impending attack by unidentified flying objects. Suddenly, the episode turns into a retelling of Aesop\u2019s fable of the grasshopper and the ant. As the doctor calmly enters the small fallout shelter he built for his family, the neighbors panic: they have no shelters or survival plans of their own. They turn vicious and violent, bludgeoning the door of the doctor\u2019s basement shelter before the threat passes: the \u201cmissiles\u201d were merely satellites. The partygoers are ashamed and the doctor is left scarred \u2014 aware that his benign notions of human nature must necessarily be revised. He now knows that his jocular friends, just beneath the skin, are little better than a bunch of \u201cnaked, wild animals, who put such a price on staying alive that they\u2019ll claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege.\u201d \u201cWe were spared a bomb tonight,\u201d declares the doctor, \u201cbut I wonder if we weren\u2019t destroyed even without it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suburbanites also run amok in \u201cThe Monsters are Due on Maple Street,\u201d an episode still sometimes shown to students in middle school and high school civics classes. The residents of Maple Street convince themselves that space aliens, masquerading as human beings, have been hiding among them in their \u201ctree-lined little world\u201d as a first step toward global rule. Immediately, suspicions fall upon the local oddball, an insomniac often spotted standing alone late at night, staring at the sky. \u201cLet\u2019s not be a mob!\u201d cries one man \u2014 but as the paranoia spreads, Maple Street becomes a frenzied war zone, with rocks and bullets flying. Predictably, the episode is often cited as an indictment of McCarthyism during the \u201cRed Scare,\u201d which is now lodged in the popular imagination as a postwar period of unprecedented tribulation and fear. But the episode also recalls, even more explicitly, the mob-driven irrationalities that fueled the rise of Nazism, still fresh in the public mind in the 1950s, and the subject of several other Twilight Zone<\/i> episodes. The threat of barbarism, Serling repeatedly suggests, never ends; the margin between order and murderous chaos is thin. \u201cFor the record,\u201d asserts Serling at the episode\u2019s close, \u201cprejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The panicking residents of Maple Street
(\u201cThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,\u201d 1960)
Copyright CBS<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Other frightening episodes also counter the wide notion that TV in the late Fifties and early Sixties offered little more than singing cowboys and implacably cheerful families. In the famous episode \u201cTo Serve Man,\u201d alien beings \u2014 towering, seemingly courteous \u201cKanamits\u201d \u2014 arrive from a far-off planet promoting peace, even as they scheme to harvest gullible humans for food. In \u201cPeople Are Alike All Over,\u201d an astronaut crash-lands on Mars, where seemingly hospitable residents \u2014 looking handsome and fit in their tunics and sandals \u2014 promptly lock him up in a Martian zoo, an amusing specimen of an inferior species. In \u201cThe Midnight Sun,\u201d the earth drifts from its orbit and, apparently, heads directly toward the sun, leaving its hapless inhabitants to sweat buckets as the planet sizzles and boils. But often, The Twilight Zone<\/i> portrays a cold world \u2014 a world in which hopes and illusions are crushed, and big-talking but \u201cflimsy\u201d earthlings, with their \u201ctiny, groping fingers,\u201d and \u201cundeveloped\u201d brains (as Serling puts it in \u201cPeople Are Alike All Over\u201d) fall prey to merciless forces beyond their control.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A<\/span>nd yet, other equally memorable episodes are less far-fetched and bleak; some portray a more familiar world that is only slightly askew. Some such episodes are morality tales with effective film noir<\/i> touches \u2014 shadowy streets, slick tricksters, desperate men facing down their deepest fears. In \u201cNick of Time,\u201d written by Richard Matheson, a newly married couple find themselves stuck in a small Midwestern town after their car breaks down. Killing time in a local diner, the husband \u2014 a young William Shatner \u2014 becomes obsessed with \u201cThe Mystic Seer,\u201d a weird little table-top machine that purports to answer profound questions for the price of a coin. Its brief assertions, dispensed on slips of paper \u2014 \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d \u201cIf that\u2019s what you really want\u201d \u2014 are mere generalities, but Shatner\u2019s character finds them uncannily accurate, even as the camera cuts frequently to the toy-like devil\u2019s head that bobs atop the device, a sly smile fixed creepily on its rubber face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the Mystic Seer a tool for satanic mischief? Or does its power come entirely from the whims and anxieties swirling about in the husband\u2019s head? Don\u2019t be vain. Don\u2019t be selfish. Don\u2019t hanker after easy riches or eternal youth. Be careful what you wish for. These are recurring themes on Serling\u2019s show. And, be very<\/i> careful when you find yourself in that \u201cmiddle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition,\u201d for it is this, \u201cthe dimension of the imagination,\u201d that is in fact \u201cthe twilight zone,\u201d as Serling announces in the intro of some of the show\u2019s seasons \u2014 the seductive but precarious province that \u201clies between the pit of man\u2019s fears and the summit of his knowledge.