The Twilight Zone is a show that almost everyone has heard of, and for good reason, it remains a stone cold classic and one that still holds up today despite first airing over sixty years ago. A year or so back I picked up the complete collection on Blu-ray and after getting my dad the complete box set on DVD for Christmas I have entered into some sort of race with him. This show really is the Black Mirror of its time, while it could be accused of being quantity over quality, the good to great episodes, at least in season 1 far outweigh the bad ones (of which there are a fair few).
Season 1 is made up of a beefy 36 episodes, each one features an intro and an outro voiced by series creator Rod Serling, who also wrote a bunch of the episodes. The show is in an anthology format, each episode self contained featuring unique characters and settings. The thread holding them all together is that the protagonist of each episode has unknowingly strayed into the 'twilight zone', a place where the normal rules of the world no longer apply. Usually this is used to nightmarish effect but not always. There are a bunch of episodes that are sweet and feel good, and a less successful bunch of episodes that are played for comedic effect. The settings vary and are not always restricted to the (at the time) modern day of the 1950's, quite a few are sci-fi in nature, some are Westerns (Mr. Denton on Doomsday and Execution) while others take place during wartime (Judgement Night, The Last Flight and The Purple Testament). Nearly all of the episodes have some type of morality tale they are imparting, and most end with a usually cruel final twist that often manages to elicit a chill.
Similar to Black Mirror fears of the time are used in some of the stories, most notably fear of atomic war which pops up in a bunch of the episodes, such as Time Enough at Last (a man finds he has all the time in the world to do his favourite pastime of reading when he becomes the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust) and Third from the Sun (a group of people plan to pilot a spaceship off their planet due to an impending nuclear war).
There are also the more common worries that people exhibit that resonate today, such as people who yearn for the simpler times of the past (The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine, Walking Distance, A Stop at Willoughby).
