Hang on, I thought when I read this. I’ve written about the Twilight Zone several times (including for the programme of the UK theatrical adaptation). I did a Twilight Zone DVD commentary. And then I did a search and realised that the book I did a foreword for is long out of print: 

So here you go. Some broader thoughts:

Foreword

We find what we need.

Sometimes we don’t understand it, or don’t take advantage of it. Sometimes it destroys us when we find it, and sometimes it becomes our salvation. Rod Serling knew.

(I’m writing this on a plane. I’m not worried. I’m barely scared of flying at all…)

I was fourteen when I first encountered The Twilight Zone. In geological time, even in human being time, this was not long ago. Still, it was in the days when the only way to watch something made for TV was to see it when it was broadcast. You had to be there. If no-one was showing it, you didn’t see it. If it was broadcast when you were a small child, if it wasn’t shown in your country, you were a long way out of luck. My parents had added to the difficulty by deciding , when I turned twelve, and we moved, not to have a television.

Still, I found The Twilight Zone. It was what I needed. I was in conversation with a friend of my father’s, an American Greek named Andy, and we were talking about television shows we’d enjoyed over the years (in a house without television, we could at least talk about television) and he mentioned The Twilight Zone. He hummed the theme tune. No, I said. I’ve never heard of it. Tell me more. Over the next few weeks, I forced him to tell me the plots of all the episodes he could remember, over and over, soaking them up. I might never see this thing, but I still wanted to know all about it. I made the episodes in my head, expanding on the themes: deadly dolls and twist endings and aliens and Death….

A year or so later I was in Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, a science fiction and comics shop in London, and I found a couple of Twilight Zone paperbacks – adaptations of Twilight Zone episodes into short story form (or possibly collections of the original stories that the episodes were based on. It was a long time ago, and the books have long-since been lent out and never returned). I bought them, read them avidly. (Where were the DVDs you ask? Why didn’t I watch the episodes on YouTube? Like I said, it was a long time ago. We didn’t have the leisure to invent DVDs, back then, given the constant peril of dinosaur attacks and the marauding hordes of Genghis Khan, okay? We had three TV channels in the UK, and they all went off by midnight.) I was excited about the involvement of writers like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, writers whose short stories and novels I had loved. I didn’t know if I’d ever actually get to see any episodes of the show. I took what I could get.

And then, in the early eighties, when I was in my early twenties, possibly because the upcoming Twilight Zone movie had raised its profile and brought it back into the consciousness of the broadcasters, The Twilight Zone was shown on British television, and I stayed in that night, or I’d tape it, hoping that the video recorder would work, or that my landlady wouldn’t change the channel, and, finally I got to see the episodes I’d been making in my head for all those years. I saw The Twilight Zone movie (a meh film, but I enjoyed the framing sequence). I bought Marc Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion, read it avidly. So, all through the eighties, on English TV, I finally, watched The Twilight Zone.

It was better than I had ever hoped. Better than I had dreamed. It did not disappoint. It was beautifully filmed, excellently acted, and, above all, it was intelligent. I was watching half hour long journeys into the imagination, in which people found themselves saved or damned or human, unable to outrun their destiny, able to change only themselves. The Twilight Zone was a point of view, a way of talking about things – easy to imitate badly, just as it’s easy to do a poor impersonation of Rod Serling’s clipped delivery, but inimitable. Easily parodied, unable to be imitated. In the years since the original Twilight Zone, one thing we have learned from the attempts to imitate it, to revive it, to remake it, under the Twilight Zone name or another, is how astonishingly difficult it is to make something like that work, and it throws back into focus something it’s easy to overlook – that  The Twilight Zone was simply one of the high water marks of television.

Time passed. Every now and again I’d find myself talking to television executives about television shows, and I would hear them explain why an anthology series was impossible, and I would find myself impressed again by Rod Serling’s achievement in getting The Twilight Zone onto the television at all, let alone that of not doing the same thing week after week, of creating a mood that was light or dark, creepy or exhilarating as the story demanded.

This book is a remarkable tribute to Rod Serling’s creation  – an analysis, a photographic record, most of all, a journey backstage. (I say Rod Serling’s creation, but one thing that this book delivers in spades, if there was any doubt about it, is what a remarkable team Serling assembled, and how very much they did.) There were many journeys backstage in the Twilight Zone – literal and metaphorical. If there was a favourite Twilight Zone plot, it was the one in which our protagonist discovers that what he or she or they believe to be the real world is something else, something other. There’s a backstage. Someone can call “Cut” on your life, and you’ll find that you’re just a creature of fiction, a moment of slippage.

And now, in this age of DVD boxed sets, when everything is available, when things we thought were stories have been discovered to be content, it’s appropriate that the best way backstage into The Twilight Zone is through words and pictures, through archival documents and interviews and commentary. If you want to know how it was done, if you want to marvel at how it was done, if you think that, possibly, one day, you’ll be the one to bring back anthology television, then I commend this book to you.

We find what we need, after all.

(The cabin staff just announced that we’ll be landing soon. I think I caught sight of something on the wing…)

Let’s go backstage.

Neil Gaiman

February 20, 2007