Yes, Virginia, there is a Twilight Zone Marathon. But it’s not on Syfy. It’s on Decades. If you don’t have Decades, stream along on Hulu or another service or watch on discs if you have them
July 4, 2020 Noon | Time Enough at Last A man who just wants time to read finds himself all alone with a library full of books after a nuclear war. Adapted from Lynn Venable’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #6 |
12:30 PM | The Hitchhiker A creepy hitchhiker follows a young woman (Inger Stevens) across the country. Adapted from Lucille Fletcher’s radio play. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #18 |
1:00 PM | Living Doll She’s Talky Tina, and she doesn’t think she likes you. Credited to Charles Beaumont, but actually written by Jerry Sohl. VIEWER’S CHOICE #9 |
1:30 PM | The Trade Ins An elderly couple struggles to afford a set of new, healthy bodies. |
2:00 PM | On Thursday We Leave For Home James Whitmore plays Captain William Benteen - who through willpower, discipline, and the ability to inspire hope - keeps a group of castaways alive on a harsh planet. When rescue finally comes, will Benteen be able to give up power? I’ve always found the ending heartbreaking." |
3:00 PM | The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street A parable of Cold War witch hunting. A mysterious object flies overhead, and a neighborhood loses all power. Then a select few regain and lose power. Suspicion grows that the flying object was an alien spaceship and that someone living on the street is an alien in disguise, preparing the way for an invasion. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #4 |
3:30 PM | To Serve Man Aliens promising Utopia leave behind a book which reveals their true motives. Based on a Damon Knight story and originally broadcast over 20 years before the first version of V. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #3 |
4:00 PM | Five Characters in Search of an Exit A soldier, a clown, a ballerina, a hobo, and a bag pipe player find themselves in a mysterious prison. Adapted from Marvin Petal’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #25 |
4:30 PM | A Stop at Willoughby Stressed out by work, a tyrannical boss, and an unsympathetic wife, a man finds a haven on the train ride home. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #5 |
5:00 PM | It’s a Good Life Think happy thoughts! Think happy thoughts! Think happy thoughts, or little Anthony will wish you into the cornfield. A town lives in fear of a child with incredible mind powers. Based on the story by Jerome Bixby. VIEWER’S CHOICE #20 |
5:30 PM | The Masks Greedy family members visit a dying old man during Mardi Gras. As a condition of inheriting his fortune, they must wear certain masks. VIEWER’S CHOICE #12 |
6:00 PM | The Obsolete Man Burgess Meredith is a librarian facing execution in a totalitarian society where books are banned. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #8 |
6:30 PM | The After Hours Mannequins!! Starring Anne Francis VIEWER’S CHOICE #35 |
7:00 PM | The New Exhibit Martin Balsam (the detective in Psycho) plays an obsessed wax museum worker who is determined to take of the museum’s exhibits after the museum closes. |
8:00 PM | Where is Everybody? The first episode. A man finds himself in a deserted town, but always there are tantalizing hints that he’s just missed finding somebody. |
8:30 PM | A Game of Pool When an ambitious and talented pool shark says he could beat a deceased legend regarded as the best pool player ever, he gets a chance to prove it. The stakes? His soul. Script: George Clayton Johnson VIEWER’S CHOICE #33 |
9:00 PM | The Shelter One man has the foresight to build a bomb shelter. His neighbors chuckle until a nuclear strike appears imminent. Script: Rod Serling |
9:30 PM | The Dummy One of two episodes about evil dummies who torment the ventriloquists who work with them. This one stars Cliff Robertson. Based on a story by Lee Polk Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #17 |
10:00 PM | The Odyssey of Flight 33 An airliner travels back and forth through time. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #10 |
10:30 PM | A Nice Place to Visit A deceased criminal gets almost everything he wants in the afterlife, but what did he do to deserve such good fortune? |
11:00 PM | Nick of Time A couple stop at a diner and are amused at first by a devil headed fortune telling machine on their table. Will they let the machine’s cryptic yet unnervingly accurate predictions run their lives? VIEWER’S CHOICE #24 |
11:30 PM | A Hundred Yards Over the Rim A nineteenth century pioneer finds the future while trying to save his son and guide his wagon train to safety. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #36 |
Midnight July 5, 2020 | Printer’s Devil Stars Burgess Meredith in a story about a newspaper publisher’s deal with the devil. There’s a scene of contemplated suicide that almost plays as a Satanic version of Clarence’s rescue of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. |
1:00 AM | Night Call An old woman receives a series of frightening phone calls. VIEWER’S CHOICE #26 |
1:30 AM | Night of the Meek Art Carney portrays a down and out department store Santa Claus who finds a miraculous bag. VIEWER’S CHOICE #23 |
