Speaker 1: What do you get when one of the most respected
Speaker 1: television journalists of our time takes on one of television's
Speaker 1: greatest writers. What you get is sailing a Jenny into
Speaker 1: the Twilight Zone with TV's first visionary, the new book
Speaker 1: by Alan Sepinwar. Now, if you've been part of the
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone fan community over the past few years, you
Speaker 1: might have seen Alan around at events like Sailing Fest,
Speaker 1: speaking to fans and doing the work behind the scenes
Speaker 1: to bring this book together. And now all of that
Speaker 1: effort has paid off and the book is finally available
Speaker 1: for pre order. Now I'll put the links to Alan's
Speaker 1: website and a pre order link in the show notes
Speaker 1: so you can pre order your copy after you've listened
Speaker 1: to my conversation with Alan Sepinwall. It is my great
Speaker 1: pleasure to welcome to the Twilight Zone Podcast, mister Alan Sepenwall. Alan, welcome,
Speaker 1: It's good to see you. Tom.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to see you again.
Speaker 1: I'm so appreciative that you sent me a copy of
Speaker 1: the book. I've been really looking forward to reading it now.
Speaker 1: I haven't read it yet for a very specific reason,
Speaker 1: because I think whenever a work like this comes out
Speaker 1: that is really covering road sailing and his life and
Speaker 1: various other things things. Yeah, I want to kind of
Speaker 1: approach this on a couple of fronts, So I wanted
Speaker 1: to come into it relatively cold and talk to you
Speaker 1: about the kind of research aspect of it and what
Speaker 1: went into making it. And then maybe when the book
Speaker 1: comes out, you can come back on and we can
Speaker 1: get into the details of what's actually in it after
Speaker 1: I've read it. Would that be okay?
Speaker 2: I would absolutely love to thank you.
Speaker 1: What I find really interesting about your career, Alan is
Speaker 1: you know you have spanned some really big changes in
Speaker 1: the industry, not in just what we're watching, but how
Speaker 1: it's being reported. Could you give us a bit of
Speaker 1: an overview of your career and some of your highlights.
Speaker 2: Sure, I've been doing this. Last week was the thirtieth
Speaker 2: anniversary of my career as a professional journalist, so I've
Speaker 2: been doing this for a minute. I started at the
Speaker 2: Star Ledger newspaper New Jersey, which perhaps some of your
Speaker 2: listeners might recognize as the paper that Tony Soprano would
Speaker 2: go and pick up at the end of his drive
Speaker 2: at the start of every season of that show. So
Speaker 2: it was the big paper in New Jersey, So I
Speaker 2: happened to be there right as The Sopranos was about
Speaker 2: to debut. Therefore, right as television, as we talked about
Speaker 2: it was really going to change. So I had a
Speaker 2: front row seat to that, To the Wire, Deadwood, mad Men,
Speaker 2: a lot of these big shows from the turn of
Speaker 2: the century into the last few decades. After I was
Speaker 2: at The Star Ledger for fourteen years, I then moved
Speaker 2: on because the Internet made newspapers more challenging. I started
Speaker 2: writing for a couple of different websites, neither of which
Speaker 2: unfortunately exist, which means, you know, one of the perils
Speaker 2: of being an internet journalist is sometimes your work just disappears,
Speaker 2: and I'm doing what I can to try to recover that.
Speaker 2: And then I spent about six years writing about TV
Speaker 2: for Rolling Stone, and now I run my own website,
Speaker 2: What's allan Watching, And to me, the big change in
Speaker 2: terms of TV coverage is not just the amount of
Speaker 2: TV but the way we write about it. So when
Speaker 2: I started on this in the nineties, you would basically
Speaker 2: you'd get like one episode of a show on a
Speaker 2: video cassette because that's how long ago this was, and
Speaker 2: you would have to based on a single episode of
Speaker 2: a television show, you would have to be able to
Speaker 2: determine is this show good? Is this show bad? Is
Speaker 2: this worth your time? You know? And you know, among
Speaker 2: the things I sort of read in doing my research
Speaker 2: on Serling was you would have these people writing reviews
Speaker 2: of The Twilight Zone where they had just seen where
Speaker 2: is Everybody? Fortunately, whereas Everybody is a really great pilot,
Speaker 2: so you know, they had something to go on. But
Speaker 2: there's been so many shows over the years where it's
Speaker 2: like the first show is not really representative, and then
Speaker 2: you guess wrong, and so the big change is suddenly
Speaker 2: we started a getting more episodes, but be you would
Speaker 2: write about individual episodes what I guess we call now
Speaker 2: the recap, so it's you know, I would analyze every
Speaker 2: episode of The Sopranos, every episode of Breaking Bad, every
Speaker 2: episode of mad Men. My writing on a bunch of
Speaker 2: shows has now been collected into different books. But like
Speaker 2: just on because the thing is people wanted to know
Speaker 2: less what should I watch? Than Hey, I watched this
Speaker 2: great thing. What else can I think about it? And
Speaker 2: that's that's obviously something that you're doing, Tom. I mean,
Speaker 2: the people who listen to the show they've seen these episodes,
Speaker 2: you know, many more times than I have, you know,
Speaker 2: having written this book, and yet they still want to
Speaker 2: sort of come and dig in for more and get
Speaker 2: more of it, a sense more of a deep dive
Speaker 2: into what each episode, the story behind it, at what
Speaker 2: it means. And so you're getting recappers, you're getting podcasters,
Speaker 2: you're getting all of these other ways in which people
Speaker 2: can engage in television besides just you know, eight hundred
Speaker 2: words in a newspaper column.
