The SF Anthology
The Twilight Zone ran for five years from 1959, 156 episodes. Rod Serling himself wrote 92 of them. Trying out a "what if" in a completely different story each week — the opposite way of building from a serial.
There is an explanation often given for this show: censorship was strict at the time, so he wrapped social criticism in a science-fiction skin to get it through. That is half right, and half an explanation made afterwards.
The order of things is what makes it interesting. Just before the show went on the air, Serling said this in an interview: if the question is whether he was giving up important work, then yes, that is right; he had no intention of digging into social problems as drama. This was purely entertainment. At the time, in other words, he was saying publicly that he would not be doing criticism.
Eight years later, in 1967, the same man put it differently: "I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say."
There is no need, I think, to decide which one is the honest feeling. It is natural for a writer working under censorship to say one thing outward and another looking back. What this map finds interesting is that there are eight years between them.
Serling had done the same thing before this show, incidentally. Setting out to handle a real case in which a boy was lynched, he was made to revise it again and again, and it went out with the setting moved to the nineteenth-century Southwest and the victim changed to a Mexican boy. In his words, the script had been gone over by thirty people with a fine-tooth comb. The form of preparing a different world every week came out of a place like that.