User Reviews

So said the TV Guide ad for the initial November 29, 1995 broadcast of this wonderful and worthwhile program.

Twilight Zone-style music begins. Clock on wall reads 2:14. Scene is a hospital operating room in which open-heart surgery is being done.

Narrator's voice :

"Submitted for your approval : the man in cardiac crisis is Mr. Rod Serling : writer, producer, and agent provocateur of a certain electronic medium which he helped to create, and which, by way of thanks, kindly ushered him out the door. But that is of no particular concern to him at the moment, because this is Saturday, June 28, 1975, [the program said Tuesday, but that is wrong]and, thanks to a million cigarettes, and a heart with its own flair for the dramatic, Mr. Serling is on the cutting edge of infinity. Mr. Rod Serling, who once said, he just wanted to be remembered as a writer, is about to get his wish, in a small town called Yesterday, found on any map ... in The Twilight Zone."

[Heart monitor beeps wildly. Clock ticks. Twilight Zone theme music plays. Rushing up at us, then breaking up, a la Twilight Zone main title :]

ROD SERLING : SUBMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL

The show could have been done any number of ways. I like the way it WAS done, in black and white, as a Twilight Zone episode, because that show was Serling's masterpiece.

The show refers to television as the awkward (or orphaned) stepchild of radio. So I wish mention had been made of Serling's days as a radio staff writer in Cincinatti, Ohio, and of his initial attempt to do "Twilight Zone" on the radio, with script titles like "Panic At Zero Hour" and "The Button Pushers". Serling mentions his quitting the radio station, and why, in "The Mike Wallace Interview", excerpts of which are used in the show.

It would have been good to include mention of Serling's third Emmy, for "The Comedian", on "CBS Playhouse 90", parts of which are used in the show to portray what happens in a studio where live television drama is produced. Parts of "The Man In The Funny Suit", the show about the behind-the-scenes production of "Requiem For A Heavyweight", Serling's second Emmy, is also used in "Submitted For Your Approval"(SFYA).

The explanation of why Serling chose to do "The Twilight Zone" could have been made more direct. The replacement of Hubbell Robinson by James Aubrey as Director of Programming at CBS probably had much to with it, as well as commercial sponsor censorship of, and interference with, meaningful and socially relevant live television drama.

Statements by Serling as to the speed at which he wrote scripts for Twilight Zone, compared to those he wrote for Playhouse 90, were moved from the context in which I had originally seen them, in Marc Scott Zicree's "Twilight Zone Companion", about the beginning of Twilight Zone, to another context, about how Serling was tired of Twilight Zone, and burned out by it, towards its end. This context on SFYA included Serling's statement : "It's a schedule in which, if I stop to pick up a pencil I've dropped, I'm two weeks behind !" and relevant excerpts from Twilight Zone's "A Stop At Willoughby".

I thought a distinction should have been made between the "Night Gallery" pilot movie, written and narrated by Serling, from two of the three novellas in his 1967 book, "The Season To Be Wary", the top-rated program of Saturday, November 8, 1969 (its original air date) and starring Roddy McDowall, Ossie Davis, Joan Crawford, Tom Bosley, Richard Kiley, and Sam Jaffe, and the "Night Gallery" TV series, which Serling complained so bitterly and vehemently, and so rightly so, about.

Use might have been made in "SFYA" of the "curious triad", mentioned by Zicree in his "Twilight Zone Companion", formed by three Serling teleplays :

"Patterns" (Kraft Television Theater) : a bright young executive on his way up faces a future of challenges and successes. This play made Serling famous overnight as a television dramatist.

"Walking Distance" (from The Twilight Zone's first season) : Older, more thoughtful, having achieved some measure of success, Serling, as Martin Sloan, experiences a bittersweet longing for the bygone days of his youth.

"They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar"(Emmy-nominated, from "Night Gallery") : An older man, his chief successes now a thing of the past, longs for the days in which he achieved them, unhappy in an uncaring present, in which "he is hustled to death in the daytime and dies of loneliness at night".

Serling's younger daughter, Anne, adapted two of her father's Twilight Zone teleplays, "One For The Angels" and "The Changing Of The Guard", into short stories for the Avon 1985 paperback, "Twilight Zone : The Original Stories". Excerpts from these two Twilight Zone teleplays were used in "SFYA" to illustrate Serling's character, and his fears about himself becoming a has-been, unloved, unwanted, and unremembered.

Closing narration : (ending music from TZ's "Walking Distance" plays in background, with end of "One For The Angels" on screen, in which pitchman Lew Bookman walks into the distance with Mr. Death)

"Some achievements can be measured in Nielsen ratings, and some neatly summarized on a balance sheet. A word to the wise : ordinary benchmarks cannot be used to measure artistry. Case in point : Mr. Rod Serling : occupation : writer. A modern-day Aesop, who, by tickling our imaginations, slipped a little wisdom into our pockets, and then, slipped away, a little too early. Perhaps an appointment to keep ... in the Twilight Zone."