Speaker 1: And I suppose that not all of us have people
Speaker 1: in our lives who we can talk to these things about.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the things I always appreciate
Speaker 1: is with these podcasts and so on, is that it
Speaker 1: is almost like having that friends who you can kind
Speaker 1: of speak about these shows with, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it absolutely is. Actually just launched my latest
Speaker 2: podcast called TV is Good. And I have a friend
Speaker 2: named Catherine van Aarondonk who's also a critic, who lives
Speaker 2: one town over for me in New Jersey, and so
Speaker 2: we get together and talk about TV all the time,
Speaker 2: and eventually we're like, well, let's just do this, you know,
Speaker 2: as a show. But a lot of my friends in
Speaker 2: this world, and certainly a lot of my fellow TV
Speaker 2: fans are people I met online. My wife always tells
Speaker 2: the story about how, you know, I once took on
Speaker 2: a trip to Chicago, of all places, to meet a
Speaker 2: bunch of online fans of the nineties cop show Homicide
Speaker 2: Life on the Street because we were all unlike the
Speaker 2: same you know, mailing list serve about it, and eventually
Speaker 2: we decided to get together in Chicago was roughly the
Speaker 2: center of America, and so it was a place we
Speaker 2: could all easily fly to. But the Internet allowed that.
Speaker 2: Otherwise I would have like not known anyone who really
Speaker 2: was into that show.
Speaker 1: Looking down here as you may, I can see the
Speaker 1: people who you have spoken to in the industry throughout
Speaker 1: your career, people like David Chase, Vince Gilligan, and so on.
Speaker 1: Was Rod Sailing even if you weren't going in to
Speaker 1: have a conversation about him? Was he something that would
Speaker 1: just pop up throughout these conversations with these creators quite
Speaker 1: naturally over the years. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean David Chase, who created the Sopranos, is obviously
Speaker 2: a big Twilight Zone fan. It's a huge influence on him.
Speaker 2: He made a movie after the show ended called Not
Speaker 2: Fade Away, where the main character like starts a garage
Speaker 2: band and I think they're called the Twilight Zones. And
Speaker 2: in the very last episode of the Sopranos, what do
Speaker 2: you call it? The bard is playing in the background,
Speaker 2: so you hear what's Julius Moomer's agent saying, like the
Speaker 2: networks are looking for quality and the writer is top
Speaker 2: shelf or whatever the line is. And then in another
Speaker 2: episode someone compares or Tony compares his life to Rocky
Speaker 2: Valentine and a nice place to visit because sort of
Speaker 2: everything is going a little too well and he's not
Speaker 2: enjoying it. So that was a big influence, and so
Speaker 2: that would come up, and you know, with Matthew Weiner,
Speaker 2: who created mad Men, twilight Zone was a big influence there.
Speaker 2: It was mentioned on the show, and so these things
Speaker 2: would come up in conversation long before I ever got
Speaker 2: the assignment to write this book, and long before I
Speaker 2: felt frankly confident enough in my own twilight Zone knowledge
Speaker 2: to feel like, oh, you know, I could, I could
Speaker 2: go toe to toe with David. And now we you know,
Speaker 2: we will text sometimes about Twilight Zone and about his
Speaker 2: own interactions with with Sterling and all of that, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, yeah, now I get what he's been
Speaker 2: saying all these years.
Speaker 1: So whenever a new book about the Twilight Zone or
Speaker 1: Rod Saling comes out, I always wonder what its focus
Speaker 1: is going to be. How is it different from what's
Speaker 1: come out before. So how would you describe your book?
Speaker 1: And you know, why did you decide to write it?
Speaker 2: Well, I'll take I'll take the second part first. This
Speaker 2: was a case. Often when I write a book, the
Speaker 2: idea comes from me and I say, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: I really want to do something about the Sopranos. I
Speaker 2: did a book called The Revolutionist Televised, which is just
Speaker 2: me telling the stories of a dozen shows from the
Speaker 2: turn of the century that helped sort of transform how
Speaker 2: we look at TV. In this case, an editor at
Speaker 2: Hachett Books reached out to me and said, hey, I
Speaker 2: think the time is right for a new Serling biography.
