(Edward) Rod(man) Serling | Biography

Rod Serling left behind an impressive body of work for television. Hundreds of his teleplays were aired during his twenty-five-year career. By comparison, his writing for the screen seems slight--he wrote the screenplays for only nine films, and he never had an original screenplay produced; all of his screenplays were adaptations of his own teleplays or of stories or novels by others.

Edward Rodman Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of a wholesale butcher, Samuel L. Serling, and Esther Cooper Serling. He grew up in Binghamton, New York, and after high school he entered the army, where he served as a paratrooper in the Philippines during World War II and received the Purple Heart. Upon leaving the army, he entered Antioch College under the G.I. bill; there he began writing radio and television scripts, teaching himself as he wrote. He married Carol Kramer on 31 July 1948. Before he graduated in 1950, he had sold his first television script (after forty rejections). Until 1953 he wrote for a Cincinnati television station. Turning to free-lance writing for the new medium of television, he developed his craft and found an individual style along the way.

Serling's work during this period in many ways typifies the work of the first generation of television writers, a group which includes Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose. His teleplays were serious, often dealing with contemporary issues in an emotional and powerfully direct manner. Serling placed special emphasis on character psychology and motivation, and perhaps his greatest strength as a writer was his handling of dialogue--always forceful and direct, with effective use of pauses and unusual wordplay. Serling's attitude toward his characters was humanistic, and his stories were characterized by moralizing.

In 1955 Patterns, a powerful Kraft Theatre drama about the pressures of corporate politics and ruthless power games in big business, made Serling an overnight success and brought him the first of six Emmies. He followed this success with a string of fine teleplays, including two more Emmy winners (both written for Playhouse 90), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), a pathetic story about the loneliness and confusion facing a boxer at the end of his career, and The Comedian (1957), which focuses on an obnoxious, self-centered comedian who exploits those around him to further his own goals.

Serling's early days in television were filled with conflicts with networks and sponsors who attempted to censor his work. Eventually these censorship battles led to Serling's abandoning live drama to work on his own television series, The Twilight Zone. Because most of the series' episodes were in the science-fiction/fantasy genre, Serling felt that he could say things he could never get away with in more "realistic" screenplays.

The Twilight Zone, which Serling is credited with creating, aired from 1959 to 1964. The weekly stories were memorable tales of imagination and possibility, of modern science and ancient superstition. A central theme of episodes written by Serling was that there were universal mysteries and forces before which man, even modern, scientific man, must inevitably humble himself. The general tone of many was cautionary: man can never be too sure of anything. Again Serling the humanist and moralist emerged. He rewarded the good and punished the evil, often in appropriately ironic ways.

The success of his television work led Serling to write his first screenplays, and like Chayefsky and Rose, he based his earliest scripts on his television plays. Patterns, made into a film in 1956, was brought to the screen virtually unchanged, with most of the same cast members and the same director, Fielder Cook. Requiem for a Heavyweight was made into a film in 1962, and although Serling added a new ending and made minor changes, it too was quite faithful to the original. Neither suffered in the transition to the big screen. In between these films, Serling wrote Saddle the Wind (1958), one of many adult Westerns to be made in the late 1950s, with a clash between cattlemen and sheepherders serving as backdrop for a conflict of brother versus brother (Robert Taylor and John Cassavetes).

Television kept Serling busy until 1963, when he wrote The Yellow Canary, adapted from the novel Evil Come, Evil Go by Whit Masterson. Designed as a vehicle for Pat Boone, the film is a drama about a popular singer who changes his self-centered ways when he must turn amateur sleuth to retrieve his kidnapped baby. The movie benefits from Serling's insights into the world of the entertainer. Assault on a Queen (1966), based on the novel by Jack Finney, is one of Serling's weakest screenplays, a caper film about an attempt to rob the Queen Mary using a submarine.

Serling's two best screenplays were his adaptations of novels whose subject matter intersected with his own interests and specialties: Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey and Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. Seven Days in May (1964) is a drama about an attempted military takeover of the United States government by high-ranking officers who are alarmed by the President's decision to carry out a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union. The military angle obviously attracted Serling, as did the high-level power games played between the White House and the Pentagon. With Serling's tight pacing, and under John Frankenheimer's skillful direction, Seven Days in May moves with a swift, calculated momentum. Serling the humanist again emerges in the screenplay's celebration of peace and democracy and in its condemnation of war, suspicion, and the undemocratic wielding of power. And Serling the critic of technological man emerges in a speech the President (Fredric March) delivers about the nuclear age: "Our enemy is an age. It happens to have killed man's faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness. A sickness of frustration."

Pierre Boulle's novel Planet of the Apes, about a space traveler from earth who, after years in space, lands on a planet ruled by apes, where humans are no better than animals, has a premise that would have made a good Twilight Zone episode. The surprise ending of Planet of the Apes (1968) is also reminiscent of The Twilight Zone: the space traveler discovers to his horror that the planet run by apes is his own planet earth, changed during his absence. Boulle's novel, which satirizes human vanity, condemns the entrenchment of blind authority, and mocks social conventions, approaches Swiftian irony. In the film, Boulle's themes are made timely to late-1960s America; the film takes jabs at governmental authority, the military, racial prejudice, and class divisions. Serling wrote the screenplay with Michael Wilson, but his hand is visible throughout, particularly in the soliloquy delivered by one of the space travelers (Charlton Heston) at the beginning of the film, as he looks across space toward an earth that has aged centuries during his voyage: "Tell me, though. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor's children starving""

After Planet of the Apes, Serling again devoted his efforts to television, particularly his television series Night Gallery, an anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone. His next screenplay was actually done for television: he adapted Irving Wallace's The Man as a telefilm, but Paramount was so impressed with the results that the film was released in theaters in 1972. The film is about an unimportant cabinet member (James Earl Jones) who, through an unexpected chain of events, becomes the first black president of the United States. Not one of Serling's best scripts, The Man failed as the timely social commentary it aspired to be.

In 1973, after Night Gallery was cancelled, Serling returned to Upstate New York and taught at Ithaca College. On 28 June 1975 he died of complications stemming from open-heart surgery. His death was mourned as tragically premature. He received a special posthumous Emmy award in the fall of 1975, and his memory has been kept alive since his death mostly by his series The Twilight Zone. In 1980 his wife, Carol Serling, announced the publication of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone magazine, featuring fiction in the vein of the television show, and in 1982, Twilight Zone--the Movie, consisting of three remade episodes of the series, was released.

Some years after his death, Serling's last screenplay was finally filmed. The Salamander (1982), based on Morris West's novel about European espionage, was a critical and financial failure.

Rod Serling's relatively small output of screenplays should be weighed against the fact that, unlike many other early television dramatists, he remained loyal to the medium that gave him his start, even though it did not always treat him well. He will be remembered as one of our best television writers, and beyond that, as a writer whose devotion to his craft was total. To preface its obituary of Rod Serling, Writer's Digest chose to borrow these lines from Requiem for a Heavyweight: "He had ... a kind of greatness you don't see very often."