“Rod Serling was very vocal about his liberal politics. It was not a secret to anyone. He stumped against Ronald Reagan’s ‘66 gubernatorial campaign. He frequently wrote newspaper columns and letters to the editor espousing a progressive viewpoint. And he was a vocal advocate for civil rights his entire life.
As for his television career, Serling was able to evade the censors, to a certain extent, by masking his social commentary in the trappings of science fiction. But it didn’t always work. He was constantly pissing off the sponsors, who demanded he make the show less political.”
From PBS—”He was often hounded by the conservative censors for his uncompromising attention to issues such as lynching, union organizing, and racism. Television dramas including REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT and A TOWN HAS TURNED TO DUST, are still considered some of the best writing ever done for television.
Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone”
Fed up with the difficulties of writing about serious issues on the conservative networks, Serling turned to science fiction and fantasy. Through an ingenious mixture of morality fable and fantasy writing, he was able to circumvent the timidity and conservatism of the television networks and sponsors. Self-producing a series of vignettes that placed average people in extraordinary situations, Serling could investigate the moral and political questions of his time. He found that he could address controversial subjects if they were cloaked in a veil of fantasy, saying “I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”
Which episode/s did THAT crop up in? NAME THEM!
His personal political views were his; I'm NOT talking about that! And THE TWILIGHT ZONE ( the original series ) was long gone by 1966! And I am talking ONLY about the original series!