Speaker 2: There hasn't been. There have been a lot of like
Speaker 2: really great books, all of which I read, that are
Speaker 2: authoritative in different ways, like Nick Perez's book you know,
Speaker 2: that's covering the whole filmography. That's wonderful, and it definitely
Speaker 2: gets into biographical details within it, but there hadn't been
Speaker 2: like a full proper biography in a long time, and
Speaker 2: so my editor said, hey, would you like to do it?
Speaker 2: And the thing about having the job of TV critic
Speaker 2: in the twenty first century is you really don't have
Speaker 2: time to go back and watch old stuff unless you
Speaker 2: have a professional excuse for it. And so sometimes, you know,
Speaker 2: I will pick a book half as much just because
Speaker 2: I want an excuse to write watch it again. You know,
Speaker 2: I've got a book of At the Wire coming out
Speaker 2: next year, and part of it was like, you know what,
Speaker 2: I really want to watch the Wire, and I can't
Speaker 2: really justify it unless someone is paying me for it,
Speaker 2: So I will do that. So twilet Zones the show.
Speaker 2: I knew. It's a show I'd watched a fair amount
Speaker 2: as a kid. Certainly hadn't seen every episode, had never
Speaker 2: seen Night Gallery other than one or two episodes, hadn't
Speaker 2: seen any of the fifties teleplay, and all of these
Speaker 2: things were sort of on my I would love to
Speaker 2: get to this one day, and then it became harder
Speaker 2: and harder to find that one day, and so on
Speaker 2: an editor comes to me and says, hey, would you
Speaker 2: like to write a book about Rod Serling. My first
Speaker 2: thought is, hey, this is a fascinating person who is
Speaker 2: among the most influential people who ever work in the medium.
Speaker 2: I've devoted my life to covering I would love to
Speaker 2: learn and write more about him. And the other is, hey,
Speaker 2: if I do this book, I can finally watch all
Speaker 2: of The Twilight Zone and all of everything else. So
Speaker 2: that was that was really an exciting prospect for me.
Speaker 2: And then once I started into it, I was given
Speaker 2: sort of carte blanche to do whatever I wanted, and
Speaker 2: I started, you know, watching everything. I started reading everything
Speaker 2: that was available and watching interviews of his and all
Speaker 2: of that. And the thing that there are two things
Speaker 2: kept coming up over and over again. One is just
Speaker 2: how autobiographical Rod's work is, and it's just he's putting
Speaker 2: himself out there. He said once or twice, you know,
Speaker 2: all my characters talk the same and all of them
Speaker 2: are me, and that something you've talked about. And that's
Speaker 2: something that's really kind of clear in his work. He's
Speaker 2: taking his feelings and his life and putting it out there.
Speaker 2: And I realized I could structure the book so that
Speaker 2: every chapter was framed by me writing about a different
Speaker 2: you know, either Twilight Zone episode or teleplay or Night
Speaker 2: Gallery episode, whatever that he had written that in some
Speaker 2: way applied to that particular moment in his life. So
Speaker 2: the first chapter of the book is about his childhood
Speaker 2: in Binghamton. So before I get into that, I write
Speaker 2: about walking distance, you know, when we're talking about Night Gallery,
Speaker 2: I write about their tearing down Tim Riley's bar. There's
Speaker 2: a teleplay he did that almost nobody remembers, called Exit
Speaker 2: from a Plane in Flight, which was one of the
Speaker 2: things he did for the Chrysler Theater in the mid sixties,
Speaker 2: and it's basically inspired by the fact that he did
Speaker 2: a parachute jump with the eighty second Airborn like to
Speaker 2: celebrate his fortieth birthday, and he used that as inspiration
Speaker 2: for something and I looked at that, like, well, this
Speaker 2: is kind of a metaphor for that willlderness period in
Speaker 2: between Twilight Zone and Night Gallery for him, And so
Speaker 2: I use that. And so it's me trying to use
Speaker 2: his own work to tell his story. And that's part
Speaker 2: of what I did and the other thing that I
Speaker 2: thought about, And again it goes back to your question
Speaker 2: before about you know, all of these people I've known
Speaker 2: over the years who keep bringing up Twilight Zone. Is
Speaker 2: we all kind of know that Twilight Zone was a
Speaker 2: big influence on popular culture, but no one is necessarily
Speaker 2: like put that all together in one place. And because
Speaker 2: of what I've been doing over my career in all,
Speaker 2: because of all the people I know, and because of
Speaker 2: the reputation I've developed, I was able to talk to
Speaker 2: almost all of the big people who were in some
Speaker 2: way inspired by the show. So again, I talked to
Speaker 2: David Chase, I've talked to Vince Gilligan who made Breaking Bad.