\u201d In \u201cNick of Time,\u201d Shatner\u2019s character finally gets a grip and departs the diner, just as another couple settles in before the Mystic Seer, clutching their coins, looking for answers. This pair, Serling implies in his closing remarks, is doomed \u2014 too willing to submit to superstition, too likely to face the future \u201cwith a kind of helpless dread.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, in Serling\u2019s \u201cA Thing About Machines,\u201d a snooty writer\u2019s elegant home is, it appears, haunted. Bartlett Finchley (character actor Richard Haydn) is \u201ca practicing sophisticate,\u201d who \u201cwrites very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like\u201d when he is not kicking his television set and denouncing the \u201cmechanical contrivances\u201d of modern life. At first glance, this episode appears to evoke the critique of consumerism and gadgetry that was almost requisite among American intellectuals during the postwar years. (Max Lerner, to choose just one example among many, complained in 1957<\/a> that \u201cAmerica has taken on the aspect of a civilization cluttered with artifacts and filled with the mechanized bric-a-brac of machine living,\u201d part of a soul-killing social tendency toward \u201cuniformity\u201d and \u201cconformism.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Technophobic Bartlett Finchley (Richard Haydn) attacks his nemesis
(\u201cA Thing About Machines,\u201d 1960).
Copyright CBS<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Serling, though, does not identify with Finchley, whose high-handed contempt for his neighbors and employees is enough to make him dislikable. For Serling, who was quite fond of mechanized bric-a-brac, it is Finchley\u2019s hatred of radios, TV sets, typewriters, and other benign devices that make him absurd and prompt his demise. Finchley is spooked when, suddenly, he begins receiving malicious messages from his household appliances. His telephone orders him to leave the house. He is attacked by his suddenly snake-like electric razor. He is chased about and, it seems, driven to death by his own car. But Finchley, the episode implies, has been destroyed by his own prejudices and fears \u2014 by a self-absorbed refusal to live contently with what he sneeringly calls \u201cthe miracles of modern science.\u201d He has \u201csuccumbed,\u201d suggests Serling in closing, to \u201ca set of delusions.\u201d He is \u201ctormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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J<\/span>oel Engel\u2019s 1989 biography and another by Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV\u2019s Last Angry Man<\/a><\/i> (1992), depict Serling\u2019s growing weariness with the workload of The Twilight Zone<\/i>, his unhappiness with his declining ability to write in a way that satisfied himself or others, and his retreat into drinking and what seems like a kind of depression. Anne Serling in her memoir aims to amend these portraits that suggest her chain-smoking father descended into a bibulous funk as his writing career declined. Instead, she remembers a \u201cgregarious and outgoing\u201d man with boyish enthusiasms who amused her friends and his houseguests with a talent for mimicry, who fitted his vintage roadster with a horn that, when pressed, blared forth the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serling\u2019s hopeful and upbeat side is often on display in The Twilight Zone<\/i>, even in some otherwise dark episodes. The fifth-season episode \u201cIn Praise of Pip,\u201d written by Serling, has sentimentality and hope puncturing a noir <\/i>gloom. It also features one of Serling\u2019s favorite types \u2014 the shabby loser \u201cwhose life has been as drab and undistinguished as a bundle of dirty clothes.\u201d Max Phillips, a small-time bookie, is devastated by news of his son\u2019s wounding in battle in far-off Vietnam. This episode includes memorable scenes in which Phillips (Jack Klugman, in one of several appearances on the show) finds himself lost within a funhouse mirror maze \u2014 a deft nod, one assumes, to Orson Welles\u2019s The Lady from Shanghai<\/i> (1947). The episode ends with Phillips\u2019s spiritual redemption, his aching awareness that \u201cthe ties of flesh are deep and strong,\u201d as Serling sermonizes in his epilogue. \u201cYou can find nobility and sacrifice and love wherever you may seek it out: down the block, in the heart, or in the Twilight Zone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, the quality of the show dropped in its last two years. During