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October 2 · Music & Pop Culture
The night television admitted it had a fifth dimension
On October 2, 1959, CBS aired the first episode of The Twilight Zone. It was called "Where Is Everybody?", and it dropped a man into a town with no people in it — no explanation, no monster, just the dawning horror of an empty street.
Rod Serling had spent years fighting network censors over scripts about real subjects. Science fiction, he worked out, was the loophole: nobody objects to a parable if it is set on Mars. The anthology that followed smuggled more about conformity, prejudice and fear past the sponsors than his realist dramas ever managed.
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