Speaker 2: I talked to Gierymal del Toro. I talked to Jj Abrams.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe the most sort of overt Sirtling fan
Speaker 2: of them all, Damon Lindeloff, who co created Lost with
Speaker 2: him Ben Stiller, huge huge Twilight Zone fan, big and
Speaker 2: fl luents on Severance and a lot of the other
Speaker 2: work he does. Even some people you wouldn't necessarily expect
Speaker 2: to be like influenced by Serling. Rob Mack, who created
Speaker 2: Always Sun in Philadelphia and is now with Ryan Reylds,
Speaker 2: co owner of Wrexham. I was at an event with
Speaker 2: him and he asked what I had going on, and
Speaker 2: I said, while I'm writing this book about Serling, and
Speaker 2: he kind of grabbed my shirt and said, oh god,
Speaker 2: I have to talk to you for that. Like I'm
Speaker 2: obsessed with Rod Serling, and so Rob Mack is in
Speaker 2: the book with a lot of smart things to say.
Speaker 1: I talked to.
Speaker 2: Charlie Brooker, who created Black Mirror and openly admits, like
Speaker 2: I'm just shamelessly ripping off Rod Serling. This show would
Speaker 2: not exist if not for Twilight Zone, Ryan Johnson. There's
Speaker 2: just a whole lot of people, and even some of
Speaker 2: the people I didn't necessarily get to talk to, you know,
Speaker 2: Ryan Coogler, when he was doing interviews about Sinners, would say, well,
Speaker 2: the big influence on this movie is the Last Rites
Speaker 2: of Jeff Myrtlebank and twilight Zone is my favorite show.
Speaker 2: So I was able to in some cases where I
Speaker 2: didn't talk to people still use quotes from other stories.
Speaker 2: I was able to. Steven Spielberg agreed to answer a
Speaker 2: few questions by email, So that's in the book as well.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously not just his experience directing Rod with
Speaker 2: Night Gallery, but just the influence he had. And the
Speaker 2: thing about Rod that you learn is he was really
Speaker 2: self deprecating and to a degree really self doubting, and
Speaker 2: he said over and over in the final years of
Speaker 2: his life, no one's going to remember anything I did.
Speaker 2: No one is going to like Twilight Zone is going
Speaker 2: to go away, none of this is going to matter.
Speaker 2: And part of my goal with the book was to
Speaker 2: prove him wrong and to say, look, here are all
Speaker 2: these people who have contributed to all of these things
Speaker 2: that we love in the world, you know, and they're
Speaker 2: all saying, no, I wouldn't be doing this without Rod.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be doing that without Rod.
Speaker 1: And that is.
Speaker 2: Something that I feel like as I was putting together
Speaker 2: the book that was in some ways as much as
Speaker 2: telling Rod's story itself, being able to tell the afterlife
Speaker 2: of Serling on the Twilight Zone went up being really special.
Speaker 1: I just like to maybe dig into some of your
Speaker 1: areas of research then obviously course you know fast, and
Speaker 1: maybe most importantly your interactions with the Sailing family.
Speaker 2: They have there have been other books written about their
Speaker 2: father which they were not crazy about, which you know,
Speaker 2: take a somewhat negative slant to him, and so there
Speaker 2: was some understandable wariness about someone coming in to tell
Speaker 2: Rod's story. But I hung around, and I hung around,
Speaker 2: and I sort of talked about my bona fides and
Speaker 2: my credentials. And I did speak to Anne for a
Speaker 2: long time. I did speak to Jody for a long time.
Speaker 2: I spoke to Jeff Serling. I'd spoke to family friends. Obviously,
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of people still around who knew
Speaker 2: him personally, much less worked with him. I spoked to
Speaker 2: Billy Moomey. I spoke to Janozoirk, who's one of the
Speaker 2: Night Gallery directors, shortly before he died. But mostly it's
Speaker 2: like the people who knew him are his daughters and
Speaker 2: his daughter's friends. And I talked to a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of that group, and they, you know, they shared a
Speaker 2: different version of Rod than you get from when you
Speaker 2: watch the guy on TV. You know, sort of the
Speaker 2: more relaxed and goofy guy that he was. And I
Speaker 2: would like to think, and you know, obviously they will
Speaker 2: be the judges on that that the person I'm portraying
Speaker 2: in this book is the person that they knew growing
Speaker 2: up with.
Speaker 1: A lot of the authors I've spoken to, I kind
Speaker 1: of love when they have stories about going to the
Speaker 1: sailing archives. Did you do any of that during your research.
Speaker 2: I went to UCLA a couple of times, and I'm
Speaker 2: based in New Jersey, so and I was limited somewhat
Speaker 2: with some health things in terms of travel, so I
Speaker 2: never went to Wisconsin, which I know is the big archive,
Speaker 2: but I had researchers there who were able to go
Speaker 2: through it to a degree. And also, obviously I had
Speaker 2: the works of Nick Pereisy and Martin Graham's and other
Speaker 2: people who'd been through a lot of that stuff, and
Speaker 2: so I was able to incorporate some things from there
Speaker 2: and give them credit for that. I spent about a
Speaker 2: week in going through their archives. I got some things
Speaker 2: from the Serling archives at Antioch College. You know, obviously
Speaker 2: Nick had a ton of stuff, and there was just
Speaker 2: it was really there's so much out there. And the
Speaker 2: great thing sometimes if you're writing a book about someone
Speaker 2: who has been dead for fifty plus years at the
Speaker 2: time you're doing it, that's hard. But Serling saved all
Speaker 2: these papers, all these letters. He gave so many interviews.
