TV Zone

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An unenviable task, it must be, to try to sum up The Twilight Zone.  Barry Keith Grant, however, has done an admirable job in this TV Milestones volume.  He addresses in a forthright way one of the questions on my mind quite a bit as of late—what are the borders of genre?  For a creative species such as our own, with imaginations that range far and high, we blend unlikely ingredients.  The Twilight Zone had finished its initial run before I ever watched television, but I was around to catch early reruns.  Their focus on the weird, the unusual, the twist ending, informed my childhood love of the strange.  They also helped shape my imagination.  This little book helps to capture some of that.

I haven’t watched every episode of the series yet.  I’ve been making my way through it slowly since I really don’t have much time for watching, and I tend to give priority to movies.  Still, The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television programs of all time, as Grant demonstrates.  Although he tries, it may be impossible to determine just why so many people use it as a frame of reference.  Even with my penchant for analyzing, I can’t work out what it was about those disparate, discrete episodes that so captured me.  Perhaps like most influences, it was specific episodes that hit very deep.  That showed new ways of thinking about things.  That opened up worlds of possibilities.

I was exposed to Serling’s stories not only through my own reading, but also through school.  I have no hope of remembering what grade it was in, but in one of my English classes we were assigned “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”  I was probably lost in the haze of puberty and adolescence at the time, but I remember well how that story made me feel.  And the teacher pointing out how people behaved when they were afraid.  Perhaps appropriately, Grant ends his book with a quote from that very episode.  Others, however, stayed with me as well.  Perhaps that’s the thing that’s so remarkable about the Zone—some episodes are not easily forgotten.  We’re accustomed to the flood of anodyne media that dowses us with entertainment of little consequence.  Some Twilight Zone episodes were that way as well.  But when we experience something significant, we tend to remember it and remember it well.  So many episodes did that kind of work on a mind too young to make lasting life decisions.  I guess I’m still waiting for Mr. Serling to step into frame and explain it.

Shadows of Childhood

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While it may not seem to fit my current re-fascination, I’m not really a “fan”personality.  My interests are far too diverse.  Since I’ve been thinking about Dark Shadows a lot lately I decided to do some reading on it.  There’s a genre of nonfiction that involves small format, short introductions to various media.  I’ve read a few of the Devil’s Advocates series about horror movies and I recently discovered the similar TV Milestones series about, well, TV.  They have a volume on Dark Shadows by Harry M. Benshoff, and I knew it would help scratch my current itch.  You see, I wasn’t really a devoted fan of the show—I watched it after school like a lot of kids did in the late sixties and into the early seventies.  I read a few of the novels.  I never attended any conferences (they exist) and never wrote any fan fiction.  I think my level of engagement was different.

Nevertheless, this is an informative little book.  I found out that there’s even more to the phenomenon than I already knew I didn’t know.  I never really followed the whole plot line.  I didn’t realize just how complex the story is.  Perhaps on some level I knew the series was culturally significant.  As a child I didn’t know much about the wider culture.  We were working class poor, how was I to find out about such things?  For me, Dark Shadows was a kind of escapism, I suppose.  A fantasy that met a need, not a plot to be unraveled.  I wasn’t aware of how sophisticated, if cheap, it was.

By the time I got to college and started to meet different people, it was a moment that had passed.  I really didn’t think much about Dark Shadows again until after my own gothic tragedy of Nashotah House.  During the days of my career malfunction I rediscovered my childhood, perhaps looking for something better.  I started collecting and reading the novels again, and if I’m honest, were it not so expensive I’d consider watching the original series again.  Like all things nostalgic, I know my Rosebud will never be today what it was back then.  My reading sense wasn’t developed enough to see what might’ve been going on behind the scenes.  Benshoff does a good job of bringing much of that to the light.  I’ll likely read more on the series as time goes on, but I now have a better framework for looking at this particular milestone.  Not, however, as a fanatic.