The Twilight Zone's Original Pilot Script Was Thrown Out for Being Too Dark
"The Happy Place" was not making TV executives happy, so Rod Serling came up with something else.
While The Twilight Zone has plenty of memorable twists and disturbing premises, creator Rod Serling’s original idea for the iconic anthology series’ first official episode was too grim for the network executives, forcing Serling to scrap the script and come up with a new idea for the pilot. The twist? Serling eventually agreed that his first attempt would indeed have been too dark to make the series a success.
The Twilight Zone, which airs regularly on SYFY, debuted on October 2, 1959, with the episode “Where Is Everybody,” which followed a man as he slowly went insane wandering through an abandoned town. (Or is he? The twist of this episode was that he was actually in a sensory deprivation chamber in preparation for a possible Moon landing.) “Where Is Everybody” was the first official episode of The Twilight Zone, but there had been a spiritual pilot a year earlier when the Serling-penned sci-fi story “The Time Element” aired on the CBS anthology series Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.
That episode — which was about a man who finds himself back in time in Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Japanese attack, unable to convince anybody to heed his warnings — was a success, establishing the general shape future Twilight Zone episodes would take and giving CBS executives the confidence they needed to give Serling his own anthology series. He just needed to write a pilot.
The Twilight Zone's original pilot, explained
Serling’s first stab at a pilot for what would become The Twilight Zone was a story called “The Happy Place.” The premise was a dystopian society where people over the age of 60 were sent off to “The Happy Place” — in reality, an extermination camp.
As a New York Times article recounts, CBS Television program director William Self rejected the episode for being too dark. Serling was none too happy about the rejection, though he was able to turn around the script for “Where Is Everybody” in its place. “Where Is Everybody” is dark, but not that dark, and it doesn’t have as outlandish a sci-fi premise as some of the later episodes of The Twilight Zone. In other words, it was a perfect entry point for TV audiences — and wary network executives and advertisers.
In an audio commentary released in 2004, Self said that Serling eventually admitted that ditching “The Happy Place” was the correct call.
“Rod said, ‘You know something, you were right,’” Self recalled. “‘We never could have sold that other show to an advertiser.’”
The script for "The Happy Place" exists in archives and has been performed as a live reading at least once, but it was never made into an episode of The Twilight Zone, even once the series had become an established hit.
Perhaps it was just ahead of its time. Sci-fi fans will likely think of Logan’s Run, the cult classic 1976 sci-fi movie adaptation of a 1967 book, where people in a dystopian society are ritually killed when they turn 30. Or perhaps 1973’s Soylent Green, itself based on a 1966 novel called Make Room! Make Room! That dystopian society kills its elderly and turns their bodies into the titular food.
But, for 1959, at least, killing off sixtysomethings was a bit too much to launch a TV show.
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