the fourth season, the episodes were doubled in length to a full hour \u2014 but the stories did not always merit that much time, and the pacing sometimes seemed lethargic, so the half-hour format returned for the fifth season. The writing declined in other ways, too: the characters were less sharply drawn, and various conceits were recycled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, James Aubrey, the CBS programming chief, wanted the show gone, citing cost overruns as well as mediocre ratings and a chronic inability to attract top sponsors. Aubrey, a sort of anti-Newton Minow, had no patience with critics and intellectuals who insisted that the commercial networks had a moral, cultural \u2014 even patriotic \u2014 duty to \u201caim higher, write better, dig deeper,\u201d as Serling had put it<\/a> back in the 1950s. In 1961 Minow, noting the growing global reach of American TV, had asked<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What will the people of other countries think of us when they see our western bad men and good men punching each other in the jaw in between the shooting? What will the Latin American or African child learn of America from this great communications industry?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Aubrey, whose roots were in advertising, did not brood about such things. Most Americans, he believed, did not watch television selectively, by the program, but by the clock, principally as a means of filling up time. Aubrey did not seek to perplex or edify viewers \u2014 just to keep them from switching the channel. His idea of good television was The Beverly Hillbillies<\/i>, not The Twilight Zone<\/i>, which he believed too idiosyncratic to sit alongside Petticoat Junction<\/i> and The Munsters<\/i> in the network\u2019s enormously profitable schedule. Aubrey declared that he was \u201csick of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so was Serling, or so he claimed. Before The Twilight Zone<\/i>, in his 1959 interview with Wallace, Serling had noted that his temperament and talent were best suited for television, \u201cthe medium I understand.\u201d He offered his own psychological interpretation: \u201cI suppose this is an admission of a kind of weakness or at least a sense of insecurity on my part…. I want to stay in the womb.\u201d He never quite managed to leave that womb. For years he had promised to quit TV for more ambitiously literary projects \u2014 a novel, perhaps, some feature films, a Broadway play. But he had grown accustomed to weekly television\u2019s pressing deadlines: using a Dictaphone, he could polish off a half-hour script in a single afternoon. Highly strung and easily distracted, he lacked the patience for the sort of extensive revisions that good literary prose demands. (Anne Serling quotes a Twilight Zone<\/i> producer who recalls that a \u201cten-minute story conference\u201d was, for her father, \u201cthe limit, then he\u2019d go out and get an ice cream soda or shoe shine.\u201d) He also had difficulty stretching out a story to fill the bigger frame of a feature film, and, with the exception of Seven Days in May<\/a><\/i> (1964), about a military coup, his clunky screenplays were either poorly received or never made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, not surprisingly, after The Twilight Zone<\/i> ended its run, Serling kept pitching the networks new ideas for weekly series, including The Loner<\/i>, a \u201ccerebral Western\u201d about a Civil War veteran ambushed by assorted ethical dilemmas while roaming the plains; CBS picked it up in 1965 but canceled it before the first season was over. In 1970 Serling began hosting The Night Gallery<\/i>, an uneven Twilight Zone<\/i> knock-off to which he also sometimes contributed scripts. But the show\u2019s producers apparently saw Serling as something of a relic, and limited his creative role. Serling, in turn, became bored with a series that was increasingly formulaic and trite \u2014 \u201cMannix<\/i> in a cemetery,\u201d he complained. \u201cGood evening sports fans,\u201d he sarcastically announced at the start of one installment. \u201cIn discerning circles I\u2019m known as the Howard Cosell of the crypt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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S<\/span>erling was still in his forties, and still insisting<\/a> (during a disastrous tenure as president of the Television Academy) that TV should see itself as \u201cnot just an industry but an art form.\u201d But television had passed him by on its way to becoming \u201cwith the single exception of the workplace,\u201d the \u201cdominant force in American life today,\u201d as Jeff Greenfield observed in Television: The First Fifty Years<\/a><\/i> (1977). It was now \u201cour marketplace, our political forum, our playground, and our school.\u201d CBS had become the \u201csingle biggest advertising medium in the world,\u201d wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be<\/a><\/i> (1979), a fact not lost on the industry\u2019s leaders, who had presumably embraced the maxim, commonly attributed to Aubrey, that TV worked best when it relied on the surefire recipe of \u201cbosoms, broads, and fun.