Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The Five Best "Twilight Zone" Episodes

Trying to sift through all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone and pick just the five best episodes is rather daunting. Plus, it opens one up to mass criticism because TZ fans are passionate about their favorite episodes. But this is the start of our annual "Five Best" month at the Cafe and we're ready to take the heat. Here are our picks for TZ's five best episodes (and some honorable mentions):

Billy Mumy as Anthony.
1. It's a Good Life - The residents of a small town live in fear of a young boy (Billy Mumy) with limitless powers who controls their day-to-day existence. Disagree with Anthony and you're liable to find yourself in "the cornfield" (a place you don't want to be!). Disturbing and even downbeat at its conclusion, It's a Good Life is the most chilling TZ episode--and, in my opinion, the best one. In Twilight Zone: The Movie, Joe Dante ruins the story with a happy ending.

John Carradine as Brother Jerome.
2. The Howling Man - While touring a post-World War I Europe, a young man named David seeks shelter from rural monks during a storm. At first, the monks refuse admittance but they relent when David passes out. Later that night, David hears a strange howling and finds an imprisoned man who claims the monks are holding him against his will. This atmospheric, eerie tale written by Charles Beaumont is a rare TZ excursion into straight horror. It works extremely well, right down to the hand on the door knob in the epilogue.

3. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - A man recently recovered from a nervous breakdown looks out the window of his airplane seat and sees a gremlin trying to sabotage the wing. No one believes him, of course. William Shatner's tendency to overact works to his advantage in this clever tale of a man who must convince himself of his own sanity and then risk his future in order save his fellow passengers. This one was also adapted for Twilight Zone: The Movie with John Lithgow shining in the Shatner role.

One of the Kanamits (on
the right, that is).
4. To Serve Man - A witty story that builds up to the best punchline of any TZ episode. To say anymore would spoil it for viewers who haven't seen it.

5. Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up - Two troopers tracks what may be an alien to a snowbound diner inhabited a by a soda jerk, a bus driver, and his passengers. The catch is that six passengers got off the bus, but now there are seven. Which one is an alien? A great example of one of the lighthearted episodes, complete with a neat twist, this one always draws me in if I happen on it during one of those TZ marathons.

Honorable mentions:  Five Characters in Search of an Exit (the soldier, the ballerina, etc.); The Invaders (Agnes Moorehead protects her home); Time Enough to Last (Burgess Meredith and his spectacles); Night of the Meek (Santa Claus); The Eye of the Beholder (a young woman undergoes plastic surgery); In His Image (the best of the hour-long episodes).


30 comments:

  1. Well, you got the two that I wait for every marathon, "The Howling Man" and "To Serve Man," but I want to put a plug in for "The Obsolete Man," which feels like 1984 if made by George Romero. Actually I love all of the Burgess Meredith episodes including the classic you mention and "Printer's Devil," where he reminds me so much of Walter Huston's Mr. Scratch in "The Devil and Daniel Webster."

    Gosh, they're all so good, my only complaint is having seen them too many times! I overslept for many a high school class back in the 80's when the only way I could see these was staying up all night to catch them at 3 am on WPIX-11. Good education nonetheless!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great picks! My favorite it "Time Enough At Last" (Burgess Meredith) and "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" (William Shatner). I love lists almost as much as I love The Twilight Zone!

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Twilight Zone is perhaps the best written show ever. Rod Serling's genius cannot be denied. My favs are "To Serve Man, "Time Enough at Last", "Room 22 ("Room for one more honey!") "After Hours" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", "One for the Angels." TZ is the definition of Classic TV!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've never been able to understand why folks rank "To Serve Man" so highly in the TZ pantheon. It's a memorable episode, to be sure, but it violates the cardinal rule of storytelling but telegraphing its "punchline" at the very beginning.

