mondovertigo's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
4.75
heatherjm's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
2.5
Very repetitive. I thought it would have one “lesson” per episode but it didn’t.
carly9er's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
mckenzierichardson's review against another edition
3.0
I received a copy of this book through Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. I watched The Twilight Zone a lot when I was younger and loved it. This book was well-written and showed how powerful the show was as pure entertainment as well as teaching material for how people can be decent human beings.
This book took me awhile to finish (about a month). This was mostly due to the fact that it is not necessarily a book that one would binge read. I found it best to read a chapter or two, take a break, them come back and read another chapter later. Otherwise the chapters kind of blended together because their messages were interrelated or used to same episodes as examples.
The book uses a large variety of episodes from all five seasons of the show. Each chapter contains its own lesson based on one or multiple episodes. I really enjoyed how Dawidziak combined literature and philosophy with moments in his own life to future explain the lesson he found in the episodes. It made the book read like a micro-memoir, a self-help book, and an ode to Rod Serling all rolled into one.
While the advice given in the book wasn't exactly ground-breaking (don't judge others, don't be a jerk), they are still good things to keep in mind and everyday life shows that there are people who still need reminding about these basic life lessons.
I also loved the author's passion for the show, Serling, and television in general. This passion is clearly evident in his writing and makes the book enjoyable to read. His wordplay and ability to take on Serling's style of narration made this a good read in this dimension... and in The Twilight Zone.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. I watched The Twilight Zone a lot when I was younger and loved it. This book was well-written and showed how powerful the show was as pure entertainment as well as teaching material for how people can be decent human beings.
This book took me awhile to finish (about a month). This was mostly due to the fact that it is not necessarily a book that one would binge read. I found it best to read a chapter or two, take a break, them come back and read another chapter later. Otherwise the chapters kind of blended together because their messages were interrelated or used to same episodes as examples.
The book uses a large variety of episodes from all five seasons of the show. Each chapter contains its own lesson based on one or multiple episodes. I really enjoyed how Dawidziak combined literature and philosophy with moments in his own life to future explain the lesson he found in the episodes. It made the book read like a micro-memoir, a self-help book, and an ode to Rod Serling all rolled into one.
While the advice given in the book wasn't exactly ground-breaking (don't judge others, don't be a jerk), they are still good things to keep in mind and everyday life shows that there are people who still need reminding about these basic life lessons.
I also loved the author's passion for the show, Serling, and television in general. This passion is clearly evident in his writing and makes the book enjoyable to read. His wordplay and ability to take on Serling's style of narration made this a good read in this dimension... and in The Twilight Zone.
wildweasel105's review against another edition
3.0
Enjoyable and enlightening look behind the genius of Rod Serling's masterpiece contribution to television. Although I prefer a more biographical approach to Rod Serling himself, this volume strives to point out the contributions and anecdotal opinions of some of the authors who contributed to the series itself.
writethruchaos's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Now entering... the Twilight Zone!
A very interesting self-help book crossed with a history of Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. I really enjoyed the historical aspects of the book, especially the points about writing. Mark does a great job of expanding on the societal morals and deep messages conveyed through each Twilight Zone episode. Now I have to rewatch the entirety of the Twilight Zone because I defo wasn't looking for deep social meanings in middle school
A very interesting self-help book crossed with a history of Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. I really enjoyed the historical aspects of the book, especially the points about writing. Mark does a great job of expanding on the societal morals and deep messages conveyed through each Twilight Zone episode. Now I have to rewatch the entirety of the Twilight Zone because I defo wasn't looking for deep social meanings in middle school
marknyy's review against another edition
4.0
This is an insightful look at the many life lessons Rod Serling had for the viewers of this landmark series. In fact the series and each lesson contained herein is still relevant more than sixty years later.
sara_littlebookdragon's review against another edition
4.0
This is a great read - if you love the Twilight Zone or if you've only ever heard about it. Rod Serling is amazing and this book made me realize that to an even greater extent. I'm grateful for that.
