My Journey Through 1970s TV: Friday Nights, 1978

For what I believe is only the second time since I’ve started these reviews of the 1970s prime time schedules, we come to an evening with not a single series ranked in the top 30. But that doesn’t mean some of the offerings weren’t good or are not worth remembering.


CBS
The New Adventures of Wonder Woman
The Incredible Hulk
Flying High

It’s the third and final season for Wonder Woman, a valiant but flawed attempt to bring one of our most iconic superheroes to life. As I’ve said in previous posts, Lynda Carter was perfect casting, but nothing else measured up to her standard.

Pairing Wonder Woman with another comic book superhero probably seemed like a good idea, though this version of the Hulk bore little resemblance to the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby a decade earlier.

Series creator Kenneth Johnson made several changes, believing it would make the show more believable, and because he disliked the comics. So here it’s David Banner, not Bruce, and the Hulk as played by bodybuilding champion Lou Ferrigno had only a fraction of the original character’s strength. But if he wasn’t as powerful at least, as played by Bill Bixby, he also wasn’t as antisemitic (seriously, Mark Ruffalo, read a history book before opening your yap).

Devaluing the source material was still standard for most comic book adaptations in the 1970s. Stan Lee went along because those compromises were the only way to bring his characters to a wider audience. In this case the series still worked on its own terms, thanks to the gravitas it gained from Bixby, its Fugitive-like premise of a hunted man unable to settle in one place, and haunting music (“The Lonely Man”) written by Joe Harnell.

As for Flying High, it didn't, despite a trio of beautiful women in the leads, attempting to recreate Charlie's Angels with stewardesses instead of detectives. 

ABC
Donny & Marie
ABC Friday Night Movie

This was the same Friday lineup ABC offered in the previous year, though it would change in 1979 as this was the final season for the Osmond siblings.

NBC
The Waverly Wonders
Who’s Watching the Kids?
The Rockford Files
The Eddie Capra Mysteries

“I was out of work and got two scripts,” Larry Hagman told me when I interviewed him several years ago; “One was for a sitcom called The Waverly Wonders, which Joe Namath ended up doing, and the other was Dallas.” Hagman called his agent and said, “Let’s go with Dallas,” and his agent replied, “You’re crazy! That thing is never going to go.”

Fascinating how one moment changed TV history, isn’t it?

The Waverly Wonders was canceled after four episodes. Other football stars made a successful transition to acting - Jim Brown, Alex Karras, Merlin Olson – and Namath had more natural charisma than any of them, but it never translated to the parts he played.

Who’s Watching the Kids? had one of the most convoluted histories of any series. After the failure of Blansky’s Beauties, a Las Vegas-set sitcom from Garry Marshall about showgirls, Marshall revisited the concept, retained Blansky’s cast members Caren Kaye, Lynda Goodfriend and Scott Baio, and tried again. This time, the stories featured Baio and Tammy Lauren as the showgirl’s younger siblings. Only nine episodes aired before it too was pulled from the schedule.

The Rockford Files, about midway through its run, saved NBC from yet another quality shutout, though The Eddie Capra Mysteries had potential. Vince Baggetta played Capra, a lawyer who exonerated his clients by investigating their cases and uncovering the real culprit. In the final scene he’d gather all the suspects together and identify the guilty party.

There were stylistic similarities to Ellery Queen, and according to some sources that show’s unused scripts were retooled into Capra episodes. But Baggetta didn’t have Jim Hutton’s quirky charm, so despite some clever scripts it became yet another Friday night failure for NBC, lasting just 13 episodes.


Shows Missed:
The Don Knotts Show (1970)
San Francisco International Airport (1970)
Nancy (1970)
The Headmaster (1970)
The Man and the City (1971)
Search (1972)
The Delphi Bureau (1972)
Jigsaw (1972)
The Little People (1972)
The Sixth Sense (1972)
Faraday & Company (1973)
Kodiak (1974)
The New Land (1974)
McCoy (1975)
Joe and Sons (1975)
Beacon Hill (1975)
Mobile One (1975)
Big Eddie (1975)
Executive Suite (1976)
Ball Four (1976)
Young Dan’l Boone (1977)
Rafferty (1977)
Mulligan’s Stew (1977)
Big Hawaii (1977)
We’ve Got Each Other (1977)
Lifeline (1978)
W.E.B. (1978)
The Waverly Wonders (1978)

Michael Gray and Memories of Shazam

I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Michael Gray, and how deeply the news was felt by so many, at least based on social media.

