We tend to remember The Twilight Zone as relentlessly grim, but it could also be wry or even outright funny. Its humor bore a family relation to Mad Magazine—affectionate ribbing with a dash of cruelty—as when Serling cast Shelley Berman, that master of deadpan, in “The Mind and the Matter” as an office worker chronically exasperated with everyone around him. He’s a Larry David prototype (Berman would go on to play David’s father in Curb Your Enthusiasm)—an incessant kvetcher who wants to empty the world of “the worst scourge there is, the populace” and refill it exclusively with people like himself. When his wish is granted, he finds himself in a crowded elevator surrounded, as if in a hall of mirrors, by men who look exactly like him—including, to his horror, a sour version of himself in drag.
Serling was very much a 1950s liberal. As his younger contemporary Joan Didion wrote of their generation, he was “convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.” Unlike many who grew up during the Great Depression, he never had, and therefore never lost, faith in radical politics. Traumatic though it was, his wartime experience fortified his belief that the United States was a beacon of decency in the world, and that it needed only to live up to its own professed values. In the Twilight Zone episodes “The Obsolete Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Mirror” (a crude portrait of Fidel Castro as a lunatic narcissist), he tried to represent the distinctive horror of the twentieth century—totalitarianism—not as an ideology of right or left but as a response to the human penchant for ceding volition to some paternalistic power.
Ever since the war he had been afflicted by night terrors and a dire sense of living on borrowed time. “I always write with a sense of desperate urgency,” he said, “as if I had just gotten my X-ray from the doctor” and been told to “check with the insurance man and see whether or not the house is free and clear.” But despite his demons, he remained at heart a callow optimist. He attributed racism, along with anti-Semitism and xenophobia, not to any particular historical process or cultural pathology but to ignorance that could be ameliorated by education. To that end, he wanted to use television as a teaching machine. He clobbered his viewers with the morals of his stories. Beware of What You Wish For! (“Time Enough at Last”). We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us! (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”). Sets and types were clichéd (a Wild West saloon with a buxom barmaid who seems tough but is actually tender). Production values were primitive (a shaking camera indicating a spaceship blasting off). Stories were often wrapped up with an O. Henry–style twist that left the viewer more depleted than disturbed. Yet behind it all was a moral seriousness that was invariably ingenuous and sometimes moving.