Unmade Scripts from Twilight Zone Creator Rod Serling May Finally See Light of Day: Details

There's no denying the fact that Rod Serling was one prolific screenwriter. Out of the 156 episodes produced for the original iteration of The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY), Serling wrote 92 of them.

And even when the acclaimed anthology series officially came to an end in 1964, the man didn't rest on his laurels and take an early retirement, but continued to work like an absolute machine, creating two other television projects — The Loner and Night Gallery — and penning cinematic classics like Seven Days in May and Planet of the Apes. To quote a famous Hamilton lyric, "How do you write like you're running out of time?" Well, he kind of was. A lifelong smoker, who could go through several packs of cigarettes a day, Serling passed away before his time at the age of 50 on June 28, 1975 following complications from open heart surgery.

Two years after his death, an ambitious 22-year-old UCLA graduate looking to break into the television business set out to write the definitive history of Serling's magnum opus. That kid's name was Marc Scott Zicree and the book he'd end up publishing was The Twilight Zone Companion (now on its third edition). "I wanted to be a writer-producer in TV and there were no classes on that," he tells SYFY WIRE. "So I thought, ‘If I write the book I want to read and learn what I want to learn, that’ll solve the problem.’ The three shows that made me want to be a writer were Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits."

Unproduced Rod Serling Twilight Zone scripts may finally get made into new series, Rod Serling's After Twilight

Rod Serling working at his Westport, Connecticut home in 1956. Photo: CBS via Getty Images

With glowing recommendations from Twilight Zone collaborators like producer Buck Houghton and writer George Clayton Johnson, Zicree gained unprecedented access to the Serling estate, courtesy of Rod's widow, Carol (she died in 2020 at the age of 90). "[His family] trusted me and they didn't have to do that. But no, instead, they took me into their home and into their hearts, and were very kind and very helpful," he adds. "For the next five years, I was crawling through Rod Serling’s attic and going through his scrap books and his files. I actually found a video of him teaching a class where he would bring a 16mm print of a Twilight Zone episode, screen it, and then talk about it. This was never intended to be aired, so Rod was 100 percent candid and honest. That was invaluable."

In addition, Zicree discovered a treasure trove of Dictabelt recordings, in which Serling outlined ideas for scripts that were never produced. After all these years, they might finally see the light of day in a brand-new series called Rod Serling's After Twilight, the author reveals. "We would arrange to have Rod narrate it from those recordings that have never been aired. We’ll see how that goes."

The project would also give Zicree a chance to finally realize a scrapped teleplay he himself wrote for the 1980s revival of Twilight Zone. Entitled "Knife Through the Veil," the episode tells the story of a woman who travels to the afterlife to seek vengeance against a man who killed her husband and child in a home invasion before dying in a car crash (the synopsis comes via The Twilight Zone Podcast). Douglas Heyes — who helmed such TZ classics as "Eye of the Beholder" and "The Howling Man" — was on board to direct before CBS pulled the plug a week from prep. "They thought it was too hard-edged for their little network," Zicree notes. "Now, of course, it would be nothing."

Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!