    And leaving off "Walking Distance"? Shame on ya.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A tough task indeed. So many great episodes. I love some of your honorable mentions more than your top 5, but nicely done.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rick, this was a very good thing you did! No stinkin' cornfield for me, please. Love this list! "The Howling Man" is so clever and frightening because things are definitely not what they seem. I was thrilled when "Twilight Zone: The Movie" did a great job with "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" especially because of John Lithgow. "The Eye of the Beholder" made for a fascinating discussion in a comparative literature class in college. Great post, and it's fun to see the additions from everyone, too.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "To Serve Man" has always been my favorite; as you note, it has the greatest punchline. Another favorite is "The Hitchhiker" with Inger Stevens, a quietly creepy little gem about an odd little man she gives a ride to (could it have influenced "Carnival of Souls"?). And then there's "The Dummy," with Cliff Robertson, which scared me as a kid (and still does, actually).

    ReplyDelete
  8. Rick, you set yourself quite a task to choose just five episodes. I tried to do this a few years ago--and the list grew to ten, then fifteen, then twenty! I did notice that the bulk of the ones I liked came from the first couple of seasons. Some of these are quite elaborately filmed (for TV) with many outdoor locations, and directed by fairly well-known movie directors from the studio days.

    In my top five would certainly be "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "Walking Distance" (all the better for its untypical non-twist ending), "Perchance to Dream" with Richard Conte (one of the most niftily constructed plots of all), "The Hitchhiker," and "After Hours" with Anne Francis and, in a cameo, the great Franklin Pangborn as--what else?--a department store floor walker. As I said, the list could easily grow, but those are the first five that come to mind. By the way, isn't that alien in "To Serve Man" Richard Kiel, the villain with the metal teeth in "The Spy Who Loved Me"?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Yep, that's Kiel in "To Serve Man". He's also terrific in a comic role in SO FINE (1981).

    My top five: "Living Doll" with Telly Savalas, "Long Live Walter Jameson" with Kevin McCarthy (talk about a memorable ending), "Deaths-Head Revisited" with Oscar Beregi, "The Big Tall Wish" with Ivan Dixon, and "The After Hours" with Anne Francis.

    Just missing: the hour-long "Miniature" with Robert Duvall.

    Honorable mentions would be numerous, but "The Hunt" with Arthur Hunnicutt is a personal favorite (will be reviewing it at my blog soon) and two other Earl Hamner efforts that I think are underrated are "Jess-Belle" and "Ring-a-Ding Girl".

    ReplyDelete
  10. Good choices, Rick. I'll go along with them primarily because I don't remember most of the episodes so am willing to be led by the hand - as it were.

    I do remember a few of the ones you picked and that's good enough for me. Your first choice was an especially chilling one. I don't know that I liked it much, but I was so fascinated I couldn't turn it off.

    Are you going to pick Five Best Outer Limits episodes?

    ReplyDelete
  11. R.D.:

    That's James Millhollin as the floorwalker in "The After Hours"...not Pangborn. (Franklin died in 1958.)

    And nice call on "Perchance to Dream," one of my all-time favorite Zones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ivan, I could have sworn that was Franklin Pangborn. The resemblance was remarkable. I don't feel so bad after checking on IMDb, though, which notes the resemblance between the two! "Perchance to Dream" was the first episode I ever saw. I'd heard about the show but didn't know what to expect. I've seen it a couple of times since in the marathons and was amazed all over again at its clever, eerie plot.

      Delete
  12. Great topic for five favs. I could watch most every episode over and over. Echoing some other comments, I too love "The Hunt," about the man and his coon hound. I'd also have to list "Two", with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery if only for the cast, and "Miniature" with Robert Duvall for both cast and story, and just a favorite, "A Stop at Willoughby," though I might be tempted to put in a train stop in the early 60s, with the dysfunctional, rat-race workplace of today as the starting point. And "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" is a favorite also

    ReplyDelete
  13. Wow, great additions from everyone! For an anthology show, the quality of the scripts was amazing thanks to Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson (that trio accounted for most of the episodes). For any TZ fan, I heartily recommend THE TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION by Marc Scott Zicree--it may be the best reference book written about a single TV series. Ronda and Christian, my 9th grade American lit class read the teleplay for "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and studied it. I didn't see the episode until years later. An interesting episode no one has mentioned is "Spur of the Moment" with Diana Hyland; while not totally satisfying, parts of it are brilliant. Finally (for Toto), in the write-up for "It's a Good Life" in THE TZ COMPANION, producer Buck Houghton recalls that, after filming that episode, "when somebody would goof, people would say, 'Well, that's a good thing you did.'"

