A young man walks out of a movie theater in 1942 chanting that he wants to be a paratrooper. By February 1945 he's on Luzon, in the Philippines, and an enemy soldier has a weapon pointed at him. Another paratrooper fires over his shoulder and saves him. The young man is Rod Serling. He'll become the voice of The Twilight Zone. John J. Miller reviews Alan Sepinwall's Serling in the Weekend Journal, Oct. 17–18.
The book, from Grand Central at 400 pages and $35, runs from cradle to grave. Miller says it never bogs down in trivia. Serling was born in 1924 and grew up in Binghamton, N.Y. He called the war the most important period of his life, and it followed him home. His daughter Anne remembered him screaming at night. In the morning he'd say he had dreamed the enemy was coming at him. Still in New Guinea, before the jump, he'd already picked his trade. Somebody had to write the millions of words radio used every day. He meant to be that somebody.
The GI Bill got him to Antioch College in Ohio and its campus radio station. Then WLW in Cincinnati, then television. Sepinwall's line, quoted by Miller, is that Serling gave birth to the idea that in television the writer matters most. By the end of the 1950s he had won Emmys for three dramas. Patterns (1955) was about corporate politics. Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) followed an aging boxer. The Comedian (1957) was about a cruel TV star. The Twilight Zone premiered on Oct. 2, 1959, hours after a total eclipse. It ran five seasons on CBS. It was never a commercial hit. It became one in reruns, and Miller traces The X-Files, Lost and Black Mirror back to it.
The seven-day week
Serling ran the show from what we'd now call the showrunner's chair, with, in Sepinwall's phrase, “close to godlike power.” He wrote 92 of the 156 episodes. He called it “the most physically exhausting and horrendous time of my life.” A seven-day week, he said, and he ran out of speed and ingenuity. Most viewers never knew he stood 5 feet 5. He had himself filmed from the waist up. When CBS canceled the show, he floundered. He became a celebrity pitchman for everything from tires to toothpaste. In the 1970s NBC gave him Night Gallery and kept the content away from him. A longtime smoker, he died in 1975 at 50. In his last interview, months before he died, he gave credit for surviving Luzon in one short line. “It was just somebody up there.”
Our read
We file this under Career, with a Health note. Serling's arc is a working life compressed. A government benefit, the GI Bill, bought the education. A single skill, writing fast and well, built the career. Then the skill got used up. Ninety-two scripts in five seasons, on a seven-day week, and the man who did it said it was the worst stretch of his life. After the peak came the endorsements and a show he didn't control. Then a smoker's death at 50. Nobody's plan assumes that ending. Most plans assume you'll work until a chosen age, at full pace, with your health intact. That's three assumptions, and he'd have missed all three.
Here's the connection to your own plan. Open your plan and find two numbers. The age it assumes you stop working, and the age your term life or disability policy runs out. In a lot of households those two don't match. Serling's working life ended at 50. If income stops early because of illness, injury or death, those policies are what fill the gap. Check the two ages this week and write them next to each other. You buy the umbrella on the clear day, and the review is where we check it still opens.