The Twilight Zone Review

The genre framing was a tactic. Serling had spent years fighting sponsors over dramas about racism and mob violence, discovered that the same arguments passed unchallenged when the setting was Mars, and built a series out of the loophole. The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street is a suburban street tearing itself apart in twenty minutes and remains the cleanest statement of the show's thesis. Time Enough at Last, Eye of the Beholder and The Invaders each build to a reversal so efficiently constructed that they entered the language.

The writing bench is the reason it holds, with Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont supplying a large share of the best hours and Serling's own scripts carrying the moral weight. The direction is more ambitious than the budgets suggest, with high contrast photography and expressionist staging doing the work of effects that did not yet exist. The hour long fourth season is a clear dip and a number of episodes are simply thin. The peak of it defined a format and has never been surpassed.