‘For Your Approval’ Pbs Program Sheds More Than Twilight On TV Great Rod Serling

When “The Twilight Zone” premiered in October 1959, it gave viewers just what they needed: a weekly side trip off the beaten paths of conventional TV and conventional thinking.

The tour guide, of course, was an intense little man always submitting this for our approval and that for our approval. The viewers approved, and still do: Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” lives in perpetuity, rerun currently on the SciFi Channel but, more to the point, forever in our psyches (dee-dee-dee-dah, dee-dee-dee-dah …).

To honor the man who masterminded, piloted and hosted “Twilight Zone,” not to mention writing 92 of its 156 episodes, would be enough for any documentary.

But the delightful “Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval,” airing Wednesday night on PBS, does more.

This latest in the “American Masters” series delves into a separate body of work that couldn’t possibly be familiar to Serling’s younger fans: his many teleplays that helped gild the so-called Golden Age of Television.

That, of course, was the glorious, blink-and-it-was-gone era in which original theater was performed every week on such series as “Studio One” and “Playhouse 90.”

Serling’s most celebrated efforts were the plays “Patterns” (1955) and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1956), but he wrote scores of others. They were staged live, mostly from New York studios, with such actors as Art Carney, Richard Kiley, Jack Klugman, Leslie Nielsen and a very young Robert Redford.

But here is the hard part for today’s rerun-addled viewers to wrap their minds around: With the final fadeout, each program ceased to exist, at least in the form in which its audience had witnessed it.

This was live TV all right, its life truly finite.

And that’s quite a different thing than the present-day gimmickry of live TV, where a show like “Saturday Night Live” opts for live-ness, turning it into a stunt, then captures the result on videotape and, forever afterward, feeds it back to viewers as reruns and home videos.

“Submitted For Your Approval” ably recalls for us a time before videotape and, artfully drawing on the fuzzy filmed kinescopes that remain the era’s best evidence, rekindles for us a bit of the heat those long-ago audiences got from their television screens.

Serling is an ideal way to frame this larger history. As the documentary notes, his career paralleled the course of early network TV.

Known as television’s angry young man in 1950s Manhattan, he poured into his scripts his impassioned feelings about prejudice, corporate ruthlessness, the Holocaust and, in the language of the day, the shame of “selling out.”

To get his scripts on the air intact, he was in constant battle with timid sponsors and wary networks.

Meanwhile, more and more TV - and much different TV, at that was emanating from Hollywood. These shows were mostly sitcoms and Westerns which, produced on film, had the potential to earn money from reruns till kingdom come.

Declaring TV’s “live era” dead, Serling left New York for the West Coast. But if, on arriving, he gave in to the Hollywood lifestyle a bit too much, he still burned with a social conscience, and he was able to sneak those concerns onto the airwaves in the quirky little sci-fi series he cooked up.

“The Twilight Zone” would be on the CBS schedule for five ground-breaking seasons. But then the story - Serling’s and TV’s alike takes a bitter turn.

Post-“Twilight,” Rod Serling would fall prey to television’s voracious commercialism as well as his own creative burnout and hunger for celebrity. Though consumed, as always, with his own seriousness of purpose, he nonetheless made beer commercials and appearances on game shows.

In the end, Serling lost out, sold out, then embarked for good into - well, you know where.

“Submitted For Your Approval” opens with a sly and dead-on homage to “The Twilight Zone” as, in crisp black-and-white, we see a patient in cardiac crisis surrounded by a surgical team.

“This is Tuesday, June 28, 1975,” a narrator intones, “and thanks to a million cigarettes and a heart with its own flair for the dramatic, Mr. Serling is on the cutting edge of infinity.”

The program that follows should gain every viewer’s approval for how it breathes new life into a man, his work and his times.

But “Submitted For Your Approval” is only in keeping with the excellence of “American Masters,” which observes its 10th anniversary with this, its 65th program - and the directoral debut of Susan Lacy, beginning her second decade as “American Masters”’ executive producer.

Her mission, she says, is more than producing a TV series.

“We’re trying to compile a library of 20th-century cultural history,” Lacy says. “When you’re doing these programs for posterity, you put a lot of extra effort into them.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval” airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KSPS-Channel 7 and at 8 p.m. on KCDT-Channel and 26 KUID-Channel 12.