2:00 AM | A Penny for Your Thoughts A coin lands on edge, and a man gains the power to read minds. Script: George Clayton Johnson VIEWER’S CHOICE #28 |
2:30 AM | The Changing of the Guard The ghosts of dead students return to help an elderly prep school teacher. |
3:00 AM | People Are Alike All Over After a crash landing on Mars, an astronaut discovers that people really are alike everywhere. |
3:30 AM | Person or Persons Unknown Suddenly, none of David Guerney’s friends, family, or co-workers knows who he is. Script credited to Charles Beaumont. |
4:00 AM | The Lonely A convict imprisoned alone on an asteroid gets an android in the form of a woman for companionship. |
4:30 AM | Two After an apocalyptic war, two soldiers, a man and a woman, from opposing armies meet. Starring Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery (Samantha from Bewitched.) Script: Montgomery Pittman |
5:00 AM | A World of His Own A writer brings women from his stories to life. Script: Richard Matheson |
5:30 AM | The Self Improvement of Salvador Ross Salvador Ross is an ambitious young man who gains the ability to take certain characteristics and abilities from people. |
6:00 AM | Long Distance Call One of the videotape episodes. A boy talks to his dead grandmother on his toy telephone. VIEWER’S CHOICE #32 |
6:30 AM | The Long Morrow Romance, space travel, suspended animation, and an O’Henry twist. |
7:00 AM | Death Ship Jack Klugman as a hard nosed spaceship captain who refuses to let himself or his crew accept what they saw in a crashed ship on a distant planet. |
8:00 AM | The Parallel An astronaut returns to Earth, but it’s not his Earth, it’s a parallel world. |
9:00 AM | The Invaders An old woman is tormented by tiny aliens. |
9:30 AM | Mirror Image A woman at a bus station begins to suspect she’s being tormented by a doppelganger - a double of herself. |
10:00 AM | Walking Distance One of TZ’s most highly regarded episodes. A stressed out business executive tries to return to his childhood hometown. Script: Rod Serling |
10:30 AM | The Howling Man A traveler seeks shelter in an isolated monastery where a group of apparent fanatics hold a prisoner. Script: Charles Beaumont. (Adapted from his own short story) VIEWER’S CHOICE #11 |
11:00 AM | The Silence A bet ends with an O’Henry twist. |
11:30 AM | The Chaser Obsessed with a beautiful woman who wants nothing to do with him, a man buys a love potion that makes her obsessed with him. Based on the story by John Collier. |
Noon | And When the Sky Was Opened Three astronauts return to earth. When one disappears, the only person on earth who remembers him is one of his shipmates. Based on the story “Disappearing Act” by Richard Matheson Script: Rod Serling |
12:30 PM | The Midnight Sun It’s the hottest day in history as the world drifts towards the sun. VIEWER’S CHOICE #13 |
1:00 PM | Nightmare at 20,000 Feet “There’s a man on the wing!” A passenger who’d only recently recovered from a nervous breakdown sees a gremlin sabotaging the airplane he’s on, only nobody else sees it or believes him. Script: Richard Matheson (Author of I Am Legend) Based on his own short story. VIEWER’S CHOICE #1 |
1:30 PM | Death’s Head Revisited A Nazi war criminal returns to the scene of his crimes. Script: Rod Serling |
2:00 PM | In His Image Suffering serious memory lapses and prone to murderous rages, Alan Talbot returns to his hometown and discovers things aren’t as they seem. |
3:00 PM | Shadow Play A man sentenced to death for murder tries to persuade people that he’s stuck in reoccurring dream and that they’re all just characters in it. |
3:30 PM | Third From the Sun Two families attempt to escape a world on the brink of nuclear war. Adapted from Richard Matheson’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #16 |
4:00 PM | Nothing in the Dark An old woman hides from Mr. Death. Starring Robert Redford. Script: George Clayton Johnson |
4:30 PM | What You Need A street peddler gives people things they need at the right moment. Adapted from Lewis Padgett’s (AKA Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore) story. Moore is known to Weird Tales aficionados for her Jirel of Joiry stories among others. Henry Kuttner was a prolific pulp writer as well, who did some post-Howard sword &sorcery stories. Script: Rod Serling |
5:00 PM | Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? Two state troopers find a crashed spaceship and track an alien to a diner where they find the diner’s counterman, a bus driver, and the bus’s passengers. Is someone in the diner really the alien in disguise? VIEWER’S CHOICE #2 |
5:30 PM | The Last Flight A World War I fighter pilot finds himself transported through time to a present day American Air Force base. (The present being 1960 when this episode came out.) Script: Richard Matheson based on his short story “Flight.” |
6:00 PM | The Eye of the Beholder A woman is in a hospital and her face is heavily bandaged after she undergoes plastic surgery in the hope of becoming beautiful. This episode sometimes appears with the title “Private World of Darkness.” Listen to the Leader’s speech on the television in the background in some of the scenes. Like “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” this episode also goes beyond a commentary on looks. It warns against too much conformity, a tendency which ran amok in 1950s and early 1960s America. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #7 |
