Inspired by Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone…

More Than 100 TV Series and Feature Films…

Plus Now an All-New Public Service Announcement Campaign Series called:

The Insight Zone

and its One-Minute Pilot Script,

“Me, Myself & I, Robot”

by

Andrew Fumento AKA Andrew Bailey

Aside from possibly Norman Lear’s sitcom All in the Family (1971–1979), which led to seven spin-offs: Maude (1972–1978), Good Times (1974–1979), The Jeffersons (1975–1985), Checking In (1981), Archie Bunker’s Place (1979–1983), Gloria (1982–1983) and 704 Hauser (1994)… no TV series influenced more TV shows & movies than Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964).

Rod Serling started out as a freelance radio copywriter in Syracuse, NY. In a lesson in tenacity, Serling’s first 71 TV scripts went unsold until his corporate drama Patterns (1956) aired live (as most TV was at the time) on NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre (1947–1958) and earned him an Emmy®.

Serling went on to write or adapt 92 of the original 156 episodes during the 5-year run of Twilight Zone on CBS, appearing as the on-camera host in most.

The series won three Emmys® and three Hugo Awards. It has been turned into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and, thus far, revived as a series three times (1985–1989), (2002–2003) and (2019–2020).

Serling later scripted the science-fiction classic Planet of the Apes (1968, based on the novel by Pierre Boulle) and created and produced another popular anthology series, Night Gallery (1969–1973), which introduced the world to a young director named Steven Spielberg.

Rod Serling was a life-long smoker who suffered a heart attack (his third) during open heart surgery in 1975 and sadly died two days later at the age of 50. His wife Carol later discovered two unproduced Twilight Zone scripts, The Theater and Where the Dead Are, which were filmed and aired in 1994 with James Earl Jones replacing Serling as host.

I too have been greatly inspired by Serling’s writing & vision, as witnessed by the over 93 PSA campaigns I’ve written (most of which contain video scripts) — including over 15 Insight Zones.