Serling, Stern and History: There’s a Lesson in All This

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call . . . “

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Howard Stern’s underpants?

No, “The Twilight Zone.”

More about Stern and his soilings shortly. First, tonight’s bill, a look at the creator of “The Twilight Zone”--which still resonates in reruns--and other things fascinating and worthwhile in years past. Part of the PBS “American Masters” series, the 90-minute “Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval” is as much about his times as about Serling, a writer whose prolific contributions to TV drama in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose memorable hosting of “The Twilight Zone,” earn him icon rank among the industry’s pioneers.

Serling died in 1975 at age 50. Interesting man, interesting work.

Some of it is excerpted in “Submitted for Your Approval,” a documentary by Susan Lacy presented mostly in atmospheric black and white and consisting largely of antique TV footage and slender vignettes from Serling’s colleagues from “The Twilight Zone” and “Playhouse 90” and from the writer himself via a “Serling sound-alike” who gives a fair approximation of his famous clipped speech.

Thin, but fun to watch, the documentary precedes a rerunning of the original “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” Serling’s splendid, heart-breaking 1956 teleplay on “Playhouse 90” about a washed-up, punched-out, caved-in, tossed-aside fighter named Mountain McClintock who is betrayed by the manager he trusts.

Watching this Martin Manulis production immerses you in the history of the medium--the unique ambience of TV on unsteady toddler’s legs--and in quality writing by Serling, directing by Ralph Nelson and acting by the entire cast. Jack Palance is especially wonderful as that tragic hulk, Mountain, who was portrayed by Anthony Quinn in Serling’s lesser movie adaptation in 1962.

Slices of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and other of Serling’s most noteworthy teleplays of the 1950s, like the landmark “Patterns,” show up in “Submitted for Your Approval,” as do chunks of “The Twilight Zone,” the defining “fantasy fiction” series for which he is best known--and 80% of which he personally wrote.

Serling did his best work in an era when others were doing their best to censor good work that even hinted at controversy. Like many writers, he was victimized by that attitude, an example of which is recounted by Jeff Kisseloff in his just-published oral history of early TV, “The Box.”

It involved Serling’s script for “The U.S. Steel Hour” about the Emmett Till case, in which a black teen-ager in Mississippi was lynched for whistling at a white woman. “Doomsday at Noon” sent U.S. Steel officials “into apoplexy,” writes Kisseloff, and “after the racist Southern White Citizen Council threatened a boycott, the company pressured Serling to sanitize the script.”

As a result, in a total erasure of the Till case, the story’s locale became New England and the black youth an unnamed foreigner. Despite protests by Serling, “U.S. Steel had succeeded in reducing 300 years of shameful treatment of blacks to a neighborhood dispute,” Kisseloff notes.

Serling showed his mastery of artful obfuscation, however, when putting contemporary social messages into the mouths of alien characters. He did it most famously in “The Twilight Zone” episode “Eye of the Beholder,” a statement about beauty and totalitarianism in which a surgical team removing bandages from the face of a woman after an operation turns away from her in disgust. By our standards, she’s gorgeous. By their’s, she’s hideous. Then we’re shown the faces of the horrified surgical team. They have the contorted features of pigs.

Serling’s distinctive voice ultimately fattened his bank account--he became a popular off-screen commercial spokesman--but not his reputation as a serious writer. And you can read what you like into some of his public introspection. “Talking to me is like dredging up the past glory of a major league pitcher who won the Most Valuable Player award 20 years ago,” he told The Times in 1967.

Glory, too, is in the eye of the beholder, it seems. The more distant, the more faded. Which returns us, 360 degrees, to Howard Stern.

Best-selling author Stern and his chattering cohorts recently spent some time on his radio show ridiculing Sid Caesar, another of the true geniuses of early television whose satirical sketch comedy they found unfunny. Stern was in a fog over the praise Caesar deservedly still receives in some circles. “I don’t get it,” he said.

Well, there’s no universal taste in comedy. Just as some listeners don’t get Stern, even though he is a gas at times, Caesar also was not for everyone, even in his prime.

What set the Stern crowd to snickering on this particular morning was a conversation on tape with Caesar and “Stuttering John” Melendez, the Stern errand boy regularly sent out to crash the New York posh-event circuit and, with a straight face in his guise as serious radio interviewer, mischievously surprise celebrities with questions so crass and absurd that they get flustered or enraged or hide behind a potted plant when they’re not hip or quick-witted enough to play along.

So Melendez had cornered Caesar somewhere and peppered him with questions about why he hadn’t been asked to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live”--cruel, unanswerable questions that Caesar stonily tried to answer anyway until he caught on and became a potted plant, which Stern and his predatory pals just loved.

Well, it’s America, where barbarity earns you as many ratings points as hisses, and better that, as the FCC-battling Stern would agree, than some stuffy, uptight blue noses of censorship smiting the barbarians when it suits them.

What this small incident illustrates, though, is how often, in this era of gleaming high-tech immediacy, we are either ignoramuses or amnesiacs when it comes to the past, how tenuously we are connected to our own history, how little we grasp of what came before us. So bully for the Serling documentary.

As smart as he is, moreover, Stern should be appreciative of someone (in this case, Caesar) who in an earlier day pushed the envelope of satire and creativity as Stern does, albeit more seismically. So the guy’s comedy leaves you cold. So make your point, then shut up about it and pay a little homage instead of repeatedly swinging a baseball bat below the belt. Thirty years from now, Stern may be a future era’s Mountain McClintock, getting a hotfoot in public from some punk with a microphone, an attitude and a list of smart-aleck questions about the long, white wig he wears to hide the embarrassing lobotomy scar.

* “Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval” airs at 9 tonight, followed at 10:30 by “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” on KCET-TV Channel 28.