llynn66's review against another edition
3.0
If I was to put together a list of my favorite TV shows of all time, I am not completely decided about the rankings but I know that The Twilight Zone would make it into the top 5. (And probably the top 3.) I don't remember my first encounter with the Twilight Zone. Luckily for me, it always seemed to be out there somewhere in re-runs when I was a kid (and throughout my entire life.) Kids in the 1970s lived in a bifurcated television landscape. There were the 'modern shows' (generally breezy, cheezy and the foundation of our fads, tie-in toys, and celebrity crushes) and the 'old fashioned shows' (black and white, slower paced but somehow more intriguing -- shows like the Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, I Love Lucy, Lost in Space, and The Addams Family became our 'cult' shows.) My generation was probably the last one to enjoy both 'classic' (black and white) television and 'modern' (in 'living color'!) television equally.
In my mind there was no better 'old fashioned' program than The Twilight Zone. I LOVE this show! Every episode intrigued me, made me think and gave me the perfect balance of chills and insights. This series developed in me a life long fondness for supernatural anthology programming. Because of my early Twilight Zone addiction, I went on to watch and appreciate the Outer Limits, Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Dark Side, Tales from the Crypt, Thriller, and Hammer House of Horror as well as lesser known/more forgotten offerings such as Circle of Fear, The Sixth Sense, Journey to the Unknown and Supernatural. I still search for 'new to me' anthology shows online and, when I discover one, it is like a Time Tunnel (to reference yet another old favorite) to the happiest moments of childhood.
I DO remember my introduction to Rod Serling's other production: Night Gallery. I was only a preschooler when the show started. But, by the time I was graduating from kindergarten, I was a committed fan. My dad and I used to watch it every week. Serling fascinated me. Here was this unassuming guy who 'looked like a dad' but who introduced us to these weird and unusual and spine tingling stories each week in his creepy 'gallery' of disturbing paintings. Perhaps it helped that my dad was an art teacher by trade and we spent many hours in art museums and galleries talking about paintings. But no paintings I ever saw in real life could touch Mr Serling's collection in my elementary school mind!!
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone is a nice book for TZ fans. It was written by a TV critic who works out of Cleveland, so this title was featured in a display of books with regional/local interest at my neighborhood library. The author, Mark Dawidziak, has obviously been as affected and influenced by Serling's work as I have been. And he recognizes Serling as a playwright who should be held up in the 20th century American canon as one of the greats. I agree. If I were a high school literature teacher, my class would be reading Serling along with Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, Edna Ferber and Neil Simon.
Dawidziak relates Twilight Zone episodes to a code of ethics through which we can live better and more ethical lives. Although, as I enter my fifties, I fight hard against the aging person's compulsion to 'moralize', to sugarcoat the past, and to wring hands about the degradation of society, today's climate gives me pause. I see around me so many of the warnings that Rod Serling was trying to give us fall on the deaf ears of fear, incipient nationalism, scapegoating, revenge and greed. Our body politic is festering from the head down. Our government lashes out against individual citizens and broad groups alike in childish and profanity laden tweets filled with blatant lies. We have found the enemy and it is us. And the generations who grew up on the Twilight Zone and it's backstory, which was the ashes of civilized life lying in the ruins of World War II, should KNOW BETTER than to embrace the flickers of authoritarianism, propaganda, in-your-face racism, misogyny, dog-eat-dog economics and beating down those who have the least hope. Rod Serling is tossing in his grave, my friends...or sadly looking at dark paintings in the Great Gallery Beyond and seeing that they are tableaux of scenes from 21st Century Planet Earth.
And, I must add that Dawidziak never gets political in this book. Not once is an orange spray tanned game show host from hell mentioned. Any reader can choose to explore the ethics of the Twilight Zone straight, no chaser. But let us be clear. A reader is practicing self delusion if they convince themselves that Rod Serling would be ok with what we are reading in the headlines today.