Speaker 2: I was able to really just like getting a newspapers
Speaker 2: dot com account for a year turned out to be
Speaker 2: just a spectacular investment because there were so many interviews
Speaker 2: and so many quotes he gave, you know, just accessing
Speaker 2: different archives. I have a friend who works at the
Speaker 2: Paley Center in New York, so any of the teleplays
Speaker 2: that aren't on YouTube or that are not necessarily available commercially,
Speaker 2: they've got a bunch of those. At one point I
Speaker 2: wanted to write about at I think the sixty two Emmys,
Speaker 2: maybe the sixty three Emmys. One of the Emmys in
Speaker 2: the early sixties, there was an infamous moment where he
Speaker 2: did a Schlitz beer commercial that had been pre recorded
Speaker 2: and they showed it like on the giant screen in
Speaker 2: the theater, and Rod was kind of mortified because this
Speaker 2: was before he decided, you know, to go full pitch Man,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to see what the commercial was, and
Speaker 2: the Paley Center had the actual Emmy telecast and I
Speaker 2: was able to go and watch it and take notes
Speaker 2: on that, and you know, so that's the thing that
Speaker 2: comes up in the book, and it really there's just
Speaker 2: so much out there, like I could barely I could
Speaker 2: barely scratch the surface of my research in terms of
Speaker 2: what is in the book, because I got I turned
Speaker 2: in one very early edit that was you know, would
Speaker 2: have been the size of you know, the King James
Speaker 2: Bible or something unabridged if that were to be published.
Speaker 2: And my editor looked at and is like, this is wonderful, Alan,
Speaker 2: There's way too much detail in here. You really need
Speaker 2: to pare this down a lot. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: I writers got to kill their darlings, and I tried
Speaker 2: to pare it back to the bear essentials.
Speaker 1: The battle is not what to put in, it's what
Speaker 1: to leave out. So yeah, absolutely, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2: I was at Ithaca and Kathy Michael, who's the archivist there,
Speaker 2: at one point, I'm going through the things and I
Speaker 2: discovered I knew that Rod had done like a radio
Speaker 2: interview with Regis Philbin shortly after the Twilight Zone ended,
Speaker 2: and they had it on audio cassette, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: you know, do you guys have a tape player because
Speaker 2: it did not occur to me to bring one. I
Speaker 2: thought this might be digitized, and they said, well, we don't,
Speaker 2: but we'll look for it, and they just, you know,
Speaker 2: she and her partner Terry Beth, who worked in the
Speaker 2: archives with her, they just sort of scoured the library
Speaker 2: until they found a cassette player elsewhere. And I was
Speaker 2: able to listen to this interview, and I went up
Speaker 2: using several quotes from it that really that's the great
Speaker 2: feeling is when you hear him say something that is
Speaker 2: the exact point you're trying to make. It's always better
Speaker 2: if it's Rod saying it, then if you're saying it
Speaker 2: as the writer, like he is the story, I am
Speaker 2: never the story.
Speaker 1: Through viewing all this stuff first hand, to reveal about
Speaker 1: road Saling as a person that maybe you hadn't been
Speaker 1: exposed to before, anything that quite surprised you.
Speaker 2: I knew the again, I knew the really broadest strokes
Speaker 2: about him before I did this. It's sometimes you go
Speaker 2: and you write a book and you're an expert on
Speaker 2: it already. That's been the case for me for most
Speaker 2: of what I'd done. This was one where I had
Speaker 2: to make myself an expert, and so I was learning
Speaker 2: a ton along the way. And so I knew he
Speaker 2: had fought in World War Two, but not really any
Speaker 2: of the details of it. And then you read something
Speaker 2: like his you know, first Squad, first Platoon, that story
Speaker 2: that he wrote in college that the Strand magazine published
Speaker 2: a few years ago, and you realize, oh, like this,
Speaker 2: this was just utterly traumatic that he would have went
Speaker 2: through something like this, And you can see that trauma
Speaker 2: and that sense of both guilt but also like difficulty
Speaker 2: accepting that humanity was capable of these things. That is
Speaker 2: suffused throughout his work. That's there all the time, regardless
Speaker 2: of whatever else he's writing about. This sort of of
Speaker 2: how can people do this to each other? You know,
Speaker 2: and I wish they couldn't is always there. I you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't know anything about his I knew he I
Speaker 2: knew of him as Jewish, so I didn't know he
Speaker 2: had raised his children, he and Carol had raised the
Speaker 2: children not as Jewish, and he had not actually converted himself.
