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What Does The Twilight Zone's First Episode Have in Common with Back to the Future?
Where have I seen that Courthouse Square before...?
There are many episodes of The Twilight Zone that are about time travel in one way or another. “Where Is Everybody?” the very first episode of the iconic anthology series (which airs regularly on SYFY), is not one of them. However, the series premiere still has a connection to one of the most iconic pieces of time travel fiction of all, well... time.
Turns out the idyllic but abandoned town in “Where Is Everybody?” is also the very same town where one Marty McFly tried to get his high school-aged parents to fall in love.
What's the connection between the first episode of The Twilight Zone and Back to the Future?
Yes, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, which aired on October 2, 1959, was filmed on the same set as the classic 1985 comedy Back to the Future (now streaming on Peacock). Both were shot on the Universal Studios backlot in Universal City, California, on a set called Courthouse Square. The set — intended to be a classic, charming American small town — predates The Twilight Zone by a decade. It was first constructed for the 1948 film noir An Act of Murder, but the pleasant genericness of the town meant it could easily be repurposed for any Universal production that needed that sort of setting.
In the years following its construction, movies like It Came From Outer Space and the TV show Leave It to Beaver were filmed on the set. After “Where Is Everybody?”, the Courthouse Square set would appear in notable titles like To Kill a Mockingbird, Bye Bye Birdie, The Incredible Hulk TV show, Knight Rider, and Gremlins before its most famous appearance as Hill Valley in Back to the Future. It’s still being used as a set to this day, recently appearing in the 2024 film MaXXXine — though in that case, it’s playing itself, as part of the horror movie takes place on the Universal backlot.
Featuring a courthouse, town square, and several little shops, the famed set is picture-perfect. “Where Is Everybody?” puts this to great use, dialing up the strangeness. The episode stars a man who finds himself in a town with no memory of who he is or how he got there. There are also no people in the town, and in his isolation, he gradually goes mad until the reveal: He isn’t actually in a town at all. He’s a potential astronaut undergoing a test in an isolation booth to determine what will happen to the human mind during the long, lonely flight to the Moon. He hallucinated everything.
Hill Valley in Back to the Future, meanwhile, is intended to be a very real place, albeit an idealized one. It’s where Marty McFly lives, and it’s where his parents lived in the ‘50s. Admittedly, the most iconic part of Hill Valley, the clocktower, is not present in “Where Is Everybody?” That bit of architecture was not part of the original Courthouse Square set and was added for Back to the Future.
Still, if you watch with a careful eye, you can see that poor Sergeant Mike Ferris is walking around the same town that Marty McFly would drive a DeLorean through decades later. (Or maybe four years before he walked through it, since part of Back to the Future is set in 1955, which is four years before the Twilight Zone premiered.)
Back to the Future is now streaming on Peacock. Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
