It is revealed at the end of the tale that the young man is in an isolation chamber, the subject of an experiment in preparation for space flight. In response, Serling produced a script entitled “Where is Everybody?” The story concerns a young amnesiac who wanders into a town with no residents but with a feeling of being watched. He urged Serling to try again with something different, something lighter. ![]() William Self thought the story was a powerful statement but hardly something by which to sell a series to a network. Serling turned in a script entitled "The Happy Place." It was a dark vision of a future in which citizens over the age of sixty are taken to idyllic retirement communities and systematically euthanized. His first attempt, however, did not go over well. William Self, an executive in program development at CBS, was assigned to film the pilot at Universal International Studios and Serling set to work developing a script. The fantasy story was something fresh on television and its popularity among viewers of The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse attracted the attention of CBS, who backtracked and decided to allow Serling a shot at developing his own fantasy series. "The Time Element" (read our review here) is a time travel story starring William Bendix and Martin Balsam and concerns a man who, by means of a recurring dream, travels backwards in time to the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eventually, the sponsor relented and “The Time Element” was produced on Arnaz's program to wide acclaim and enormous popularity. Arnaz loved the script but the corporate sponsor of the series was not as high on the project and both Granet and Arnaz fought hard to get it made. Eager to work with Serling's material, Granet dug the script out of the network archives and took it to Desi Arnaz, the host and creative entity behind The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. Bert Granet, a producer at CBS on The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, who later joined Rod Serling as producer on the fourth and fifth seasons of The Twilight Zone, learned that Serling had sold a script to CBS but that the network shelved it. Serling's second potential script, entitled "The Time Element," was purchased by CBS but the network passed on developing it into a series, or even filming it at all, and ultimately shelved it. Serling later reworked the material into the third season The Twilight Zone episode "The Gift," and reused the title for a completely different first season episode suggested by a story idea from Madelon Champion. ![]() The first, "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air," about an alien encounter in a remote village, was rejected by the network. He began by creating his own production company, Cayuga Productions, which eventually oversaw production on his new television experiment, The Twilight Zone.īefore the creation of Cayuga Productions, Serling wrote two hour-long scripts in an attempt to entice CBS to take a chance on a fantasy anthology series. Essentially, he desired to create a program where the writer was in control. After witnessing several of his more controversial scripts for Playhouse 90 censored and sanitized to appease corporate sponsors, Serling began to contemplate creating a fantasy program in an effort to alleviate such restrictions. With fantasy, Serling reasoned, he could get away with Martians and robots saying the controversial things which ordinary characters could not. ![]() Serling gained a reputation as a writer willing to tackle pressing social and political issues as well as a writer vehemently opposed to censorship. ![]() It seemed curious, therefore, that a writer at the top of his field as a dramatist would want to potentially risk his reputation by turning his efforts toward tales of fantasy, science fiction, and the supernatural, creative fields generally held in low regard by cultural gatekeepers. By the time The Twilight Zone aired on October 2, 1959, Serling had been writing television scripts for nearly a decade, receiving an unprecedented three Emmy Awards for his work. The Twilight Zone seemed like an odd endeavor for a writer like Rod Serling. Serling emerged from the era of live television as a dramatist with deep humanistic concerns, writing for prestige dramatic anthology programs such as Kraft Television Theatre and Playhouse 90. There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.
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