Watching The Twilight Zone at Night: It's Different

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"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone." - Rod Serling, Twilight Zone opening credits 

On and off for the last year or so, I've been working my way through The Twilight Zone. Now, I've seen a good portion of the show's episodes before on TV, but this is my first time watching through the series from beginning to end—thanks to the wonders of modern media, via Netflix and Hulu (which, between the two of them, have every episode). And I've noticed something that never occurred to me before: more than any other show I can think of, The Twilight Zone benefits from context.

I'm not talking about context in the sense of the social, political, or historical background surrounding the show's creation (though, given the sheer number of Cold War allegories, there's something to be said for that). What I mean is the physical context of any given viewer of the show, the literal space surrounding the TV set, computer screen, or whatever the view chooses to watch it on. Basically, how you watch The Twilight Zone has a huge consequences on its effectiveness.

Before my discovery of its availability on streaming services, my only exposure to The Twilight Zone was through late-night TV marathons of the show that aired during my middle and high school years. Often I'd be sleeping over at a friend's house, my buddy and I flipping through the channels at some weird hour of the night as the manic energy of the sleepover's escapades (video games, junk food, etc.) dissipated. Half asleep, we'd stumble upon some episode of the show, immediately arrested by Rod Serling's monologue or a singularly striking image of sci-fi weirdness, and before we knew it, we'd watched seven or eight of the suckers, and it was 4:30 am. The experience was nightmarish, sad, hazy, and a little funny, and we'd wake up the next morning with only sketchy memories of the episodes we'd watched.

That, I argue, is the single most effective way to watch The Twilight Zone: randomly discovered in the middle of the night, with the lights off, with your mind slowly falling asleep.

What I've found upon revisiting the show is that watching it fully alert in the middle of the day or at dinner time or over breakfast is a completely different experience. That's not to say that the show isn't still great (in fact, I'd still rank it among the best TV shows ever), but it is a decidedly different series at 3 pm than it is at 3 am. During the day, The Twilight Zone is a well-written (if occasionally over-written), immaculately paced, inventive show that vacillates between a twisted sense of humor and a deeply humanist impulse for sentimentality. But in the middle of the night, in the dark, all those intellectual characteristics take a back seat to the oppressive and altogether unnerving mood. Each episode begins with an uncanny feeling of displacement that grows over the next thirty minutes until it blossoms into the terrible realization that there is something irreversibly not right about the world. The logic of the show (which is occasionally shaky) ceases to matter, and the story on the TV becomes phantasmagorical, making only enough sense to convey twisted epiphanies and the fearful awe of encountering the unknown.

Okay, yeah, I'm getting a little over-the-top—that last paragraph was just about as purple (albeit not as eloquent) as a Rod Sterling intro. But it really is striking how much your state-of-mind and the surrounding environment affect how you view the show [1]. Or maybe that's just me. After all, everyone brings their own set of emotions, biases, and experiences to the art they consume. All I know is that I can watch shows like Lost or Seinfeld at any time and get roughly the same thing out of the experience; not so with The Twilight Zone. I dunno, maybe it really does take place in a fifth dimension.

Until next time.

1] Yeah, technically we viewers always bring different sets of baggage to different settings (e.g. if you're watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off in a hotel room by yourself, it's not the same as when you watch it in a friend's living room with a bunch of pals), but the extent to which I feel differently about The Twilight Zone based on the setting in which I watch it goes way beyond the normal effects of setting-shifting. The only other things I can think of that have a similar transformation are horror movies, a genre with which The Twilight Zone shares more than a little of its DNA.