Speaker 2: But like I did not know, for instance, about his
Speaker 2: like deep, deep love of Christmas, which is obviously a
Speaker 2: thing you see all the time in the show, not
Speaker 2: only in Twilight Zone but Night Gallery. The teleplays a
Speaker 2: few Stirling fests to go. I thought it was great
Speaker 2: when you did the performance of No Christmas is here,
Speaker 2: Like that's wonderful. Like this this idea that this man,
Speaker 2: because of the day in which he was born, but
Speaker 2: also the country in which he lived, fell in love
Speaker 2: with this holiday that in theory was not for him,
Speaker 2: and yet he made it for him.
Speaker 1: Now you've mentioned the the industry creatives who you've interviewed
Speaker 1: for the book and so on, which, yeah, I'm really
Speaker 1: quite pleased about because you know, we all know JJ
Speaker 1: Abrams is a Twilight Zone five and then we might
Speaker 1: get a SoundBite here and there, but I've always wanted
Speaker 1: to hear him and other people really get into that. Now.
Speaker 1: I remember speaking to Joseph Doherty when his book was
Speaker 1: coming out, Yeah, the TV writer, And what kind of
Speaker 1: struck me was that he just loved talking about rod Sailing.
Speaker 1: You know, there was a joyous kind of geeky enthusiasm
Speaker 1: when we spoke that It wasn't it almost wasn't really
Speaker 1: about the book anymore. I mean, was that common with
Speaker 1: the people that you spoke to, all these industry creatives.
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I mean it's the thing is you find if
Speaker 2: you do, if you do this job that I have
Speaker 2: for as long as I have, is sometimes it's really
Speaker 2: hard to get people to open up about their own work.
Speaker 2: They can be guarded in different ways either because they
Speaker 2: like David Chase wants the Sopranos to speak for itself.
Speaker 2: It's always like pulling teeth to get him to talk
Speaker 2: about theme or subtext or anything like that, you know.
Speaker 2: And then there's others who just for for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: don't really want to delve into what was motivating them
Speaker 2: to do this. But if you get them talking about
Speaker 2: something else that they love, they will not stop, you know.
Speaker 2: You know, giermal Do Toro, like we talked for an hour.
Speaker 2: We could have talked for like five hours, except he's
Speaker 2: ghirmal Do Toro and his other stuff going on. But
Speaker 2: like he just you know, it's sort of like if
Speaker 2: you watch a Rod Serling interview and he opens his
Speaker 2: mouth and a monologue spills out, you know, just improvised.
Speaker 2: That's what it was like talking to these people. They
Speaker 2: had so many thoughts built up and so much passion
Speaker 2: for it. I interviewed Pamela Adlon, who is an actress
Speaker 2: and a writer and director. You might know her best.
Speaker 2: She's the voice of Bobby Hill from King of the Hill,
Speaker 2: and she, you know, she talked about a lot of things,
Speaker 2: including the fact that one of her daughters is named
Speaker 2: Rocky Valentine, because that's how obsessed she was with the
Speaker 2: Twilight Zone. And you just you get a lot of that.
Speaker 2: There's so much warmth and enthusiasm for this work and
Speaker 2: the influence it had on them, sometimes as people, sometimes
Speaker 2: as creators, sometimes.
Speaker 1: As both we as well as that. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I was really impressed with and quite delighted
Speaker 1: by is how much you immersed yourself into the sailing
Speaker 1: fan community, going to Sailing Fest, speaking to those people.
Speaker 1: So why do you think it was important to do that?
Speaker 2: Because I wanted to get a sense of what people
Speaker 2: why everybody loves the show, not just the famous people,
Speaker 2: because obviously there's millions upon millions who have watched this
Speaker 2: show over the sixty seven years since it debuted. And
Speaker 2: I don't want to just hear from Steven Spielberg. I
Speaker 2: don't want to just hear from Ryan Johnson. I want
Speaker 2: to hear from the people whose lives it's affected, and
Speaker 2: I want to get their take on it. And it
Speaker 2: was I got to go to serling Fest in twenty
Speaker 2: four and twenty five. I don't think I'm going to
Speaker 2: unfortunately be able to be there at this summer's one.
Speaker 2: And love to everybody who's going to be there, who
Speaker 2: I got to meet, and many of them were quoted
Speaker 2: in the book, but it was I remember remember that
Speaker 2: first one especially, I went to like the ink wasn't
Speaker 2: even dry on the contract for me to write the book,
Speaker 2: So all I had done at that point was I
Speaker 2: had rebinged the Twilight Zone, you know, some episodes, seeing
Speaker 2: again many for the first time, and everyone around me,
Speaker 2: yourself included, could kind of tell I didn't know what
Speaker 2: I was talking about then, but they were really nice
Speaker 2: about it. It was really like, it wasn't gatekeepery. It
Speaker 2: wasn't you know, how dare you be the person to
Speaker 2: come in here and do this. It was we really
Speaker 2: love twilight Zone. We want you to love twilight Zone too,
Speaker 2: and if you're going to go out there and you're
Speaker 2: going to kind of spread the word, that's awesome. And
Speaker 2: I felt incredibly welcomed by everybody I got to meet,
Speaker 2: who had really insightful things. I could have just filled
Speaker 2: a book with, you know, their thoughts on the show,
Speaker 2: and it would have been great, and there's still a
Speaker 2: fair amount of that in there. But it was just
Speaker 2: it was so nice to be around these people and
Speaker 2: to see the passion and to see people engaged not
Speaker 2: just in talking about Twilight Zone, but you know, when
Speaker 2: you did, you're no Christmas this year reading or that
Speaker 2: you know they would screen an episode of The Loner
Speaker 2: or do any of the things that they did, Like
Speaker 2: it's people know and best for the Twilight Zone. But
Speaker 2: there's so much there, and these people were willing and
Speaker 2: excited to engage with.