Thus I have come to the conclusion that we need modern voices like Serling. We desperately need great talents who can fascinate and entertain and also do so with strong moral underpinnings. We need writers who can show us life lessons and give us compassionate guidelines for treating those around us with more love and respect. Until these people emerge (or, more importantly, are given a voice in today's over-saturated and sprawling media environment) we need to get back to some of the values Serling espoused in such a delightfully eerie way.
Here are some of my favorite lessons from the book and some words from author, Mark Dawidziak, from actors who have worked with Serling and from Serling, himself, that impacted my thinking:
"Looking for themes that will recur in The Twilight Zone and will frame its lessons, you'll be able to identify many of what he might have called preoccupations: the fundamentally decent person tossed into the middle of a morally ambiguous situation; the worn-out professional coping with dissatisfaction, obsolescence, or just being forgotten; the aging warrior striving to keep on his feet as the ground is being cut out from under him; the worth of the individual; the yearning for simpler times; the enduring spirit battling to survive under the merciless assault of forces beyond one beleaguered person's control." {Dawidziak on Serling}
"Now just what is morality? I'm not able to begin to give you a definition of it...I do know, however, that if a churchgoing Calvinist reads three books of the Old Testament each morning and lives a life of perpetual abstinence, all he has to do is say the word 'nigger' once, and, in my book, he is not a moral man. On the other hand, if a college student swings, tosses around four-letter Anglo-Saxon profanities and does not know a catechism from a cartoon, if he holds out his hand to a ghetto child or takes a train ride down to Alabama to help register black voters or rises to his feet to publicly speak out for what might well be an unpopular cause, then I say this morality is a pure and remarkable thing." {Serling, speaking to a graduating class in Akron, Ohio in 1971}
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street is an American tragedy that Serling delivers with a word of caution: 'The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices--to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspi"cion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own--for the children, and the children not yet born. And the pity is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone" {Dawidziak and Serling in the category of 'Divided We Fall' and highlighting one of the most famous TZ episodes.}
"When you worked with writers like Rod Serling, you learned that you didn't need fancy sets, big special effects, and lavish budgets. It was the writing. We had words! We had words! We had substance. You start with the words or you ain't got nothin!" {Actor Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith from Lost in Space) on Serling's impact as a writer}
"I learned that there are certain playwrights, like Rod Serling, who just suit me. It was a joy to play his characters and to roll his words around in my mouth. What characters he gave you to play! What words he gave you to say! Lovely words. They just seemed to resonate with me. There have been three writers that seemed to most suit me: Rod Serling, Clifford Odets, and Neil Simon. With Neil Simon, it was the humor and the rhythms. With Odets, it was the staccato style and muckraking attitude. But with Rod Serling it was the anger, the defiance, and the fire. He brought such fire to everything he wrote." {Actor Jack Klugman on his admiration for Serling's writing. Klugman played in four separate TZ episodes.}
"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes, all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's Earth." {Serling's final words of caution on the Deaths-head Revisited episode. Serling, a Jew, was transformed by his WWII experience and it informed his work and life in myriad ways.}
"And it's all due to his imagination. As you pull back from that final scene, it grows in perspective. Gregory represents the writers on The Twilight Zone, using their imaginations to shape a better world, but he also represents all fantasy writers. Pull back a little more and you see that Gregory represents all writers, who realize that storytelling is, in itself, an act of hope and optimism. Pull back a little more and you see that Gregory represents all the dreamers, from poets and inventors to scientists and songwriters. Pull back a bit more and you see that Gregory represents us, using our imaginations as starting points to reach for something perhaps wondrous and wonderful. Many of us feel that the door to something better is locked, but The Twilight Zone is always there to remind us that you unlock this door with the key of imagination." {Dawidziak on Serling, highlighting the theme of "Imagine a Better World" and one of my favorite TZ episodes: A World of His Own}
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone might not literally be a guidebook to all the skills and values and grit that is needed to negotiate our real world Twilight Zone. However, it is a refreshingly positive walk down memory lane for Twilight Zone/Rod Serling fans. This book illuminates Serling's writing and influence on 21st century pop culture and entertainment. Younger readers may be interested to learn that just about every writer working on sci fi and fantasy television and film today was deeply influenced by Rod Serling's work. The book also contains submissions from contemporary writers such as Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and David Chase on their admiration for and indebtedness to Rod Serling.