    ReplyDelete
  14. Great. You've got all the ones, which isn't many, I remember. The first episode I ever saw was "To Serve Man". I'm going to try and track down all the episodes and burn them to disc.

    I suppose if I really wanted stir up a hornets nest I suggest pitting a TZ review against The Outer Limits.

    To bad they don't make shows likes this anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Nice choices, Rick! I would also like to include "Night Call" directed by the incomparable Jacques Tourneur. That one always freaked me out. Also, "Living Doll" (already mentioned by Hal).

    ReplyDelete
  16. Yvette and Tom, THE OUTER LIMITS is coming up next! Barry, Jacques was indeed incomparable (CURSE OF THE DEMON is a personal fave).

    ReplyDelete
  17. I love this show! Good job, but where's Walking Distance and Two? Oh well, it's just a nitpick. But your guys still did an amazing job.

    ReplyDelete
  18. When I first saw "Walking Distance" as a child it intrigued me and stood out in my memory among the series' many great episodes. Years later, when I watched my first "Twilight Zone" marathon and saw "Walking Distance" again - for the first time since that very first time - I felt eerily like Gig Young wandering back into his own childhood.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Your five choices get no argument from me. So many excellent episodes to choose form make creating such a list an unenviable task.

    However...I would like to mention a personal fave "Mr. Denton on Doomsday". I believe Col. Potter's line would not be out of place in that "It has the three things that make a movie great - horses, guns and horses." AND DAN DURYEA.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Hi. I was awarded the Leibster Blog award; in return, I'm awarding it to you. Check out my blog to get the rules.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Rick I would add The Invaders(remember I did a post on this) Time Enough At Last and Mr Dingle the Strong both with Burgess Meredith, The Monsters are due on Maple Street, and a tie between Where Is Everyone and Probe 7 - Over and Out.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Great list and - Oh my goodness! I KNEW you'd have "To Serve Man" here! I absolutely refuse to watch that one again, I tell ya! A few of my faves stand out: Burgess Meredith's Time Enough to Last (another shuddering moment for the bibliophile in me); Agnes Moorehead in The Invaders, and James Daly in The Stop at Willoughby. That Willoughby had one heckuva a twist! I just love this show!

    ReplyDelete
  23. Love this post! I agree with you completely about the Billy Mumy episode. There's another one I watch every time it's on, specifically to get creeped out: The New Exhibit with Martin Balsam. Takes place in a wax museum, and it scares me almost as much today as it did when I was a kid.

    ReplyDelete
  24. The Twilight Zone had the best twists, such a great show! Time Enough To Last is always the first episode that comes to mind but I also really like Third From the Sun and Long Distance Call. Great post.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Love the list, esp 'Will The Real Martians Please Stand Up'! Underrated episode.
    I made a list of some rare, lost Twilight Zone episodes. Wondering if anyone has seen any of these and how they stack up to the better known shows?

    http://www.smellslikeinfinitesadness.com/7-forgotten-twilight-zone-episodes/

    ReplyDelete
  26. TZ Favorites

    (1) Time Enough At Last
    (2) The Howling Man
    (3) Nightmare At 20,000 Feet
    (4) Death's Head Revisited
    (5) The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

    Honorable Mention: Judgment Night

    Love your pick of "To Serve Man"

    SGR

    ReplyDelete
  27. My favourite episode, and one that nobody else has mentioned, is "Nick of Time" starring William Shatner and features the spooky fortune-telling machine "The Mystic Seer".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A nice pick! It would likely make my Top 20 (so many good episodes to pick from).

      Delete
  28. Twilight Zone has too many great episodes to limit it to five.

    ReplyDelete