The Twilight Zone: The Definitive Edition - Season One

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre classic Starring Rod Serling Publisher Image Entertainment External Links Image Entertainment

In the annals of television of the fantastic, there is no single program of science fiction, fantasy, or horror as essential or inspirational as Rod Serling's landmark anthology series, a show so influential that its title be came a catch-phrase. The complete run of the show has previously been available on DVD before, but in haphazardly arranged single disc volumes, and without any supplements. These remastered versions, taken from the original camera negatives and magnetic soundtracks, trump those previous releases. The entire first season is presented in broadcast order on a 6-disc set packed with a wealth of supplements.

Serling was one of the most celebrated writers on television when he created The Twilight Zone, with 3 Emmy awards to his credit, but he was chafing against the censorship of sponsors who wanted safe, entertaining shows. This was his response. As a producer he had both creative and editorial control, and by making the series an anthology of tales of the fantastic, he had a way to slip in social and political commentary under the radar.

Serling's best stories use tales of the fantastic to get at the core of his characters. They have an often poignant, sometimes sad humanity to them, even when they explore more bitter sides of fear and desperation and greed, and other turn on an inevitable sentence of poetic justice passed on those who prey upon humanity. Genre fiction was not part of his previous resume but he quickly become the Arthur Miller of the tales of the fantastic. Serling brought the same capacity for compassion and sensitivity to human drama that defined his television plays "Requiem For A Heavyweight" and "The Comedian" to such episodes as "One For the Angels," "Time Enough at Last," and the poignant "A Stop at Willoughby," and his social conscience to such episodes as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," his take on the paranoid hysteria of the red scare. For Serling, the experiences of the fantastic were always metaphors, exaggerations and isolations to make an observation on the human condition, or dislocated dramas that put the social problems of today through a prism to get the viewer to get past the justifications and see the issues in their naked, raw form.

Serling wrote 27 of the 36 scripts and won his fourth writing Emmy Award for this season and a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, while frequent contributors Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson maintained Serling's high quality while bringing their own sensibilities to the show. Beaumont in particular could be merciless with his characters ("Perchance to Dream" has one hapless soul tormented until his demise and "Elegy" has a pitiless black humor to it). Endings are less justice than simply the unfeeling hand of fate squashing a hapless soul. "A fate, a laughing fate," is how Serling describes one episode in his narrative frame, but it's a pitiless black humor.

Richard Matheson contributes 2 scripts to the debut season, including the whimsical season finale. He is probably the most elegant of show's writers. While he's not concerned with social commentary, he shares Serling's compas sion (as in the nightmare of alienation "A World of Difference") and both of his episodes brilliantly show reality as we know it dissolving in front of us: are we who we think we are, or has our fate been written by another?

The half hour format gave Serling and his writers a format in which to hone their scripts into the television equivalent of short stories, with economy and focus, and it drew out the best in the directors, who were rarely showy but almost always creative in their approach, which never sacrificed character to the ideas. Most importantly, the show never sacrificed character to ideas. That's one of the reasons the twist endings worked so well: when you are caught up in the journey of a character, you don't spend your time trying to peak around the narrative corner. And while you can hardly not second guess stories like "I Shot An Arrow In The Air" or "A World Of His Own" (though the deftly played coda of the latter is a delightful surprise as it blurs storyteller, story, and character in a clever twist), they never devolved into gimmick. They are real stories, entertaining and involving with characters we are compelled to follow right to the end.

The original season features the original opening credits sequences set to the swirling harp of Bernard Hermann's dreamy original theme (replaced in Season Two by Marius Constant's more familiar avant-garde theme), with Serli ng narrating the introductions off camera, though each episode is followed by Serling's original on-screen promos for the next week's shows (not all of the film of his codas are intact -- they have apparently been lost to time -- but the audio exists for every episode).

The set allows the viewer to see the development of the show for themselves with the inclusion of the original, unaired version of the pilot "Where is Everybody," which features a different narrator and unfamiliar opening cre dits, as well as minor changes -- it's slightly longer and has a few different shots (which are easy to pick out because of the change in image quality) and dialogue differences. It also features the original sponsor pitch by Rod Serling, where he attempts to sell the series to potential advertisers. The broadcast version of "Where is Everybody" is more familiar, but his introduction is shorter and more abstract. By the second episode, "One For the Angels," starring Ed Wynn (the comic who showed his dramatic chops in the Serling scripted "Requiem For A Heavyweight," sparring with death for a stay of execution) we get the erudite introduction we've come to associate Serling: sharp, evocative, creative. "Street scene. Summer. The present. Man on a sidewalk named Lew Bookman. Age: sixtish.."

Almost every episode features a supplement of some kind. "And When The Sky Opened," for instance, features excerpts from "The Twilight Zone Companion" author Marc Scott Zicree's audio interview with director Douglas Heyes in 1978, a fabulous and often funny excerpt from a Rod Serling Lecture at Sherman Oaks College in 1975 where he takes questions for the audience about the episode, new commentary by star Rod Taylor, and an option to watch it with Leonard Rosenman's isolated score.

Actors Earl Holliman, Martin Landau, Martin Milner, Kevin McCarthy, director Ted Post, and pilot producer William Self also contribute commentaries on their episodes. While they are usually unenlightening -- it's been over 40 years since the episodes were produced, and details get a little hazy -- they can be entertaining, especially when they slip into old stories (Kevin McCarthy, having run out of things to say about "Long Live Walter Jameson," describes how he first got into acting). There are also archival interviews with series producer Buck Houghton and others (including writer Richard Matheson, director Douglas Heyes, and actors Burgess Meredith and Anne Franc is) conducted by Zicree, isolated music scores by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, and Leonard Rosenman (among others), and numerous excerpts from Serling's 1975 Sherwood Oaks College lectures, each organized by appropriate episodes. Among the numerous supplements on disc 6 are an episode of the panel show "The Liar's Club" hosted by Rod Serling, promos and ads, and a brief but priceless Serling blooper.

The shows have never looked or sounded better -- they are crisp and clean -- and they are complete, something that they have not been on TV since their initial broadcasts (the shows were cut down for more commercials in syndication). This collection has been lovingly put together, and as it boasts, it makes for the Definitive treatment of this essential show.