Best of Beaumont Beatdown
Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone, astoundingly wrote 92 teleplays of the show’s 156 episodes (70 of those 92 being Serling’s original stories). It wouldn’t have been humanly possible for Serling to write them all, so he had to find fellow writers who could match the tone and quality he had envisioned for the series. Enter up-and-coming writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Beaumont would go on to have the second most writing credits for the series, after Serling, including teleplays for some especially beloved and macabre episodes.
As it turns out, Beaumont’s birthday falls on January 2nd, fitting in neatly with the New Year’s tradition of marathoning the Twilight Zone. So, I thought it’d be fun to commemorate what would have been Beaumont’s 97th birthday by putting his episodes* head-to-head in a little tournament!
This bracket was concocted using imdb ratings for each episode and then modeled roughly after March Madness brackets from there:
Round 1 includes eight epic match-ups and will be live for 3 days from 15 Dec. [All Matchups]
Round 2 will start on 20 Dec. [All Matchups]
Round 3 will start on 24 Dec. [All Matchups]
The Finals will start on 30 Dec. [Finals]**
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Feel free to add your own propaganda for your favorite episodes via reblogs, comments, or messages! If you submit propaganda in one round, and that episode wins, I’ll include it in future rounds and you won’t have to re-submit.***
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*I did not include the episodes of the Twilight Zone that were entirely ghost-written for Beaumont. Maybe I’ll put together a little write-up about Jerry Sohl, who wrote season 5’s “Queen of the Nile” and “Living Doll” to make up for it later!
**Links will produce posts once each round is live.
**Not all propaganda submitted may be included, if I suspect anything submitted is generative “AI” it will not be added to later rounds.
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A list of all episodes included is below the jump!