It surprised me, I’ll admit. Though responses to the deaths of celebrities shouldn’t be a contest, it seemed that Gray’s passing had an impact beyond what I would have expected, and beyond what I’ve seen for actors of a more prominent stature.

Maybe it appeared that way to me because most of my friends online are in my age group, so we all grew up at the same time and spent our Saturday mornings in front of the television. One of the shows we watched was Shazam! A live action superhero series that debuted in 1974 and ran for just 28 episodes. But those episodes stuck with us for a long time.

For the uninitiated, Michael Gray played Billy Batson, a roving junior newscaster who traveled in a Winnebago motor home with an older companion called Mentor (Les Tremayne). They would receive messages from The Elders that someone would soon need their help and guidance. And if the situation became dangerous, Billy could transform into Captain Marvel (Jackson Bostwick, and later John Davey).

Long before it came out on DVD, I could still recite the opening narration from memory:

“Chosen from among all others by the immortal elders Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury - Billy Batson and his mentor travel the highways and byways on a never-ending mission: to right wrongs, to develop understanding, and to seek justice for all. In time of dire need young Billy has been granted the power by the immortals to summon awesome forces at the utterance of a single word.”

Shazam!

It was cool then. It’s still cool now.

And if anyone hasn’t made the connection yet, “Shazam” is a word comprised of the first letters of each elders’ name.

Superheroes then were not the genre unto themselves that they are now. The Superman series from the 1950s and the Batman series of the ‘60s both had their charms, and while the animated Super Friends was another Saturday morning staple, it was heavily regulated like all children’s shows by well-meaning but prudish guardians who wouldn’t even allow Batman to throw a punch.

So at a time when it was still rare to see any comic book superhero come to life, Shazam! was bound to make an impression. I know it will seem antiquated now to generations spoiled by an MCU with the budget and technology to depict any superhuman ability. In the comics Captain Marvel could go toe-to-toe with Superman; here he’s helping teenagers who get lost in the woods.

But Shazam! turned those limitations into strengths, in part because of the sincerity of the performances by Gray, Tremayne and Bostwick, and because the action scenes were not as essential to the stories as the lessons imparted in each episode.

For those a little slower on the uptake, a final scene always had Billy or Captain Marvel speaking directly to the audience about what we just learned.

It didn’t matter that this hero wasn’t fighting alien invasions or his comic villains like Dr. Sivana. It was more relatable to watch them help an insecure boy to make friends, another to resist peer pressure that could get him in trouble, and another to stay in school when he’s considering dropping out. Billy and Mentor also supported a high school girl who was bullied after she joined the boys track team. Thankfully they weren’t around when boys started joining girls’ track teams.

These were stories told with a lot of heart and simple kindness, that likely kept a few impressionable teens and pre-teens on the right path. That’s an impressive legacy, and it’s why Michael Gray’s passing was met with such sorrow from my generation. Though he appeared in guest spots on a few other shows, including a one-episode stint as one of Marcia’s many boyfriends on The Brady Bunch, he will forever be Billy Batson to us.

He was 75 when he died. When I was 40, I probably wouldn’t have said that was too young, but now in my 60s that perspective has changed. He left the business at a young age, so we didn’t get to see him in roles in his 50s and 60s. Maybe that’s another reason why we were surprised at this sad news: to us he is still frozen in time as the young man with the teen idol looks that put him on Tiger Beat covers.

Gray’s legacy will live on, of course. The Blu-ray release of Shazam! features a stunning cover by renowned comic artist Jerry Ordway. 

And he had a cameo in the 2023 film Shazam! Fury of the Gods, still wearing his signature red shirt with the yellow collar. That continued a tradition from the earlier Shazam! series, which featured an appearance by Frank Coghlan, Jr., who played Captain Marvel in a 1941 serial.

