This is a somewhat sad but extremely well made episode from "American Masters". I say sad because Rod Serling was probably the greatest television writer who ever lived, yet despite six Emmy awards and fan that no other TV writer ever attained, he was incredibly insecure and unsatisfied.
The show only briefly talks about Serling's life before he went to New York City to become a writer and his writing is the main focus of the shows he wrote. The first part of this concentrates on his early work and in particular the wonderful teleplays he wrote. While it only talks about a few of these, those few are among the best television of the age and resulted in his first Emmy awards. Then the show concentrates a lot of attention on his "Twilight Zone" series. My only complaint about this is that most folks are already very familiar with these shows and I would have preferred less--not that the show wasn't brilliant. But I would have liked more about Serling the man is the final portion of the show and discusses his emotional and physical decline brought on by self-doubts and uneasiness with his ability to keep producing hits.
Apart from concentrating too much on individual episodes of "Twilight Zone", the only other complaint I had was how the show mostly was dismissive of his work on movies apart from "Seven Days in May". This seemed a bit of an overstatement and some of his 'less worthy' scrips (such as "Planet of the Apes") were still very good. Still, I appreciate how the show managed to capture the uneasiness Serling had with fame and his own insecurities. And, it really was interesting when the program talked about the network and sponsors and how they were cowardly in re-writing some of his best work. Well worth seeing.
The show only briefly talks about Serling's life before he went to New York City to become a writer and his writing is the main focus of the shows he wrote. The first part of this concentrates on his early work and in particular the wonderful teleplays he wrote. While it only talks about a few of these, those few are among the best television of the age and resulted in his first Emmy awards. Then the show concentrates a lot of attention on his "Twilight Zone" series. My only complaint about this is that most folks are already very familiar with these shows and I would have preferred less--not that the show wasn't brilliant. But I would have liked more about Serling the man is the final portion of the show and discusses his emotional and physical decline brought on by self-doubts and uneasiness with his ability to keep producing hits.
Apart from concentrating too much on individual episodes of "Twilight Zone", the only other complaint I had was how the show mostly was dismissive of his work on movies apart from "Seven Days in May". This seemed a bit of an overstatement and some of his 'less worthy' scrips (such as "Planet of the Apes") were still very good. Still, I appreciate how the show managed to capture the uneasiness Serling had with fame and his own insecurities. And, it really was interesting when the program talked about the network and sponsors and how they were cowardly in re-writing some of his best work. Well worth seeing.