- SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE A TINY PLANET DIES TWILIGHT ZONE SERIES
- SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE A TINY PLANET DIES TWILIGHT ZONE TV
He belonged to the first generation of American Jews for whom the demarcation between being Jewish and being American was not a border patrolled on both sides. Rod Serling grew up in the 1930s in the small upstate New York city of Binghamton, the second son of an assimilated Jewish family. Suspecting that the “existential anxiety runs at the core of The Twilight Zone…conveys some deep truth about its creator,” Shadmi became fascinated by Serling himself. Again and again, The Twilight Zone was mentioned in the news. White Supremacists were coming out of the woodworks. The world around me seemed to become more and more like the Twilight Zone. The show had a cartoonish quality-improbable plots played out in an unreal monochrome world-yet the dread that ran through it felt unnervingly vivid and real.
SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE A TINY PLANET DIES TWILIGHT ZONE SERIES
After moving to New York in 2002, he watched the entire original series and was amazed by its “beautiful, gray-toned gems with eye-popping visuals and stranger-than-strange stories” that made him think of “the old Jewish Mashals and Maasiyas”-allegorical fables whose force felt undiminished by time. Growing up in Israel in the 1980s, Shadmi had noticed references to The Twilight Zone on The Simpsons and The Wonder Years and saw a few episodes of the 1985 television remake. Its stark and vertiginous black-and-white illustrations convey more effectively than words alone the life and work of a man whose imagination was both verbal and visual. In 2019 Koren Shadmi, a young illustrator and writer, published The Twilight Man, a biography of Serling in the form of a graphic novel. Its themes-the shock of prolonged isolation, the dread of time running out, the eruption of dark dreams into waking life-feel all too current. Now hardly a week goes by without someone invoking it in a blog or newspaper as a forecast of our own moment. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, the original series started turning up on binge-watching lists as if on the homeopathic principle that small doses of fear might ward off bigger fears. In 2002 it was adapted for a long-running radio series, with Stacey Keach as narrator. In 1983 Steven Spielberg produced an homage film consisting of four unrelated episodes, three of them based on stories from the original series.
SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE A TINY PLANET DIES TWILIGHT ZONE TV
There have been three TV remakes, including the current series hosted by Jordan Peele, now in its second season. The Twilight Zone has had many afterlives. If you want the dark truth about American life-about life itself-come with me to the Zone. Many in my generation listened attentively to the prologues and epilogues he delivered each week in a sonorous voice that seemed to say: enough with suburban idylls like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best forget the crooners and hoofers served up by Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk.
The man who gave this old sensation a new name was Rodman Edward Serling, known as Rod. More particularly, the words attached themselves to the feeling of being in a place that’s simultaneously familiar and alien, a “neutral territory,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne described it, “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”
The show ran from 1959 to 1964, and by the time it went off the air the phrase “twilight zone” had entered the language as a kind of shorthand for whatever feels eerie or strange. If, like me, you’re a baby boomer who pleaded as a child to stay up with the big kids to watch The Twilight Zone, you might remember daring yourself to make it all the way through without taking cover behind an older sibling or the family dog. Inger Stevens and Leonard Strong in ‘The Hitch-Hiker,’ an episode of The Twilight Zone, 1960
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