The GREATEST PILOT EPISODE in TELEVISION HISTORY is on ME-TV tonight @ 12:35am est: “The place is here...the time is now...and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey...” —Rod Serling’s opening narration to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?,” October 2, 1959 (directed by Robert Stevens). In “Where is Everybody?,” an amnesiac played by Earl Holliman wanders through a strangely deserted town and decries, “I’ve looked and I haven’t seen anybody around...maybe they’re all asleep or something, but literally, there hasn’t been a soul,” Serling himself observing the sleeping giant that was America in the Cold War conformity of the Eisenhower Fifties? Holliman turns out to be an astronaut in training (torn from the day’s headlines, following the April ’59 naming of the Mercury Seven astronauts by NASA) who, following 484 hours in an isolation tank to prepare him for solo space travel to the moon (three years before JFK’s moon speech), cracked from loneliness and began to hallucinate what we, the audience, thought was the “reality” of the episode—the first Twilight Zone twist ending and still one of its metaphysically best, its narrative structure upending the tacit agreement between storyteller and audience that what you’re being shown is “real.” A true pilot episode (and the greatest in the history of television) in that it included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with The Twilight Zone—isolation, fear, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem all too real—“Where is Everybody?” is finally a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from one’s self, which would prove to be the defining, existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th Century, a time when the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge—the atomic bomb—first coexisted. arlenschumer.com/twilight-zone #twilightzone #thetwilightzone #rodserling #tv #television #tvhistory #televisionhistory #arlenschumer @dgareps @nyadventureclub @adamschumer @richardsyrettstrangeplanet https://www.instagram.com/p/CoVBerZJAO5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
