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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 206 из 359Under the comforting guise of "it's only make-believe," The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness-rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis.
*For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone , I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in Starlog #15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.
**Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer' Yearbook .
Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith* as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood.
If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n’ robbers meller, The Detectives , on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBC-this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.
But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone 's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews.
The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." ** Nevertheless, problems continued.
*For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone , I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in Starlog #15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.
**Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer' Yearbook .
Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith* as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood.
If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n’ robbers meller, The Detectives , on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBC-this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.
But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone 's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews.
The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." ** Nevertheless, problems continued.