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re a medicine show,\u201d confessed one network official quoted in Greenfield\u2019s book. \u201cWe\u2019re here to deliver the audience to the next commercial. So the basic network policy is to set in motion from the beginning of prime time to the end of prime time, programs to maintain and deliver those audiences to the commercial.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, commercial networks in the 1970s were not, as they are today, almost entirely lowbrow, pitched to high school kids and adults who share their tastes. Certain popular comedies, like The Bob Newhart Show<\/i> and M<\/i>*<\/i>A*S*H<\/i>, featured smart writing and distinctive characters who, despite their quirks, lived like grown-ups in a recognizable world. Even the hit police drama Kojak<\/i> provided skilled acting and fairly thoughtful narratives that are still watchable today. But during the 1970s the growth of cable and the rise of PBS, which Newton Minow championed, effectively freed CBS, NBC, and ABC to fight with each other in the high-pressure ratings races without the added burden of catering to more discriminating viewers, who could now be directed to Nova<\/i> and Masterpiece Theatre<\/i> instead. Moreover, as Greenfield notes, the shift from black-and-white to color programming meant that \u201cthe original attraction of television drama \u2014 a close-up look at people in conflict,\u201d was now definitively replaced by \u201can obsession with action\u201d \u2014 explosions, car chases, stock heroes and villains, girl cops in swimsuits punching out bad guys in tropical locales. Not surprisingly, in 1976, just a year after Serling\u2019s death, several of the most popular network shows were, in effect, comic strips \u2014 The Six<\/i> Million Dollar Man<\/i>, The Bionic Woman<\/i>, Charlie\u2019s Angels<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serling attacked these trends, picking up where Minow left off. In lectures and interviews, Serling suggested that TV\u2019s most representative programs were becoming even worse than the clich\u00e9-ridden radio and television serials he had mocked in the 1950s<\/a> for their stale plots \u201csprinkled with a kiss, a gunshot, a dab of sex, a final curtain clinch.\u201d Engel quotes a luncheon speech in which, among other barbs, Serling called Let\u2019s Make a Deal<\/i> a \u201cclinical study in avarice and greed\u201d and said The Dating Game<\/i> featured \u201cthinly veiled sexual fantasies\u201d pitched by airhead contestants to \u201ca trio of trick-or-treat Charlies.\u201d Serling, who had set one particularly harrowing Twilight Zone<\/i> episode \u2014 \u201cDeath\u2019s-Head Revisited\u201d \u2014 in the Dachau concentration camp, particularly hated Hogan\u2019s Heroes<\/i>, which featured \u201cthe new post-war version of the wartime Nazi: a thick, bumbling fathead whose crime, singularly, is stupidity \u2014 nothing more. He\u2019s a kind of lovable, affable, benign Hermann Goering.\u201d In a speech at the Library of Congress, quoted in his daughter\u2019s memoir, Serling said Hogan\u2019s Heroes<\/i> could appeal only to those \u201cwho refuse to let history get in the way of their laughter.\u201d The show was, in short, \u201ca rank diminishment of what was once an era of appalling human suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, Serling himself waded in the shallow end of the TV pool. He hosted a quiz show called Liar\u2019s Club<\/i> in 1969 and 1970. At the time he died in 1975 at the age of fifty, he was set to host Keep on Truckin\u2019<\/i> \u2014 a summer variety show starring \u201cMadame,\u201d a wise-cracking puppet made popular on Hollywood<\/i> Squares<\/i>. And then there were the commercials. Engel, whose book is especially vivid in depicting how Serling\u2019s ads and endorsements were both a cause and an effect of his depression and self-doubt, offers a partial list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1968 and 1969, Serling touted an almost unending stream of products, including Crest toothpaste, Laura Scudder potato chips, auto loans at Merchant\u2019s Bank in Indianapolis, B. F. Goodrich radial tires …, Packard Bell color televisions, Westinghouse appliances, Anacin, Samsonite luggage, Volkswagens, Gulf Oil, and Close-Up toothpaste (Serling actually introduced the product to the marketplace). He also got paid for his public service announcements for the National Institute of Mental Health (anti-drug abuse), CARE (for Biafran refugees), Epilepsy Foundation of America, United Crusade, the Des Moines Police Association, and the Save the Children Foundation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And yet, even as he recorded countless ads, Serling continued to rail against the stupidities of commercial television, as in a 1974 speech<\/a> to the American Advertising Federation: \u201cYou wonder how to put on a meaningful drama that is adult, incisive probing when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper.\u201d He did sometimes apologize for his second career as a commercial pitchman. On at least one occasion, he admitted that \u201ca sizable check was thrust in front of me and I plowed in with no thought to its effect or ramifications.\u201d In certain literary circles, hosting the quiz show and doing all those commercials brought Serling scorn. But it was work; it kept him in the game, and more than paid the bills.<\/p>\n\n\n

