The Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone is a television anthology series created (and often written) by its narrator and host Rod Serling. Each episode (156 in the original series) is a self-contained fantasy, science fiction, or horror/terror story, often concluding with an eerie or unexpected twist. Although advertised as science fiction, the show rarely offered scientific explanations for its fantastic happenings and often, if not always, had a moral lesson that pertained to everyday life. The program followed in the tradition of earlier well written radio programs such as The Weird Circle and X Minus One. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to serious science fiction ideas through television and also through a wide variety of Twilight Zone literature.

The success of this original series led to the creation of two revival series (a cult hit series that ran for several seasons on CBS and in syndication in the '80s, and a short-lived UPN series that ran early in the new millennium), a feature film, a radio series, a comic book, a magazine and various other spinoffs that would span five decades.

Writers for The Twilight Zone included leading genre authorities such as Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner Jr., Reginald Rose and Ray Bradbury. Many episodes also featured adaptations of classic stories by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Lewis Padgett, Jerome Bixby and Damon Knight.