Speaker 1: All of it, and I think a lot of them
Speaker 1: And this is one of the things that delighted me most.
Speaker 1: Although I haven't read the COVID to COVI yet, I
Speaker 1: did kind of skim through the book. There's names in
Speaker 1: there that I recognize, you know, from people who listen
Speaker 1: to this show and so on, and it was just
Speaker 1: it was just so lovely and I really appreciate you
Speaker 1: doing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember I was the very first day I
Speaker 2: was there, the Friday of the twenty four fest. I'm
Speaker 2: wandering in the merch room and I'm I'm you wouldn't
Speaker 2: think it to look at me or to hear me
Speaker 2: speaking really loudly in my microphone. Right now, I'm kind
Speaker 2: of a shy person and so approaching strangers to like
Speaker 2: say hi, I'm so and so please talk to me.
Speaker 2: That's kind of a personal hell. And I'm just in
Speaker 2: the merch room and I see this guy walking around
Speaker 2: and I make myself off go up to him and
Speaker 2: say hi, and he says, you know, hi, I'm Andy Valentine.
Speaker 2: Nice to meet you. And Andy Yef. You know Andy.
Speaker 2: Andy basically became my tour guide into Serling fandom, and
Speaker 2: I just hung with him and his friends for several days,
Speaker 2: got so many great stories, so much like color that
Speaker 2: winds up being in there, Harold Clark, you know, everybody
Speaker 2: else I got to meet as a result of that.
Speaker 2: It was really just a joy. And everyone was so
Speaker 2: helpful and so nice, and the board was wonderful, Like
Speaker 2: it was really, I really felt lucky to have as
Speaker 2: many people open themselves up to me in a way
Speaker 2: that they did not have to. And I'm eternally grateful
Speaker 2: to everyone for that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so slight change of direction. Bough.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen, you wrote a book called TV. You
Speaker 1: co wrote TV.
Speaker 2: The book, Yes, yeh.
Speaker 1: And it's it sets out to do a definitive ranking
Speaker 1: of the greatest television shows of all time. Now we
Speaker 1: all have a good list, because it's a great inspiration
Speaker 1: for conversation, and I think disagreeing with them is as
Speaker 1: much the point as agreeing with them, you know, Yes,
Speaker 1: it's just there to kind of get people talking and stuff.
Speaker 1: Can you remember what position the Twilight Zone got.
Speaker 2: I think it's maybe eleven, maybe thirteenth. I would have
Speaker 2: to check it again. We're going back ten years, and
Speaker 2: I will confess again this was from before I was
Speaker 2: as steeped in the show as I am now. I
Speaker 2: co wrote it with a longtime friend of mine who
Speaker 2: I worked with at the star Letgerd named Matt's Dollar Sites.
Speaker 2: Matt was always mister twilight Zone, and so I think
Speaker 2: that was one of those where he was pushing it
Speaker 2: as far up the hill as he could get it,
Speaker 2: and I was saying, okay, sure, sure, that's fine. I
Speaker 2: just look, I know these other shows more so they
Speaker 2: wound up a little bit higher. Yeah, having seen it now,
Speaker 2: I think that's eleven or thirteen or whatever it is
Speaker 2: is too low.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, it's still pretty respectable, thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, out of all the shows that had been
Speaker 2: made from say, nineteen forty nine to twenty sixteen, that's good.
Speaker 2: But I think it's better, and certainly in terms of influence, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's one of like the three or four most influential
Speaker 2: things ever on TV. It's that it's I love Lucy
Speaker 2: and it's the Sopranos.
Speaker 1: Sure, sure, Okay. Now, I've asked this about of a
Speaker 1: lot of people on the show, and I would really
Speaker 1: love to get your take on it as a TV
Speaker 1: critic who's been in the business for so long. But
Speaker 1: people have tried, depending on your opinion, maybe they've failed,
Speaker 1: maybe they've succeeded, but people have tried to bring the
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone back. Do you feel that we can bring
Speaker 1: the twilight Zone back and have it be called twilight
Speaker 1: Zone and have it be successful and beloved, or do
Speaker 1: you think it is Rod sailing back in the day
Speaker 1: and that is what the twilight Zone is.
