‘The Twilight Zone’ Was Rod Serling’s Answer to Censorship (2024)

The genesis of a TV series can be found almost anywhere. Sherwood Schwartz created The Brady Bunch to speak to the growing number of blended families at the tail end of the 1960s. The concept of The Good Place, summed up by Michael (Ted Danson) in Season 1 when he states “This is the Good Place, we don’t put people in jail. It’s just a room, where you have been put, as a form of punishment, and from which there is no exit.”), finds its roots in Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 play No Exit (amusingly referenced in Michael's quote). Adam Goldberg didn't have to go far at all for The Goldbergs: the series was based on his own childhood experiences. The impetus for The Twilight Zone is particularly interesting, in that the classic science fiction/horror TV series came about thanks to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man, in Mississippi, and creator Rod Serling's determination to tell the story against the powerful coalition that wouldn't allow it: TV censors.

The Twilight Zone (1959)

TV-PG

Ordinary people find themselves in extraordinarily astounding situations, which they each try to solve in a remarkable manner.

Release Date

October 2, 1959

Creator

Rod Serling

Cast

Rod Serling , Jack Klugman , Burgess Meredith , John Anderson

Main Genre

Sci-Fi

’The Twilight Zone’s Inspiration Is a Historic Miscarriage of Justice

The murder that inspired Serling to create The Twilight Zone, the same murder that sparked the Civil Rights movement, dates back to August 1955. Emmett left his home in the Chicago area to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta, and on the 24th, after spending the day picking cotton with his cousins, Emmett ducked into a store to buy bubble gum. White Mississippians expected Black customers to leave money on the counter, but Emmett put the money for his gum directly into the hand of white store owner Carolyn Bryant. Bryant would testify that she stormed out of the store to get a pistol from her car, while Emmett, his cousin Simeon Wright, and friend Ruthie Mae Crawford ran away. Four days later, Bryant's husband Roy and J.W. Milam took Emmett, at gunpoint, from the Wright home, drove to a barn almost an hour away, and tortured him. Emmett was then shot in the head, his body tossed into the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire.

When his body was found days later, only a silver ring on one finger could be used to identify the remains. Emmett had been pistol-whipped, had his wrists broken, and otherwise brutally maimed. The local sheriff sought to have the body buried immediately before news left the area, an action that was stopped through the efforts of Emmett's mother Mamie. Upwards of 50,000 people attended the funeral, and Mamie allowed pictures of Emmett's mutilated corpse in the open casket to be published "because when people saw what had happened to this little 14-year-old boy, they knew then that not only were men, Black men, in danger, but Black children as well" (the photo can be seen in the link above, only barely recognizable as a person at all). Roy Bryant and Milam were put on trial, and after five days and a single hour of jury deliberation, the men were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. That acquittal meant they could not be retried for the crime, even after confessing to Look magazine that they tortured and murdered young Emmett. Instead of going to prison for their horrific actions, they each earned $4,000 for telling their story, as mentioned in the previously cited CBS News article.

Rod Serling Is Compelled To Tell Emmett Till’s Story

At the time, 30-year-old Serling was a burgeoning presence in dramatic television circles and one who saw the potential of television and films as forces for social justice. As cited in Smithsonian Magazine, Serling would be quoted as saying, “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus [on] the issues of his time.” That Till's murder occurred as Serling began making his mark in television is seemingly destiny, like something out of the series Serling would create. That Till's murderers were acquitted of the crime compelled Serling to tell the story.

Television in the 1950s was restrictive, to say the least, as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would attest to. So when Serling pitched the idea to the executives behind ABC's anthology series U.S. Steel Hour, he framed it as a story about a Jewish pawnbroker's lynching in the South. That pitch was accepted, and Serling began working on a script for that scenario for television, and an adaptation of the same story for Broadway that replaced the Jewish pawnbroker with a black victim. As Serling would recount in an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, after telling a reporter from the Daily Variety about the plot of the play, titled "Noon on Doomsday," the reporter quipped, "Sounds like the Till case," to which Serling added, "If the shoe fits..." His remark set off a storm of controversy as wire services were quick to suggest that the Till case was going to be dramatized on the U.S. Steel Hour.

Rod Serling Finally Tells Emmett Till’s Story via ‘The Twilight Zone’

As explained by journalist Jeff Kisseloff, "Station owners and advertising agencies were afraid to offend any segment of their white audiences, even racists, for fear of losing income." As a result, when U.S. Steel Hour and ABC received thousands of angry letters and wires from white supremacist groups, among others, they caved and ordered changes to be made to Serling's script. In the same interview with Wallace, Serling described how his initial story was decimated. "It was gone over with a fine-tooth comb by 30 different people,” he said and added that he was expected to attend at least two meetings a day for over a week, taking notes on the changes that had to be made. When "Noon on Doomsday" finally did air in April 1956, it was a radical difference from what Serling had initially drawn up. It was no longer taking place in the South, but in New England, and anything that could remotely link the story to the South wasn't allowed. The victim wasn't black, or even Jewish, but an unknown foreigner. The killer wasn't a hate-filled, psychopathic nut job, but just a good old, wholesome American boy who had a lapse in judgment.

Serling took another shot at telling Till's story on CBS’ Playhouse 90, framing it as a lynching in a small Southwest town. Despite CBS executives insisting the story remove any reference to black and white racial dynamics, specifically any reference to Till, and a completely different time period, his hope of communicating his message about prejudice and hatred shone through, albeit muted. This latest experience sent Serling back to the drawing board, and then it dawned on him. Making directed social commentary wasn't working, but what if that commentary was filtered? From there, Serling settled on a show that was a science fiction/horror anthology on the surface, with an undertone that spoke to society's ills: The Twilight Zone. As his daughter Jodi explains, “He realized to get the point, or a controversial message, across that you had to do it a certain way. He did feel that it was criminal for writers not to be permitted to address the social evils that exist. The networks and the sponsors did not interfere with The Twilight Zone because they didn’t realize what my father was trying to convey.” Essentially, the series was a Trojan Horse, delivering Serling's messages under the guise of a fictional world, and the censors simply rubber-stamped it.

The Twilight Zone became one of TV's most iconic series, airing between 1959 and 1964, and sired several revivals and adaptations, with mixed results. The Till murder case was officially closed by the Department of Justice in 2021, and a push to indict Carolyn Bryant in August 2022 on kidnapping and manslaughter charges related to the murder was declined due to insufficient evidence (Bryant also denied having recanted the damning statements at the original trial). A movie about the murder and the aftermath, Till, was released in 2022. Serling did finally share his take on Till in the classic episode "I Am the Night - Color Me Black," and his closing narration is just as true now as it was then:

"A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ—but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether."

The Twilight Zone is available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S.

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