6:30 PM | The Little People Two astronauts land on a planet to repair their ship. One discovers a civilization of tiny people and sets himself up as their god. VIEWER’S CHOICE #37 |
7:00 PM | He’s Alive Starring Dennis Hopper. Critics often disparage “He’s Alive” because the true identity of Peter Vollmer’s shadowy benefactor is so obvious. That misses the point which is about how easily people can be led to political fanaticism, hate, and scapegoating by demagogues who know how to hit the right chords. The content of Vollmer’s speeches are especially striking. Yes, Vollmer’s words reflected those spoken by many other demagogues before him, but listen closely and you’ll still hear alarming echoes in current political movements. The anti-immigrant spiel sounds all too much like what we’ve heard from the Tea Party in recent years, and the anti-banker rants sound all too much like the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Along with Jean Shepherd’s “Disarm the Toy Industry” lady form “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,” Vollmer is one of the best single character embodiments of the nuttiness of both the extreme left and the extreme right. |
8:00 PM | Long Live Walter Jameson A history teacher recounts historical events of long ago as if he had lived through them. |
8:30 PM | Queen of the Nile Has an actress found the secret of eternal youth? |
9:00 PM | Kick the Can Can the residents of an old age home find a little bit of magic and feel young again? VIEWER’S CHOICE #22 |
9:30 PM | Mr. Garrity and the Graves An Old West snake oil salesman offers to raise loved ones from the dead. |
10:00 PM | Twenty-Two A beautiful woman in a hospital keeps having nightmares about Room Twenty-two and a creepy nurse. “Room for one more.” |
10:30 PM | A Kind of Stopwatch A man gets a stopwatch that can stop time. VIEWER’S CHOICE #38 |
11:00 PM | A World of Difference Life’s a stage. A man suddenly finds himself in an alternate universe where he’s an actor and the life’s he’d been leading was the TV show he starred in. The show’s been canceled and the set will soon be torn down. Problem, the actor’s life is actually pretty miserable. Can he get back to his old life before it’s too late? |
11:30 PM | Number Twelve Looks Just Like You Based on Charles Beaumont’s story “The Beautiful People.” A futuristic society pressures people into medical treatments to make themselves physically perfect and beautiful. Although, commentators often note how this episode warns against society’s increasing over emphasis on appearance resulting in eating disorders, use of Botox, and plastic surgery - its warning against anti-intellectualism often gets overlooked. VIEWER’S CHOICE #29 |
Midnight July 6, 2020 | Valley of the Shadow A reporter stumbles across a small town whose wary inhabitants possess wondrous secrets that could change the world. Problem: The townspeople won’t let the reporter leave. How can he escape? This is an “hour long” episode. Script credited to Charles Beaumont |
1:00 AM | One for the Angels A street peddler makes a pitch to The Grim Reaper. Script: Rod Serling |
1:30 AM | The Old Man in the Cave A town has survived a nuclear holocaust and its aftermath thanks to a mysterious old man. |
2:00 AM | Ring-A-Ding Girl Premonitions prompt a Hollywood star to return to the small town where she grew up in an attempt to save it. |
2:30 AM | The Jeopardy Room A dissident seeks escape from a hotel room booby-trapped by Eastern Bloc agents. Starring Martin Landau |
3:00 AM | A Most Unusual Camera Thieves find a camera that takes pictures of the future. VIEWER’S CHOICE #31 |
3:30 AM | The Rip Van Winkle Caper Criminals pull off a heist and seek to escape by going into suspended animation. Script: Rod Serling |
4:00 AM | Little Girl Lost When a little girl enters a doorway to another dimension, her parents and a neighbor attempt to rescue her. I never thought much of this episode. The short story it was based on is better. Script: Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) based on his own short story. VIEWER’S CHOICE #34 |
4:30 AM | The Hunt An old man and his dog go hunting in Appalachia and find themselves someplace else entirely. Script: Earl Hamner, Jr., creator of The Waltons. |
5:00 AM | Stopover in a Quiet Town A couple find themselves in a deserted town where they hear a child’s laughter. VIEWER’S CHOICE #30 |
5:30 AM | Elegy Three astronauts land on an asteroid with an atmosphere. They find an idyllic, old-time, American small town where no one seems to notice them or even move except for - the caretaker. |
6:00 AM | Back There Stepping out of a Washington D.C. club, the Professor from Gilligan’s Isle travels through time to the eve of Lincoln’s assassination and tries to prevent the tragedy at Ford’s Theater. |
6:30 AM | I Shot an Arrow Into the Air A space ship crash lands, and the commander who tries to maintain order is pitted against a crew member who thinks survival means every man for himself. Based on an idea by Madelon Champion. Script: Rod Serling |