I’ve mentioned Isis, the companion series to Shazam!, in previous posts, but I liked both shows equally, and it was always a special treat when the heroes met in a crossover episode. Looking back now I’m glad I got to meet and speak with Joanna Cameron, and now wish I could have met Michael as well.

Classic Halloween TV Movie: “Don’t Go to Sleep”

It's that time of year again.

I always feel some pull to do at least one Halloween post in the spirit of the season, and thankfully there were a rich supply of vintage made-for-TV horror and suspense films to debut in the Comfort TV era. The hardest part is choosing which to highlight.

This year let’s look at “Don’t Go to Sleep” from 1982 – or best not to look if you’re easily unsettled. This one will scare you, right up to a final scene that is pure nightmare fuel.

Dennis Weaver and Valerie Harper star as Philip and Laura, married with two kids, Mary and Kevin, who as the movie opens are relocating to Laura’s childhood home to be closer to her ailing mother (Ruth Gordon). Philip isn’t happy about the move, but there are deeper tensions within the family, dating back to a car accident that claimed the life of their eldest daughter, Jennifer.

One night soon after Mary thinks she hears a voice coming from under her bed, which is mysteriously set on fire. 

She later confirms, first to her shock and then to her delight, that the voice belongs to Jennifer. What could be a happy supernatural reunion quickly turns malevolent, as Jennifer is clearly out to punish her family, using Mary as her weapon. “They don’t love me like you do,” Jennifer tells her.

With this genre it’s hard to know where to stop the story description without revealing too much that is best left for new viewers to discover. But what comes next goes harder than you might expect for a prime-time TV movie, as a family already falling apart from grief and regret is subjected to one tragedy after another. And why has Jennifer turned against her family? That too will be revealed.

While Valerie Harper will always be Rhoda to classic television fans, she built a successful side hustle in scary TV movies like “Night Drive,” “The People Across the Lake” and this one. Dennis Weaver, another stalwart TV presence, shows a darker side than usual as he suspects his family has never forgiven him for having one too many before the accident that killed his daughter.

But “Don’t Go to Sleep” belongs to its youngest stars, especially Robin Ignico as Mary and Kristin Cumming as Jennifer. 

It’s surprising that neither went on to a notable career given their effective performances. According to Wikipedia Ignico was a finalist for the role of Little Orphan Annie in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, and Cumming lists only four other credits on her IMDB page. But they’re both terrific here, forcing viewers to question whether these sisters are allies or adversaries, and which one is the real victim.

The movie is available on YouTube – and if you too struggle to sleep after watching “Don’t Go to Sleep,” don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Remembering Steve Allen

2027 will be here before you know it, and as each new year takes us further away from the earliest days of television, the likelihood intensifies of its pioneers being forgotten.

It’s unfortunate that this happens with television but not with movies. In the Criterion Closet videos on YouTube you’ll see celebrities in their 20s honoring films older than their grandparents. Whether it’s Fellini or Bergman, Chaplin or Tati, Kubrick or Kurosawa, they know the movies and why they should be known.

Why should television be different? Maybe it’s because so much of the work of its first generation of stars has been lost, as it was never deemed important enough to be preserved in the first place. But there’s still plenty left to attest to the talent of these creators, and their impact on the medium.

Steve Allen belongs on everyone’s short list of TV’s most influential figures.

He had the ingenuity of Ernie Kovacs, the quick wit of Robin Williams and, like Johnny Carson, he had the ability to bring out the best in every talk show guest.
Allen wasn’t perfect – he hated rock and roll and mocked it at every opportunity, usually by reading the lyrics to pop songs as if they were profound poetry (“Be Bop-a-Lula, she’s my baby…Be Bop-a-Lula, I don’t mean maybe…”). When Elvis appeared on his show, he had him sing “Hound Dog” to a Bassett Hound wearing a top hat. 

But as a Grammy-winning composer who wrote several popular hits, he at least earned the right to take a pessimistic view of the top 40.

