Cult Television

1. ENGL 6650/7650: Special Topics in Popular Culture Cult Television Spring 2011 Room: PH 308 Day/Time: Tuesday, 600-900 pm Cult Television

2. Agenda 1/25/11 | Meeting 2 Introduction to the Course Cult TV Series of the Week: Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and The Prisoner Cult Television

4. Possible Screenings Season 1, Episode 22: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street Original Air Date—4 March 1960 On a peaceful suburban street, strange occurrences and mysterious people stoke the residents' paranoia to a disastrous intensity. Season 2, Episode 6: Eye of the Beholder Original Air Date—11 November 1960 A young woman lying in a hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages, awaits the outcome of a surgical procedure performed by the State in a last-ditch attempt to make her look "normal". Season 2, Episode 15: The Invaders Original Air Date—27 January 1961 When a woman investigates a clamor on the roof of her rural house, she discovers a small UFO and little aliens emerging from it. Or so it seems. Season 3, Episode 26: Little Girl Lost Original Air Date—16 March 1962 Awoken in the middle of the night by the cries of his daughter, a father enters the girl's room to find that she has vanished - even though he can still her crying out for help. The Twilight Zone

5. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley In many respects, it may be odd to find The Twilight Zone included in a book devoted to “cult” TV shows. Generally, the phrase “cult TV” suggests programs that failed to find critical and/or popular success during their initial (usually short-lived) runs; in most cases, these programs are chiefly embraced by relatively small, cult-like bands of devotees and are not usually recalled by the public at large. Max Headroom and Twin Peaks certainly exemplify this kind of “traditional” cult TV show, beloved by faithful fanatics but few others. Yet every now and again, television presents a series that inspires both a mainstream and a cult following, a program that somehow becomes an immediate signifier to almost anybody raised within the dominant culture. Star Trek is the most obvious example of a cult show that has grown into a nigh-universal cultural signifier; similarly, CBS-TV’s The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) has become an integral component of American popular culture, the very title now embedded in the national language as a shorthand description of anything weird or fantastic. . . . The Twilight Zone

6. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley Although he was making a good living and receiving high praise from critics, Rod Serling became increasingly frustrated by network interference. Most television shows were supported by a single sponsor, and these corporations often pressured the networks to change or censor words, ideas, or plot developments that might reflect unfavorably on their products. “Before the script goes before the cameras,” Serling observed, “the networks, the sponsors, the ad-agency men censor it so that by the time it’s seen on the home screen, all the message has been squeezed out of it” (qtd. in Gerani and Schulman 36). Examples of such censorship could be as trivial as the elimination of the line “Got a match?” from “Requiem for a Heavyweight” because Ronson lighters was the sponsor, or they could be as serious as the almost total revision of “Noon on Doomsday,” a teleplay for United States Steel Hour in which a scathing examination of prejudice and bigotry was reduced to inoffensive pabulum (Zicree 14). Eventually, Serling realized that he could write more seriously about the human condition if his realistic themes were clothed in fantastic storylines. It was this realization that led to The Twilight Zone. . . . The Twilight Zone

7. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley Although he enjoyed reading pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and Weird Tales as a child, Serling does not appear to have had much affinity for science fiction and fantasy prior to The Twilight Zone. For example, his script “U.F.O.” for a 1954 episode of Studio One is particularly weak and offers little evidence that the author has any grasp of the science-fiction genre. However, Serling was a quick learner; once he figured out that spaceships would allow him tremendous opportunities to explore the human experience without outside interference, he managed to incorporate them and other sci-fi trappings—robots, time travel, and the like—into the kind of stories he preferred to tell. . . . The Twilight Zone

8. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley Thirty six episodes of The Twilight Zone were broadcast during the initial 1959-1960 season, most of them written by Rod Serling. In all, Serling would write 92 of the series’ 156 installments. During the first season, Serling would craft several classic tales, including “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” in which Dan Duryea portrays a drunken ex-gunslinger restored to his former skill by a magic potion, and “The Lonely,” in which Jack Warden plays a murderer condemned to spend decades on a distant asteroid with only a beautiful female robot for company. Serling also contributed what may be the single most memorable Twilight Zone episode of all, “Time Enough at Last,” in which Burgess Meredith appears as Henry Bemis, a mild-mannered bank clerk who wants nothing more than to be left alone with his books. Because he happens to be in the bank vault when atomic warfare breaks out, Bemis survives as the last person on Earth. Instead of being chagrined by this fate, Bemis happily settles down to spend the rest of his life reading—only to accidentally break his glasses, leaving him unable to enjoy a world populated by nothing but books. “It’s not fair!” the defeated little man complains to his unhearing and now useless companions. . . . The Twilight Zone

9. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley Although the show’s creator was incredibly prolific, he couldn’t possibly write every episode, so other writers were brought in, most notably science-fiction specialists Richard Matheson (1926- ), Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), and George Clayton Johnson (1929- ). Chief among this triumvirate was Matheson, author of such speculative-fiction classics as I Am Legend (1954), The Shrinking Man (1956), and Bid Time Return (also called Somewhere in Time, 1975). Generally recognized as the premier American fantasist after H. P. Lovecraft’s death and before the rise of Stephen King, Matheson contributed 16 scripts to The Twilight Zone, including “The Invaders” (2.15), a nearly wordless episode in which an old woman (Agnes Moorehead) is terrorized by tiny alien invaders. She manages to destroy her tormentors, but not before one transmits a warning message back to his home planet, which turns out to be Earth, about the dangers on this world of giants. Perhaps even more fondly remembered is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (5.3), wherein Captain Kirk-to-be William Shatner plays an airline passenger who can’t convince anybody that a gremlin is destroying the plane’s wing during a violent storm. . . . The Twilight Zone

10. Twilight Zone Jonathan Lampley As early as 1963, Serling spoofed himself on The Jack Benny Show. Since then, hundreds of radio and TV shows have parodied The Twilight Zone, including Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy. The Dutch rock group Golden Earring had a hit song called “Twilight Zone” in 1982, and the program has been referenced in songs by many other artists, including the Rolling Stones. The very phrase “Twilight Zone” has entered the cultural lexicon. It is a testament to the brilliance and imagination of Rod Serling that his image, ideas, and voice—literal and figurative—continue to resonate in the American consciousness long after his passing. . . . The Twilight Zone

11. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone The Twilight Zone is generally considered to be the first real "adult" science-fantasy anthology series to appear on American television, introducing the late 1950s TV audience to an entertaining and at the same time thought-provoking collection of human condition stories wrapped within fantastic themes. Although the series is usually labeled a science fiction program its true sphere was fantasy, embracing elements of the supernatural, the psychological, and "the almost-but-not-quite; the unbelievable told in terms that can be believed" (Rod Serling). During the show's five-year, 155-episode run on CBS (1959-64) the program received three Emmy Awards (Rod Serling, twice, for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama, and George Clemens for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography), three World Science Fiction Convention Hugo Awards (for Dramatic Presentation: 1960, 1961, 1962), a Directors Guild Award (John Brahm), a Producers Guild Award (Buck Houghton for Best Produced Series), and the 1961 Unit Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations, among numerous other awards and presentations.

12. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone The brain-child of one of the most successful young playwrights of his time (with such "Golden Age" TV successes as "Patterns" and "Requiem for a Heavyweight"), Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone began life as a story called "The Time Element" which Serling had submitted to CBS, where it was produced as part of the Westinghouse-Desilu Playhouse anthology. Although it was little more than a simple time-warp tale, starring William Bendix as a man who believes he goes back in time to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the TV presentation received an extraordinary amount of complementary mail and prompted CBS to commission a Twilight Zone pilot for a possible series. With his "Time Element" script already used, Serling prepared another story which would be the pilot episode for the series. "Where Is Everybody?" opened The Twilight Zone on 2 October 1959, and featured a riveting one-man performance by Earl Holliman as a psychologically stressed Air Force man who hallucinates that he is completely alone in a deserted but spookily "lived in" town while actually undergoing an isolation experiment. It was this hallucinatory human stress situation placed in a could-be science-fantasy landscape, complete with an O. Henry-type "snapper ending", that was to become the standard structure of The Twilight Zone. "Here's what The Twilight Zone is," explained Serling to TV Guide magazine in November 1959. "It's an anthology series, half hour in length, that delves into the odd, the bizarre, the unexpected. It probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long considered to have IQs in negative figures."

13. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone Serling's contract with the network stipulated that he would write eighty per cent of the first season's scripts which would be produced under Serling's own Cayuga Productions banner. The prolific Serling, of course, ended up writing well over 50% of the entire show's teleplays during its five years on the air. This enormous output was for the most part supported by two other writers of distinction in the science-fantasy genre: Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Matheson's literary and screenplay work before and during the series ran parallel to that of Beaumont; not suprisingly, since they were personal friends and often script-writing collaborators during their early days in television. Matheson's early writing had included the short story collection, Born of Man and Woman, and a novel, I Am Legend (both published 1954), and later the screenplays for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957; from his own novel), House of Usher (1960), and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Beaumont's work included similar science fiction and horror-fantasy writings, with the short story collections Shadow Play (published 1957) and Yonder (1958) as well as screenplays for Premature Burial (1962) and The Haunted Palace (1963) alongside others in a similar vein. Their individual scripts for The Twilight Zone were perhaps the nearest in style and story flavor to Serling's own work. George Clayton Johnson was another

14. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone young writer who, emerging from Beaumont's circle of writer friends, produced some outstanding scripts for the series, including the crackling life-or-death bet story "A Game of Pool", featuring excellent performances from Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters. Earl Hamner Jr., later to be creator and narrator of the long-running The Waltons, supplied eight scripts to the series, most of which featured good-natured rural folk and duplicitous city slickers. The renowned science fiction author Ray Bradbury was asked by Serling to contribute to the series before the show had even started but due to the richness of Bradbury's written work, he contributed only one script, "I Sing the Body Electric", based on his own short story.

15. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone As an anthology focusing on the "dimension of imagination" and using parable and suggestion as basic techniques, The Twilight Zone favored only a dozen or so story themes. For instance, the most recurring theme appeared to be Time, involving time warps and accidental journeys through time: a W.W.I flier lands at a modern jet air base (Matheson's "The Last Flight"), a man finds himself back in 1865 and tries to prevent the assassination of President Lincoln (Serling's "Back There"), three soldiers on National Guard maneuvers in Montana find themselves back in 1876 at the Little Big Horn (Serling's "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms"). Another theme explored The Confrontation with Death/The Dead: a girl keeps seeing the same hitchhiker on the road ahead, beckoning her toward a fatal accident (Serling's "The Hitchhiker", from Lucille Fletcher's radio play), an aged recluse, fearing a meeting with Death, reluctantly helps a wounded policeman on her doorstep and cares for him overnight before she realizes that he is Death, coming to claim her (Johnson's "Nothing in the Dark"). Expected science fiction motifs regarding Aliens and Alien Contact, both

16. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone benevolent and hostile, provide another story arena: a timid little fellow accustomed to being used as a doormat by his fellow man is endowed with super-human strength by a visiting scientist from Mars (Serling's "Mr. Dingle, the Strong"), visiting aliens promise to show the people of earth how to end the misery of war, pestilence and famine until a code clerk finally deciphers their master manual for earth and discovers a cook book (Serling's "To Serve Man", from a Damon Knight story). Other themes common to the series were Robots, with Matheson's excellent "Steel" a standout; The Devil, Beaumont's "The Howling Man"; Nostalgia, Serling's "Walking Distance" and "A Stop at Willoughby"; Machines, Serling's "The Fever"; Angels, Serling's poetic "A Passage for Trumpet"; and "Premonitions/Dreams/Sleep," Beaumont's "Perchance to Dream". The general tone of many Twilight Zone stories was cautionary, that man can never be too sure of anything that appears real or otherwise.

17. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone In 1983 Warner Brothers, Steven Spielberg and John Landis produced Twilight Zone the Movie, a four segment tribute to the original series presenting pieces directed by Landis (also written by Landis), Spielberg (written by George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Josh Rogan, based on the original 1962 episode "Kick the Can"), Joe Dante (written by Matheson, based on the original 1961 episode "It's a Good Life"), and George Miller (written by Matheson from his own story and original 1963 episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"). From 1985 onwards CBS Entertainment produced a new series of The Twilight Zone. Honored science fiction scribe Harlan Ellison acted as creative consultant under executive producer Philip DeGuere; the series is particularly noted for the participating name directors, such as Wes Craven, William Friedkin, and Joe Dante. In more recent times, Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics presented a 2-hour TV movie based on two unproduced works discovered by the late writer's widow and literary executor, Carol Serling: Robert Markowitz directed both "The Theater" (scripted by Matheson from Serling's original story) and "Where the Dead Are" (from a completed Serling script).

18. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone With its subtext of escape from reality, a nostalgia for more simple times, but generally a hunger for other-worldly adventures, it seems appropriate that the original The Twilight Zone series appeared at about the right time to take viewers away, albeit briefly, from the contemporary real-life fears of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, eventually, the tragic events of Dallas. That The Twilight Zone, directly or indirectly, inspired such later fantasy and SF anthologies as Thriller (1960-62), with its dark Val Lewtonesque atmosphere, and, following that, the superb The Outer Limits (1963-64), a delicious tribute to 1950s science fiction cinema when it was at its most imaginative, remain testimony to both Rod Serling and his Twilight Zone's spirit of poetry and principle. -Tise Vahimagi

