OK, I just stumbled upon something I find truly incredible: cbs.com has some the Season 1 episodes of the Twilight Zone online on its website for free! All you need to do is go to cbs.com, and then click on videos, and then click on TV Classics, and bam!, there it is.

So I took this as a sign and decided to start this thread on a trial-run to see how it goes and whether anyone else is actually interested in watching and discussing these episodes.

For those who don't know anything about the Twilight Zone (television series), here is a brief synopsis from wikipedia:

These episodes from Season 1 are all approximately 25-30 minutes and in black and white. I figure that we can just go in the order of the episodes and spend a week or so in discussion of each one. (And anyone can lead discussion as long as it has been a full week after the previous episode was reviewed.)

So, kicking off the Twilight Zone watchalong thread (beginning on Friday, September 18) here is Season 1-Episode 1: Where is Everybody?

Feel free to start discussing once you have watched it.

Doesn't one of the channels run The Twlight Zone all day on Halloween?
I am not a big sci-fi fan, but this series represents the very best writing on American television.
Rod Serling was a craftsman!

Yeah, you're right. I think it's the SciFi channel that does this (though I may be wrong). They show a lot of Twilight Zone episodes too (or at least they have in the past).

I'm just so excited that it's online AND free. Hopefully more 2p2ers will be able to watch and participate ITT then.

The Twilight Zone starts off with a great example of what the show is about. This episode shows that you don't need a huge cast of character or lots of action to tell a good story. Just one man, alone in a town, trying to figure out why.

Watching it now, really makes me amazed with what they were doing at the time. Now, years after it was made, when all stories are redone over and over, they still keep you guessing. When I first watched this episode, I was on a mission to see how quickly I could find the ending. And they just assault you with possible solution, but then take things a small step in a different direction.

A long the same lines, there is just one fake out after another, from the woman in the car to the cell door almost closing. However, one that I liked the best was the end of the phone booth scene. It's such a simple thing. When he got in he knew how the door work, but after everything is piling up against him, he gets desperate, panics, and forgets the basics.

I have some other things, but I'll wait and see how the discussion is going. But just one last thing: He is the worst tic tac toe player ever, circle clearly could have blocked that X win.

Aren't these Twilight Zones and their twist endings a subject of parody at this point? The best ones everyone already knows, and the worst ones are weak imitations of the better ones.

Before I've said that I've watched enough Simpsons and Futurama that I likely know the ending to most of the great sci-fi stories, but I just don't know I know them yet. However, with over 150 episodes, knowing all the classics still leaves a lot to not know. There are also a number of episodes that don't have "endings" and are just good narratives. Knowing the ending of some of the stories doesn't ruin the episode, it just changes the experience some. When you watch you are enjoying the story telling and seeing the extra details they put in as allusion to the ending that you would not notice otherwise.

A story being told before rarely bothers me. Any story you see has probably been done before hundreds if not thousands or millions of times. It's mostly the telling that's the thing.

So as I was watching this episode, I kept thinking that they would never make any TV show like this now. It's almost an impossibility with our notoriously short attention span. It was actually pretty tense for me to watch because I kept expecting some big, bad thing to happen (too many cheap horror thrillers for me obv) but nothing really did...nor was it ever supposed to. It seems that it's more important that the viewer keeps guessing and is on their toes rather than that they precisely know everything that is going on.

The only other thought I really had was whether it's really possible to develop a multi-dimensional character in approximately 30 minutes...the main guy wasn't as fleshed out as I thought maybe he could have been...but I haven't completely made up my mind. I'll have to keep thinking about this.

Like TheIrishThug mentioned, I love all the possibilities and dead ends that are presented in the episode. Each is plausible so it makes it harder to guess at the ending...which I really like.

Overall, given the time constraint, I think most of Serling's Twilight Zone episodes have a great balance between character and story development compared to the last 30 years of American television writing.