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S<\/span>erling \u2014 who, early in his career, overestimated the potential of broadcast television \u2014 clearly underestimated the staying power of the show that sustains his name. In 1966 he sold back to CBS his sizable stake in The Twilight Zone<\/i>, suspecting, apparently, that the show, having run its course, would just gather dust in the network\u2019s vaults. But he did not foresee the age of syndication. From the start the series was a hit in reruns, and it is still shown regularly on broadcast and cable outlets around the world, including on Syfy, which for twenty years has run a Twilight Zone<\/i> marathon on New Year\u2019s Eve. After its cancellation, the show went on to earn \u201chundreds of millions\u201d of dollars, as Anne Serling ruefully notes, saying that selling it may have been \u201cthe worst mistake of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He did not live long enough to enjoy the continuing influence of the show James Aubrey loathed. Over the years, The Twilight Zone<\/i> has inspired board games, a magazine, graphic novels, and two other, albeit less successful, series using the same format and name. A 1983 feature film, Twilight Zone: The Movie<\/i>, was co-produced and co-directed by Stephen Spielberg, who began his career directing scripts for Night Gallery<\/i>, and whose first feature, Duel <\/i>(1971), about a murderous tanker truck in pursuit of a terrified motorist, was written by Richard Matheson and has clear Twilight Zone<\/i> overtones of its own. Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files<\/a><\/i>, has also acknowledged his debt to The Twilight Zone<\/i>, and echoes of Serling\u2019s series persist everywhere in contemporary science fiction and film. Thus \u201cThe Lonely,\u201d the early Twilight Zone<\/i> episode in which a man falls in love with an attractive robot, his sole companion on a distant, dusty planet, prefigures Her<\/a><\/i>, the 2013 film by Spike Jonze about a lonely man obsessed with the shrewd and seductive female voice on his computer\u2019s operating system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One wonders how Serling would fare in today\u2019s very different television environment. The kind of time-filling, lowbrow programming that he decried and Aubrey preferred remains widely popular. But alongside it we now have high-quality scripted series distributed by cable channels and streaming companies \u2014 dramas of a scope that the movies cannot hope to match, shows that viewers can binge-watch at home on giant screens, often without any interruptions by the dancing rabbits. At least for the moment and at least for that slice of the television market, Serling\u2019s complaints \u2014 about advertising as the \u201cbasic weakness of the medium\u201d and about the \u201cinterference\u201d by commercial interests in the artistic process \u2014 no longer apply. Perhaps Serling, with his wish to use television as a vehicle of artistic expression on pressing moral and political issues, would fit right in. (In this regard, it is worth noting that Ithaca College, where Serling taught classes for several years, has created a Rod Serling Award for Advancing Social Justice Through Popular Media<\/a>; in 2016, the inaugural award was bestowed on David Simon, whose show The Wire<\/i> is considered one of the foremost exemplars of our latest golden age of television.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA writer\u2019s claim to recognition doesn\u2019t take the passage of time very well,\u201d Serling observed in 1957, adding that the aspiring TV writer should buy a scrapbook since that would be \u201cprobably the only way he\u2019ll find permanence in recognition.\u201d The creator of The Twilight Zone<\/i> would be surprised to know that his show is not just remembered today, is not just studied by academics as an artifact from a bygone era, but is still available and watched and loved for its stories and characters and insights into human nature. Almost nothing is left of Rod Serling\u2019s many commercials, the ads that sunk him in moneyed misery. But The Twilight Zon<\/i>e<\/i> \u2014 the show for which he struggled, the artistic achievement he worried would fade to oblivion \u2014 remains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Murray on Rod Serling\u2019s struggle to turn TV into an art form<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17682,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5041],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22338,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10568\/revisions\/22338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10568"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10568"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}