May 11th is National Twilight Zone Day and it is fast approaching! Why not celebrate with some TZ binge watching...or a glance through this book?
In my mind there was no better 'old fashioned' program than The Twilight Zone. I LOVE this show! Every episode intrigued me, made me think and gave me the perfect balance of chills and insights. This series developed in me a life long fondness for supernatural anthology programming. Because of my early Twilight Zone addiction, I went on to watch and appreciate the Outer Limits, Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Dark Side, Tales from the Crypt, Thriller, and Hammer House of Horror as well as lesser known/more forgotten offerings such as Circle of Fear, The Sixth Sense, Journey to the Unknown and Supernatural. I still search for 'new to me' anthology shows online and, when I discover one, it is like a Time Tunnel (to reference yet another old favorite) to the happiest moments of childhood.
I DO remember my introduction to Rod Serling's other production: Night Gallery. I was only a preschooler when the show started. But, by the time I was graduating from kindergarten, I was a committed fan. My dad and I used to watch it every week. Serling fascinated me. Here was this unassuming guy who 'looked like a dad' but who introduced us to these weird and unusual and spine tingling stories each week in his creepy 'gallery' of disturbing paintings. Perhaps it helped that my dad was an art teacher by trade and we spent many hours in art museums and galleries talking about paintings. But no paintings I ever saw in real life could touch Mr Serling's collection in my elementary school mind!!
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone is a nice book for TZ fans. It was written by a TV critic who works out of Cleveland, so this title was featured in a display of books with regional/local interest at my neighborhood library. The author, Mark Dawidziak, has obviously been as affected and influenced by Serling's work as I have been. And he recognizes Serling as a playwright who should be held up in the 20th century American canon as one of the greats. I agree. If I were a high school literature teacher, my class would be reading Serling along with Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, Edna Ferber and Neil Simon.
Dawidziak relates Twilight Zone episodes to a code of ethics through which we can live better and more ethical lives. Although, as I enter my fifties, I fight hard against the aging person's compulsion to 'moralize', to sugarcoat the past, and to wring hands about the degradation of society, today's climate gives me pause. I see around me so many of the warnings that Rod Serling was trying to give us fall on the deaf ears of fear, incipient nationalism, scapegoating, revenge and greed. Our body politic is festering from the head down. Our government lashes out against individual citizens and broad groups alike in childish and profanity laden tweets filled with blatant lies. We have found the enemy and it is us. And the generations who grew up on the Twilight Zone and it's backstory, which was the ashes of civilized life lying in the ruins of World War II, should KNOW BETTER than to embrace the flickers of authoritarianism, propaganda, in-your-face racism, misogyny, dog-eat-dog economics and beating down those who have the least hope. Rod Serling is tossing in his grave, my friends...or sadly looking at dark paintings in the Great Gallery Beyond and seeing that they are tableaux of scenes from 21st Century Planet Earth.
And, I must add that Dawidziak never gets political in this book. Not once is an orange spray tanned game show host from hell mentioned. Any reader can choose to explore the ethics of the Twilight Zone straight, no chaser. But let us be clear. A reader is practicing self delusion if they convince themselves that Rod Serling would be ok with what we are reading in the headlines today.
Thus I have come to the conclusion that we need modern voices like Serling. We desperately need great talents who can fascinate and entertain and also do so with strong moral underpinnings. We need writers who can show us life lessons and give us compassionate guidelines for treating those around us with more love and respect. Until these people emerge (or, more importantly, are given a voice in today's over-saturated and sprawling media environment) we need to get back to some of the values Serling espoused in such a delightfully eerie way.