Speaker 2: It's really hard, and I think there's you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't watch a ton of the reboots for this just
Speaker 2: because it was Rod didn't write them, so it was
Speaker 2: ultimately beside the point. I talked to people who worked
Speaker 2: on all of them, and there's you know, there's some
Speaker 2: episodes I watched their site in there there's some good stuff.
Speaker 2: I remember liking eighties Twilight Zone when I was younger.
Speaker 2: There's some good upn episodes. There's a few of the
Speaker 2: Jordan Peele version I think are good, but it's never
Speaker 2: quite twilight Zone. Like the best of the eighties episodes
Speaker 2: could have been from all lots of different anthologies. They
Speaker 2: never necessarily felt like twilight Zone to me. Whenever any
Speaker 2: of them would remake an episode, it never worked I did.
Speaker 2: I mean, I liked the It's Still a Good Life
Speaker 2: sequel that the upn version did with an adult Bill movie.
Speaker 2: It's just hard, and I think Bill said to me
Speaker 2: something like, I think that they should if they try again,
Speaker 2: it should be called Tales from the twilight Zone or
Speaker 2: some other like. It still incorporates the title, but it
Speaker 2: makes it clear that this is not the Serling thing.
Speaker 2: But it's hard. I mean, Rod was special. He had
Speaker 2: an insight into the human condition that he was then
Speaker 2: able to marry with all of the genre elements that
Speaker 2: very few writers have. You know, he would be the
Speaker 2: first to tell you other people are better sci fi
Speaker 2: writers than him, other people were better fantasy writers than him.
Speaker 2: But what he was able to do in taking like
Speaker 2: those tropes and infusing humanity and infusing emotion and infusing
Speaker 2: philosophy into that very few people have ever been able
Speaker 2: to do it, and certainly not as well as him.
Speaker 2: And if you don't have that I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think Charlie Brooker has it right. The best twilight
Speaker 2: Zone reboot is Black Mirror, because one it's not called
Speaker 2: twilight Zone, and two it is doing what Twilight Zone
Speaker 2: did in the sense that it's about the problems we're
Speaker 2: dealing with now. And Charlie even said, like, if Rod
Speaker 2: was alive today and he was making twilight Zone now,
Speaker 2: it would be about phones, and it would be about
Speaker 2: loss of privacy and AI and all the things. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's a couple of AI episodes on the original show
Speaker 2: because Rod was way ahead of his time there. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's sort of a lot of these other reboo,
Speaker 2: which do have their merits, are trying to sort of
Speaker 2: be this old thing and this new thing at once,
Speaker 2: and I don't think that quite works.
Speaker 1: So, Alan, when's the book out? Where can people pre
Speaker 1: order it?
Speaker 2: The book is out right. The book is coming out
Speaker 2: rather on October thirteenth in the States. It will be
Speaker 2: out in many other countries around then. I can't necessarily
Speaker 2: speak to exactly when you can pre order it now.
Speaker 2: There are links if you follow me anywhere on social media,
Speaker 2: If you go to Alan Sepinwall dot com, if you
Speaker 2: go to what's Alan watching dot com, it's easy to find.
Speaker 2: The full title is Serling a Journey into the Twilight
Speaker 2: Zone with TV's first Visionary. But I have a very
Speaker 2: unique name, so if you literally google Serling and Sepenwall,
Speaker 2: you're gonna find it.
Speaker 1: Alan. I mean, it goes without saying I wish you
Speaker 1: all the best with the book, but I really want
Speaker 1: to thank you for, I guess engaging with me in
Speaker 1: the process. I really appreciated that. I thought that was wonderful,
Speaker 1: and I think what really stands out is, you know,
Speaker 1: not just the care you've taken to tell road Sealing
Speaker 1: story properly, but the way you've engaged so generously with
Speaker 1: the fine community when you've been on that journey. I
Speaker 1: think it means a great deal to all of us,
Speaker 1: and we thank you so thank you so much. Challenge,
Speaker 1: I mean, I.
Speaker 2: Got to thank you. Tom, Like the quotes of yours
Speaker 2: that are in the book are really insightful, and often,
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes in the book, I'm like choosing between
Speaker 2: five different people who said the same thing. Everything you
Speaker 2: said nobody else said, so it was like, Okay, if
Speaker 2: I want to make this point in the book, Tom
Speaker 2: is going to make it because he's the only one
Speaker 2: who thought of this. Like, your insight into his work,
Speaker 2: which should be great given the amount of time you've
Speaker 2: spent studying it all these years, is astounding. And I
Speaker 2: thank you. You were one of the people I met
Speaker 2: that first time, Like I thank you for not looking
Speaker 2: at me like something that had scraped against the bottom
Speaker 2: of your shoe and saying, hey, you know, welcome, let's
Speaker 2: talk and it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Tom Well, thank you so much for joining me. Alan.
Speaker 1: I can't wait for part two of this conversation.
Speaker 2: I will be here whenever you ask