What else should you know about Steve Allen if you didn’t already? Here’s a start.

He Invented The Tonight Show
Nearly 70 years after Allen left The Tonight Show viewers are still watching a format that he essentially created. From Carson to Colbert to Kimmel, if you’ve ever watched a late-night talk show host deliver an opening monologue, then sit behind a desk and interview guests, you’re looking at the template he established. Allen was not just the show’s first host (1954-1957), he was also its co-creator and was responsible for its most memorable segments. After launching a weekly variety series at the same time, he realized two shows were too much. Since the variety series paid more, he left The Tonight Show to Jack Paar – another oft-forgotten television pioneer.

He was also Letterman before Letterman
Remember all the crazy stunts Dave did on his late-night show, like being lowered into a tank of water while wearing a suit covered in Alka Seltzer tablets? Allen was doing that stuff 30 years earlier. He dunked himself into a large vat of Jell-O, and wore a suit made of teabags. He would also, like Letterman, interview business owners and passers-by outside the TV studio.

Big Bill Allen’s Sports Roundup
Long before bloopers went mainstream, Steve Allen was featured in one of the first and the funniest. Playing a sports reporter, he allegedly saw himself in the camera with the character’s hat and wig and began cackling hysterically. Thankfully it’s one of the clips from that era that survived.

The Steve Allen Show (all of them)
Allen’s IMDB page lists seven separate “Steve Allen Show” entries ranging from 1950 to 1981, and totaling more than 580 episodes, in addition to his more than 500 episodes as host of The Tonight Show. You don’t stay on television that long if audiences don’t enjoy what you’re delivering.

The Man on the Street
One of the most popular recurring bits on Allen’s first variety series was “man on the street” interviews in which Allen would ask a question about a pressing issue of the day. While he would often interact with actual strangers in segments, these skits featured cast members Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Don Knotts, and provide an early example of television introducing characters and catchphrases that viewers looked forward to watching. Nye would always be a smarmy dude who introduced “Hi-ho, Steverino!” into the lexicon. The Poston interviews always began with Allen asking his name and Poston being unable to remember it. And Knotts would usually play an extremely nervous guy in a dangerous profession.

I’ve Got a Secret/What’s My Line
When you watch game shows from the 1950s with celebrity panels, it’s apparent that people in the public eye back then were smarter, more erudite, and held themselves to a higher standard of civility and decorum. Allen was right at home among such luminaries as journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, publisher Bennett Cerf, humorist Henry Morgan and actress Arlene Francis. Back then the question “Is it bigger than a bread box?” was often asked when trying to guess the profession of guests on What’s My Line. Allen introduced that saying.

Meeting of Minds
I remember watching this PBS series created by Allen back in 1977 and being fascinated by the concept. It was a talk show, a format as a host he had long since perfected, but in this case his guests were actors playing historical figures. The groupings were beyond audacious: Cleopatra chatting with Theodore Roosevelt; Attila the Hun and Emily Dickinson (sounds like a Monty Python sketch!); Socrates and Susan B. Anthony. But the performers played it straight and though much of the conversation was scripted (by Allen), it never felt that way and it drew from the actual writings of each guest when possible. 

When I first watched it, Meeting of Minds was my introduction to many of the personages on its panels, and I learned more about all of them from this series then I ever did at school.

You Never Knew Where He’ll Turn Up
It would be hard to find an actor/celebrity with a more diverse IMDB page than Steve Allen. He popped up in uncredited appearances in Batman and Get Smart, he announced wrestling matches, played himself on episodes of Hart to Hart and Amen, made the standard stops on The Love Boat, Hotel and Fantasy Island, played Dr. Ehrlich’s dad on St. Elsewhere, was Bart’s electronically altered voice on The Simpsons, and kept working up until the year before his passing, with a guest spot on Diagnosis: Murder in 1999.

And in his spare time, he wrote 50 books and thousands of songs. I don’t know if he cared about being remembered – his gravesite is unmarked at Forest Lawn – but he certainly deserves to be.

My Journey Through 1970s TV: Thursday Nights, 1978

Thursdays in 1978 did not come to mind when I thought back on standout nights of television from my youth. But when I looked back at the schedule it was surprising how many shows that are still fondly recalled all aired on this same night. Nine of the 11 shows across all three networks would get DVD releases and are still streaming somewhere, a testament to their enduring popularity.

ABC
Mork & Mindy
What’s Happening
Barney Miller
Soap
Family

Mork & Mindy was a huge and immediate success following Robin Williams’ first appearance as Mork on Happy Days. Williams was fortunate in not becoming defined by that character, the way Henry Winkler couldn’t shake The Fonz for decades (he got there eventually). Not sure how well the show still holds up outside of Williams’ improv flourishes that forced poor Pam Dawber to keep up, but viewers loved it, propelling the series to #3 for the season.

This was the final go-round for What’s Happening, and a strong timeslot lead-in boosted the series to #28 for the year. Barney Miller was still going strong in season 5 (#15) but suffered the loss of cast member Jack Soo. Season two of Soap finished at #19, and with four shows in the top 30 ABC easily won another night.

Family should have been top 30 as well but couldn’t outdraw Barnaby Jones in the 10pm slot. They tried countering a show about an old guy by adding a new kid to the cast – Quinn Cummings as newly orphaned Annie. Thankfully, Cummings didn’t Cousin Oliver the whole series, but it’s debatable whether she added anything of consequence.

NBC
Project U.F.O.
Quincy M.E.
W.E.B.

Project U.F.O. limped through two seasons and 26 episodes bested by more popular competition, but it was a series that deserved a better fate.

Co-created and executive produced by Jack Webb, the show had all the hallmarks and distinct rhythm of a typical Webb procedural: no-nonsense public servants in the lead roles - William Jordan and Caskey Swaim as U.S. Air Force investigators – who engage in awkward attempts at light banter before starting each week’s case. They gather facts and question witnesses, but with UFO inquiries there’s always some doubt to their authenticity, so cases are never fully solved.

I’m a sucker for Webb’s shows so I was in from his opening narration:

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This [UFO diagrams] is the wheel he said he saw. These are Unidentified Flying Objects that people say they are seeing now. Are they proof that we are being visited by civilizations from other stars? Or just what are they? The United States Air Force began an investigation of this high strangeness in a search for the truth. What you are about to see is part of that 20-year search."

I also enjoyed how there were frequent mentions of Project Blue Book, a real government program that would later play a prominent role in Twin Peaks lore as well. The full run of Project U.F.O. episodes was uploaded to YouTube years ago, and they’re worth checking out.

But you won’t find W.E.B. there, as it was canceled after just five episodes and will likely never see the light of day again. A pre-Dynasty Pamela Bellwood starred as a television network executive, in a series clearly modeled after the film Network.

CBS
The Waltons
Hawaii Five-O
Barnaby Jones

CBS counter-programmed ABC with more adult fare, with three quality series all showing signs of age. It was year seven of The Waltons, the first without Will Geer, and that would also see Michael Learned depart before season’s end. 

Season 11 for Hawaii Five-O would be its second-to-last, as would season 7 of Barnaby Jones, the only CBS offering to rank in the top 30 (at #24).

Shows Missed:
The Don Knotts Show (1970)
San Francisco International Airport (1970)
Nancy (1970)
The Headmaster (1970)
The Man and the City (1971)
Search (1972)
The Delphi Bureau (1972)
Jigsaw (1972)
The Little People (1972)
The Sixth Sense (1972)
Faraday & Company (1973)
Kodiak (1974)
The New Land (1974)
McCoy (1975)
Joe and Sons (1975)
Beacon Hill (1975)
Mobile One (1975)
Big Eddie (1975)
Executive Suite (1976)
Ball Four (1976)
Young Dan’l Boone (1977)
Rafferty (1977)
Mulligan’s Stew (1977)
Big Hawaii (1977)
We’ve Got Each Other (1977)
Lifeline (1978)
W.E.B. (1978)

When Television Brought Us Together, Take Two

You've probably already noticed the new book cover with a familiar title just a few inches to the right of what you’re reading now. What’s the story? Glad you asked.

