There are some REALLY bad episodes... boring af that he wrote and there are obviously absolute MASTERPIECES... I'm rewatching for the +100th time To Serve Man.
I wonder if Serling was able to know after he was done writing each script the ones that were going to be considered good and which ones bad... or do you think he thought that all his stories were the same quality?
Good question. I often wondered if Charles Dickens knew just how brilliant A Christmas Carol was at the time he wrote it.
Getting back to TZ, I think some stinkers had to do with cast selection and/or production.
Editing can influence quality. Probably 15-20 hours of material filmed for each half hour episode. A lot of choices to be made as to what viewers see and what get thrown out. Easier to do when making what amounts to a docu-drama such as what Jack Webb did with Dragnet and Adam-12. Harder when you are trying to get thought provoking material out.
shareOhhh, Dickens was well aware about his success, he was kind of the Stephen King of his time. His first big success was Oliver Twist, which was released in a monthly serial magazine and was a smash hit in the UK. It even initiated discussions about labor laws for kids.
His follow up book was then a big letdown and Dickens even run into financial problems (he knew how to spend money). So he wrote a Christmas Carol, which was also a huge success with several editions released within one year alone. But as he insisted on expensive materials for the book the returns were quite small. It was also not benefitial that the copyright laws were non existence to not enforced, so he lost a lot of money from all the unauthorized plays. But he was very much aware about his success.
"Rod Serling wrote most of the episodes..."
He wrote 68 episodes out of 156, which is about 43.6%. He wrote more episodes than anyone else, but he didn't write most of the episodes.
"There are some REALLY bad episodes... boring af that he wrote and there are obviously absolute MASTERPIECES... I'm rewatching for the +100th time To Serve Man."
Serling didn't come up with the story for "To Serve Man," he only wrote the teleplay. It was an adaption of a short story of the same name written by Damon Knight in 1950:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
He didn't write 68 episodes. He wrote 92. Sixty-eight or so were original scripts. Twenty-four or so were adaptations. And many of those adaptations, like And When The Sky Was Opened, What You Need and Third From The Sun, retained the source material's core concept while pretty much starting from scratch otherwise.
share"Sixty-eight or so were original scripts. Twenty-four or so were adaptations."
I obviously knew that already, since I said:
"Serling didn't come up with the story for "To Serve Man," he only wrote the teleplay. It was an adaption of a short story of the same name written by Damon Knight in 1950"
Serling is not the writer when it's an adaption of a pre-existing work by a different writer. He obviously gets some sort of partial credit for any changes he made, but not full credit.
Serling said that he knew some of his episodes were bad - I mean, REALLY bad. Remember, he wasn't just writing, he was working furiously on many aspects of the series, running himself ragged. And he admitted that towards the end, he was burning out from the intense pace of the show & his workload.
But when he was in top form, he was REALLY good. And even in some of the so-so episodes, there's a good line or idea. Even some of the just plain bad episodes could be salvaged by rewriting, if there had been time for it. But there wasn't, alas.
In the Twilight Zone companion book, Rod Serling says that he considered about a third of the episodes to be great, real classics. He says a third are good. But he says that a third are bad.
There were a few that missed the mark. But I wouldn’t say that there were a lot of episodes that were “dogs”.
Speaking of dogs, “The Hunt” is one of my all time favorites. But the book gives it a bad review. Not everyone is going to like every episode.
I've always liked "The Hunt" as well.
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The Hunt is one of those TZ episodes that I will absolutely switch the channel to watch when it's in the rotation. The story is really really good but Arthur Hunnicutt was just so perfect as old man Simpson (his dog did a great job as well :) He's one of those actors who never headlined anything but simply improved everything he was in.
Arthur Hunnicutt was a great character actor. He must have been because he was able to work with dogs without being upstaged.🐕
He is in two of my all time favorite Bonanza episodes, Any Friend of Walter’s and Walter and the Outlaws.
Walter was a sleepy eyed Airedale who hardly moved, yet his owner Obie, a prospector, thought he was the smartest dog in the world.
His favorite phrase in reference to his dog, “Ain’t he a caution?”
LOL, I remember those!