Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays- Patterns , The Comedian, and Requiem for a Heavyweight -form a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age" . . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky ( Marty ) and Reginald Rose ( Twelve Angry Men ) who contributed to that illusion of gold.

Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was flyweight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha relates in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their `people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later: `What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' " *

Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 ( Patterns , starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executive-the teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature films- Assault on a Queen was maybe the worst of them; Planet of the Apes and Seven Day in May were two of the good ones-but television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky ( Hospital, Network ). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a five-year hiatus following the cancellation of The Twilight Zone , he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of Night Gallery. Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important." **

Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancellation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded.