The Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.
--Rod Serling

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s, we only had one television, and Mom would never allow me to watch The Twilight Zone. "It'll give you bad dreams!" she insisted. In retrospect, perhaps there simply was some other show in that time slot that Mom preferred. Or perhaps it was she herself who feared having "bad dreams" from Rod Serling's eerie "fantasy/sci-fi" series.

In any case, from the get-go I recognized a captivating program when I saw it, and in subsequent years I was always keen to catch a vintage TZ rerun whenever the opportunity presented.

In more recent decades we've had, of course, Steven Spielberg's 1983 flick Twilight Zone: The Movie and a couple of revived-for-TV TZ series (1985-89 and 2002-03). But none of the latter could recapture the incomparable presence and narration of TZ's creator, the chain-smoking Rod Serling, who, tragically, died at the age of fifty in 1975 (his heart trouble was likely exacerbated by his oral addiction).

I mean, nothing against Forest Whitaker, but he's no Rod Serling. Nor were most of the "modern" TZ series' episodes quite as compellingly scripted or acted as the best of Serling's original, black-and-white series.

Viewing these "1959 to 1964" episodes in the 21st century is, inescapably, not entirely the same experience as viewing them from the perspective of childhood or adolescence decades ago. Many of the episodes remain--virtually--as captivating as ever. Others demand we suspend not only our disbelief but also our sophistication as viewers. And still other episodes simply never were particularly good.