Here are some of my favorite lessons from the book and some words from author, Mark Dawidziak, from actors who have worked with Serling and from Serling, himself, that impacted my thinking:
"Looking for themes that will recur in The Twilight Zone and will frame its lessons, you'll be able to identify many of what he might have called preoccupations: the fundamentally decent person tossed into the middle of a morally ambiguous situation; the worn-out professional coping with dissatisfaction, obsolescence, or just being forgotten; the aging warrior striving to keep on his feet as the ground is being cut out from under him; the worth of the individual; the yearning for simpler times; the enduring spirit battling to survive under the merciless assault of forces beyond one beleaguered person's control." {Dawidziak on Serling}
"Now just what is morality? I'm not able to begin to give you a definition of it...I do know, however, that if a churchgoing Calvinist reads three books of the Old Testament each morning and lives a life of perpetual abstinence, all he has to do is say the word 'nigger' once, and, in my book, he is not a moral man. On the other hand, if a college student swings, tosses around four-letter Anglo-Saxon profanities and does not know a catechism from a cartoon, if he holds out his hand to a ghetto child or takes a train ride down to Alabama to help register black voters or rises to his feet to publicly speak out for what might well be an unpopular cause, then I say this morality is a pure and remarkable thing." {Serling, speaking to a graduating class in Akron, Ohio in 1971}
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street is an American tragedy that Serling delivers with a word of caution: 'The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices--to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspi"cion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own--for the children, and the children not yet born. And the pity is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone" {Dawidziak and Serling in the category of 'Divided We Fall' and highlighting one of the most famous TZ episodes.}
"When you worked with writers like Rod Serling, you learned that you didn't need fancy sets, big special effects, and lavish budgets. It was the writing. We had words! We had words! We had substance. You start with the words or you ain't got nothin!" {Actor Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith from Lost in Space) on Serling's impact as a writer}
"I learned that there are certain playwrights, like Rod Serling, who just suit me. It was a joy to play his characters and to roll his words around in my mouth. What characters he gave you to play! What words he gave you to say! Lovely words. They just seemed to resonate with me. There have been three writers that seemed to most suit me: Rod Serling, Clifford Odets, and Neil Simon. With Neil Simon, it was the humor and the rhythms. With Odets, it was the staccato style and muckraking attitude. But with Rod Serling it was the anger, the defiance, and the fire. He brought such fire to everything he wrote." {Actor Jack Klugman on his admiration for Serling's writing. Klugman played in four separate TZ episodes.}
"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes, all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's Earth." {Serling's final words of caution on the Deaths-head Revisited episode. Serling, a Jew, was transformed by his WWII experience and it informed his work and life in myriad ways.}
"And it's all due to his imagination. As you pull back from that final scene, it grows in perspective. Gregory represents the writers on The Twilight Zone, using their imaginations to shape a better world, but he also represents all fantasy writers. Pull back a little more and you see that Gregory represents all writers, who realize that storytelling is, in itself, an act of hope and optimism. Pull back a little more and you see that Gregory represents all the dreamers, from poets and inventors to scientists and songwriters. Pull back a bit more and you see that Gregory represents us, using our imaginations as starting points to reach for something perhaps wondrous and wonderful. Many of us feel that the door to something better is locked, but The Twilight Zone is always there to remind us that you unlock this door with the key of imagination." {Dawidziak on Serling, highlighting the theme of "Imagine a Better World" and one of my favorite TZ episodes: A World of His Own}
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone might not literally be a guidebook to all the skills and values and grit that is needed to negotiate our real world Twilight Zone. However, it is a refreshingly positive walk down memory lane for Twilight Zone/Rod Serling fans. This book illuminates Serling's writing and influence on 21st century pop culture and entertainment. Younger readers may be interested to learn that just about every writer working on sci fi and fantasy television and film today was deeply influenced by Rod Serling's work. The book also contains submissions from contemporary writers such as Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and David Chase on their admiration for and indebtedness to Rod Serling.
May 11th is National Twilight Zone Day and it is fast approaching! Why not celebrate with some TZ binge watching...or a glance through this book?