When Television Brought Us Together was first published in 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic. Some writers have reported that their book sales increased during a time when people were forced to stay inside and away from others. I was not one of those writers. Sales were slow, and with the passage of time I can see the blame for that largely falls on myself.

This was not my first book – there were 15 others that preceded it – so I have no excuse for not remembering that in many ways writing the book is the easy part, or at least the part that is most enjoyable. What follows is marketing, promotion, and begging for attention from anyone who will listen. 

I never liked that part of the job, but I did it, and in most cases received help from prominent publishers who set me up with radio and podcast interviews, and got those previous titles reviewed (favorably, I’m happy to say) in publications like Entertainment Weekly.

None of that happened this time. I was working with a smaller publisher that did its best, and I was also dealing with family health issues that pulled my focus away from the attention that every new book requires to be successful. By the following year I was ready to write the whole experience off as a missed opportunity and move on.

Thankfully, the publisher was not ready to give up. Last year they came back to me and said, “Let’s give this another try.” And by then I was eager to oblige. “And if we’re going to do it again,” I said, “This time we’re going to do it right.”

What does that mean – for starters, it’s not just the same book with a new cover. There are about 20 new chapters, and revisions and updates to previous ones. And this time there are lots of photos as well, which I think are essential in a book about a visual medium, and that also make the reading experience more enjoyable.

I’m also in a much different place than I was in my life back in 2020. Being semi-retired I now have the time and the motivation to give this work the support it deserves.

What’s the Book About?

Based on sales numbers it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that most of you who have visited this blog more than 2.6 million times didn’t buy the first edition. If enough of you had then you wouldn’t be reading this now, and I’d be on a beach in the Seychelles. So let me try to change your mind.

Start with the obvious – it’s about the classic television shows we both love: Ozzie & Harriet, Donna Reed, Patty Duke, Dragnet, Bewitched, Jeannie, The Fugitive, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Lucy, Father Knows Best, Bob Newhart, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, That Girl…more than 50 shows profiled, plus soaps, westerns, superheroes and Saturday morning cartoons. The book covers why they’re special and selects the best episodes.

But it’s more than that. It’s also about how they reflected everyday life in America 40, 50, 60 years ago. About what that meant at the time, and why we still carry some of what we experienced from those shows with us. And it’s about the things we watched in those series, that we no longer see when we step outside our front door. That last point is expanded upon in “How Times Have Changed” essays, covering everything from magazines and gas stations to healthcare and air travel.

If that sounds like this is a “woe is me” or “angry man shakes fist at clouds” book, it’s not. I wanted to reinvigorate happy memories. I want readers to be inspired to pull a series off the DVD shelf, or find it on a streaming service, and enjoy it again (or perhaps experience it for the first time). I think you’ll smile and laugh, and for those times when it might make you wistful for the better rudiments of our past, it will also make you grateful that you came of age at a time before the culture went stupid in the head.

It’s also undeniable that subsequent generations had and will have a much different perspective on television that we did. The TV screen is no longer the only one in the house, and it’s certainly not as interesting or important to them as TikTok and other social media channels. Countless new shows debut every year and disappear just as quickly, and even the best of them are noticed by a tiny fraction of our population. That’s not what television used to be – and perhaps this is a book to share with the teens and 20-somethings in your life, and to talk about why we bonded with our favorite shows back then and maybe introduce them to a few examples. I think they hold up pretty well after all these years.

I’m happy to report that since the official publication date of September 1, the new book is already doing better than it was the first time around. If you’d like to check it out just click on the link below the book cover – and if you enjoy it, please leave a review on amazon or barnesandnoble.com, as that provides algorithmic support and boosts core search rankings.

Thanks.

The Twilight Zone, Season Five: 3 Classics and 3 Wasted Trips

And so we arrive at last to the fifth and final season of The Twilight Zone. As a refresher: I started these season reviews because, familiar as I’ve been with this landmark series, I’ve never owned it or experienced all the episodes in order in their entirety.