19. From The Encyclopedia of Television: The Twilight Zone FURTHER READING Boddy, William. "Entering the Twilight Zone." Screen (London), July-October, 1984. Javna, John. The Best of Science Fiction TV: The Critics' Choice: From Captain Video to Star Trek, from The Jetsons to Robotech. New York: Harmony, 1987. Lentz, Harris M. Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film and Television Credits: Over 10,000 Actors, Actresses, Directors. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1983. _______________. Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film And Television Credits, Supplement 2, Through 1993. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994. Rothenberg, Randall. "Synergy of Surrealism and The Twilight Zone." The New York Times, 2 April 1991. Sander, Gordon F. Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man. New York: Dutton, 1992. Schumer, Arlen. Visions from the Twilight Zone. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1990. Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Toronto; New York: Bantam, 1982. Ziegler, Robert E. "Moving Out of Sight: Fantastic Vision in The Twilight Zone." Lamar Journal of the Humanities (Beaumont, Texas), Fall 1987.

20. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Cult Television

21. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Douglas l. Howard, The Essential Cult Television Reader Before people were ever lost on the Island or caught up in the Matrix, before the truth was out there, before The Truman Show, Nowhere Man, Twin Peaks, or Burn Notice,there was The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived 1960s’ series that continues to capture viewers’ imaginations and influence network television and feature films alike. For almost forty years now, in fact, critics and fans have been trying to make sense of exactly what they did see onscreen when the thunder crashed and McGoohan’s Lotus 7 sped down the highway for the final time. Was it a science fiction show? Was it a spy thriller? Was it a subversive political commentary? Or was it an allegory about the plight of the individual against the armies of social conformity? Like Number Six himself, the show, in its brief seventeen episode run, has perhaps provoked more questions than it ever answered, leaving viewers, perpetually, to chase down its hidden meanings and to come to their own conclusions where the stoic former spy provided none. Fans have formed (and continue to Cult Television

22. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Douglas l. Howard, The Essential Cult Television Reader form) a variety of clubs, websites, and discussion groups dedicated to analyzing and deciphering the series. Robert Sellers has even called it “television’s greatest ever cult show” (54). But within its many mysteries and its inherent ambiguities, The Prisoner was also an eerily prophetic vision of the postmodern world, with its encroaching military-industrial complex and its invasive technologies, a vision that still speaks to us as we examine the cold steel doors in our own domestic cells. . . . Cult Television

23. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Douglas l. Howard, The Essential Cult Television Reader Long before David Chase went to France to avoid the backlash from the final episode of The Sopranos, Patrick McGoohan “took his family to Switzerland,” as Langley reports, because “he had been forced to go into hiding” (189) after the “fall out” from the final episode of The Prisoner. Where so many viewers and where some of the show’s creators expected the series to end conclusively, according to Britton, like “a version of Goldfinger” (107), with answers to all of the questions that it had posed over its sixteen other episodes, McGoohan had other ideas. If the series had been a spy thriller of sorts with metaphoric overtones, he instead, “six-like,” rebelled against a more formulaic ending and turned the final episode into a metaphoric abstraction set against the backdrop of Number Six’s release and the end of the Village. In the process, he also created what Sellers has called “the most controversial television denouement ever” (134). Cult Television

24. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Douglas l. Howard, The Essential Cult Television Reader Having survived Number Two’s “ultimate test” in “Once Upon a Time,” Number Six is taken before a masked, hooded underground assembly, where he is freed from the burden of his number and praised for “gloriously vindicat[ing] the right of the individual to be individual.” The President of the Assembly offers him the option of leading them or leaving, but the “former Number Six” chooses to confront Number One, who turns out to be an insane version of himself. (As McGoohan himself later explained this revelation, “The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly every minute of the day until one dies is the worser part of oneself” (Langley 232).) Initiating an apocalypse of sorts, McGoohan’s “Individual” pushes the button that ignites Number One’s rocket, which forces an immediate evacuation of the Village and destroys Rover, and Cult Television

25. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68) Douglas l. Howard, The Essential Cult Television Reader is driven back to London, along with his fellow “revolutionaries,” Number Forty-Eight and Leo McKern’s miraculously revived Number Two, before winding up at his flat with the Butler, who now dutifully serves him. In the final scene, the series ends as it began, with McGoohan racing down the highway in his Lotus 7 and beginning the fight to maintain his individuality all over again. Given the apocalyptic imagery at the end of the alternate “Chimes of Big Ben” and the playful recurrence of “pop” in the series, The Prisoner Video Companion notes that, if “the control room in ‘Fall Out’ [is] the area to launch a nuclear strike[, then] Number Six does press the button” (Complete Prisoner). In this regard, the title “Fall Out” itself could also refer to the radioactive consequences of a nuclear explosion and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Cult Television

26. Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) Cult Television

27. Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) “Get a life.” Cult Television