Twilight Zone went on the year when?

What?

1959 through 1962.

And what was the reaction to it, in general?

I mean, the first year, what happened?

Of course, you see, you have to gauge that in the strange arithmetic of television, which is very close to insanity.

I think in its best run, Twilight Zone got roughly a 31 or a 32 share, which in television terms says that it is a mild success.

It is not a runaway hit. It's not gun smoke. And it's a very questionable item as to whether or not we'll renew it,

if indeed something else comes along that looks much more publicly acceptable. It's sufficiently healthy to warrant they're continuing to take a look at it.

Now what that 31 share meant was approximately 25 million people watching,

which is a fair-sized audience.

That's more than watch Shakespeare, you know, during the first hundred years.

But in the strange, again, as I say, the strange arithmetic of television, this was not considered a major show. Oddly enough, the show became more popular after it went off the air in terms of the name, Twilight's on being kind of interchangeable with strange little witticisms throughout our language. It became a funny little colloquialism that people used.

Way back in 1951, when television was just a baby, a young man sat in the Cincinnati diner with his wife and came to a momentous decision.

He decided to give up the security of his job and take a chance in becoming a freelance television writer.

I was traumatized into writing by war events, by going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of terrible need for some sort of therapy, get it out

of my gut, write it down.

This is the way it began for me.

Well, depending, of course, on the thematic treatment you're using, if you have the temerity to try to dramatize a theme that involves any particular social controversy currently

extant, then you're in deep trouble. For instance?

A racial theme, for example.

The case in point, I think a show I did for the Steel Hour, some years ago, three years ago,

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