I heard tht Rod Serling despised the show and said so on the Tonight Show. He was a former POW.
Serling was never a POW. He was a paratrooper who fought in the Philippines, including in the block-to-block fighting for Manila. He was wounded three times, including one that wrecked his knee, and suffered some form of PTSD the rest of his life, but he was never a prisoner of the Japanese.