Now I have, and it’s clear from this last batch of 36 episodes that the premise had started to run out of steam. Time travelers, dystopian futures, machines replacing humans, ill-fated voyages to outer space – viewers have seen them all before, and in most cases better than these variations.

While I still enjoyed more than half of these episodes, it’s never been easier to select a top three because there were not as many close runners-up.

The Three Best

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
One of two no-brainer contenders for the best episode of season five, and one that would likely rank in the top five from the entire series. William Shatner plays a man still recovering from a nervous breakdown, who boards an airplane and is terrified when he sees a creature perched on the wing, about to destroy an engine.

In his introduction Rod Serling warns that this story will take us into the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone, and that was not hyperbole. Every element – Shatner’s frenzied performance, Richard Donner’s direction, and the perfect final scene – all exemplify the series at its very best. And if that’s not enough, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” contains what is indisputably the best jump scare of any TZ episode.

Living Doll
There have been eight films in the Child’s Play series about a killer doll named Chucky, but none of them were as exciting as this TZ installment in which a malevolent doll called Talky Tina plots against a little girl’s brutish stepfather, played by Telly Savales. 

June Foray, who voiced Rocky the Flying Squirrel among many other beloved characters, indulges her dark side, uttering chilling lines in the sweetest tones. Can a small plastic doll murder a full-grown American male? You’d be surprised.

Number 12 Looks Just Like You
Whether this is the best episode of the season or merely the most prescient is a matter of conjecture. But it’s amazing how a 60-year-old TV show could so accurately foresee challenges now being confronted by the US in 2026.

The original inspiration for its story was not a glimpse into the future but remembrance of the past, specifically Germany under Hitler, the demand for conformity within a totalitarian state, and the Nazi's pursuit of a so-called superior Aryan race.

In the futuristic society depicted in this episode, a young woman named Marilyn has reached the age of ‘transformation,’ where she may choose a new face and body from a catalog of attractive options. It’s presented as a voluntary procedure, but Marilyn soon discovers it is mandatory after she objects to it.

There’s so much to unpack in this one – our culture’s worship of youth, how some pursue physical perfection through plastic surgery – but it also speaks to one party’s current flirtation with socialism, with its promise of classless equality. It’s good for you, we are told, no matter how many who lived under such societies protest. Trust us, they say – we know what’s best, and that freedom of choice you’ll have to sacrifice for the good of the state – you won’t even miss it after a while. Scary stuff – and it’s inching its way into the mainstream.

If I had a fourth ‘best’ pick it would be “I am the Night – Color Me Black,” in which the sun fails to rise over a small town on the morning of a public execution. It shares many of the over-written, heavy-handed qualities found in Rod Serling’s least memorable scripts but this time it still works, thanks to strong performances from Michael Constantine, Ivan Dixon, and George Lindsay.

Some fans rank “The Masks” among the series’ classics – for me it was just okay, as was “Spur of the Moment,” though it opens with one of the season’s most unsettling scenes. There were also mediocre episodes elevated by a strong lead performance – Mickey Rooney in “The Last Night of a Jockey,” Sir Cedric Hardwicke in “Uncle Simon,” John Dehner in “Mr. Gerrity and the Graves.”

Finally, “Black Leather Jackets” is silly but it has Shelley Fabares, so it automatically gets a pass.


The Three Worst

Sounds and Silences
It hurts my heart to single out anything starring John McGiver, one of my favorite character actors, on a “worst” list. But there’s no defending this headache-inducing episode about a CEO obsessed with noise, which grates on the nerves of his employees, not to mention those of us watching from home.

From Agnes with Love
Computers taking on human qualities and doing more harm than good? Maybe that wasn’t the cliché in 1964 than it is now, but here once again we get proof that The Twilight Zone was not a series that excelled at comedy. Wally Cox stars as a programmer hoping Agnes, a super-computer, can help him win his dream girl, unaware that Agnes has already fallen for him.

The Encounter
Simply one of the most repugnant half-hours of television I’ve ever watched, and one that some sources claim was banned from syndication for more than 50 years. If anyone wondered what they were missing all that time, the answer is nothing.