Despite television’s enormous growth since the days of the 1960s TV series “The Twilight Zone,” prestige drama has yet to reach maturity, Colin Marshall writes.
Television is a vast wasteland, or so I often heard while growing up. That description had been commonplace since Newton Minow of the F.C.C. used it in his address at the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961. But, as with so many famous American turns of phrase, its context was soon forgotten.
Rod Serling shooting an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” His onscreen persona—dark suit, lowered cigarette—remains so oft-parodied as to be more recognizable than the content of the show itself.Nevertheless, in America cheap thrills have a way of solidifying into cultural touchstones, and when creating “The Twilight Zone” Serling clearly understood the freedom that such déclassé subject matter could afford him in the years ahead.
Even so, not all “Twilight Zone” scripts are of a uniform quality. Serling wrote or adapted a superhuman-sounding ninety-two of the show’s hundred and fifty-six episodes himself, thus imbuing “The Twilight Zone” with his own authorial personality. But, at some point, sheer fatigue seems to have unleashed his weakness for both too-direct and too-broad statements about the concerns of his time.
One also hears that, far from the outwardly simplistic morality of “The Twilight Zone,” these dramas are marked by their unprecedented moral complexity. By most reckonings, their golden age began with David Chase’s “The Sopranos,” which deals with the personal and professional travails of a minor New Jersey mafia boss. Though Tony Soprano frequently engages in criminal or otherwise reprehensible behavior, the series famously leaves open the question of his own final comeuppance.
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