- - How a Horrific Crime Inspired Writer Rod Serling to Create “The Twilight Zone”

Angela AndaloroDecember 30, 2025 at 10:18 PM

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Rod Serling -

Television writer Rod Serling was early in his career when he found himself wanting to explore social justice themes in entertainment, harnessing the power of television on its budding 1960s audience

The murder of Emmett Till deeply impacted Serling, who wrote a teleplay exploring it, though network censors completely distorted his narrative and vision

Serling's drive to use fantasy and sci-fi elements to explore these themes led to The Twilight Zone, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964

A grisly crime inspired one writer to create a TV show that forced audiences to think.

Rod Serling was early in his career when the murder of Emmett Till took over the public discussion in August 1955, furthering racial tensions in the country. Till was a 14-year-old Chicago native visiting family members in Money, Miss. when shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant Donham, a 21-year-old white woman, claimed that he whistled and then grabbed her inside her family's grocery store on Aug. 24, 1955.

Several days later, the teenager was kidnapped from his relative's home in the middle of the night, and he was beaten and lynched. His body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a metal fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

A month later, Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and Bryant's half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted following an hour-long deliberation by an all-white, all-male jury. They later confessed to the murder in a 1956 interview, when they no longer faced legal repercussions.

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Rod Serling in 1955

Recognizing the power TV had over its audience, Serling sought to write a teleplay that addressed social justice.

"The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time,” Serling said, per Smithsonian Magazine.

Serling wrote his teleplay, but getting it in front of audiences would be a much greater challenge. The writer saw firsthand how restrictive the censors were, with networks changing the piece bit by bit until Serling felt it was a completely different work.

It would take a year for Noon on Doomsday to air, and the changes felt more like a defeat than a success to Serling. He continued to look for an opportunity to address these issues while writing for Playhouse 90, a crime anthology series for CBS.

"I think it’s criminal that we’re not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist, of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society,” Serling once said of the situation.

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Rod Serling on "The Twilight Zone" in 1963

"A Town Has Turned to Dust" was another attempt on Serling's part to tell a lynching story, but once again, censors got in the way of his messaging. Originally set in the South, CBS instructed Serling to change the setting, for fear of offending southern viewers. It was set 100 years in the past. To tone down the tension further, they also wanted the victim to be Mexican rather than Black.

The play aired in June 1958 and was perceived as "powerful" by critics, which opened Serling's mind to the different ways he could evade changes in the future. The writer turned to the elements that made mystery and sci-fi function as a genre — speaking to modern societal pains with metaphorical monsters replacing the real ones and reality-bending elements that make viewers think.

1959 put everything in motion for Serling, who formed his own film production company, Cayuga Productions. Just months after being founded, Serling and the company signed an exclusive three-year contract with CBS. The deal stipulated that Serling would not only continue writing for Playhouse 90 but also develop an original series. Thus, The Twilight Zone was born.

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Rod Serling, circa 1970

Serling talked about how he felt about the work done on The Twilight Zone in a 1970 interview.

"I think it failed in terms of its consistency. It was very good some weeks, quite bad other weeks. But this, I think, is pretty much the track record of most television, by virtue of its desperate overexposure and the brevity of time allotted to us to produce something that is qualitative," he began.

"But overall, I would say that it was a creative series. We did much more creating than we did imitating. I think we tried things — failed frequently, succeeded other times. But I think the mark of the show was the quite perceivable attempt at quality that went on in the show."

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”