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"The Twilight Zone" brought a complexity and maturity to television that had never existed before and probably hasn't been seen since. The stories were always ironic, briliant, and fascinating, and they often came with a moral lesson. Episodes like "A Kind of a Stopwatch", with Richard Erdmann, "Time Enough At Last", with Burgess Meredith, "Nightmare at 20,00 Feet", with William Shatner, and "Where is Everybody," with Earl Holliman, dove into concepts and situations no other show would have even touched. The entertainment brought on by "The Twilight Zone" was as vast as the Zone itself. Its principal writers, Sterling, Beaumont, and Matheson, were the best of their era. For sheer television entertainment, nothing compares to the brilliant, heavyweight stories of "The Twilight Zone." TO be frank, "The Twilight Zone" was the first show that didn't insult the viewer's intelligence.

I would assume that everyone knows "The Twilight Zone"'s theme song, and recognizes Rod Serling's monotone explanations of how the given character has just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. I'm not sure which episode is my favorite. There's "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet", in which William Shatner sees a monster tearing at an airplane wing, and there's also "Time Enough at Last", where Burgess Meredith plays a bookworm who gets enough time to read as much as he wants...or does he? Or, it might be another episode. But no matter. "The Twilight Zone" never ceases to impress me. Even the 1983 movie was pretty interesting, not something that many movies based on TV shows accomplish. You should try to see the show.

This show never gets old. It ages extremely well. The psychological horror of this is SO much better than any CGI horror you'll see these days. Every episode (or at least all the good ones) have a spooky element or something out of the ordinary, a twist ending, and a moral or something to think about. There are so many of these that are just, SO GOOD. Rod serling is a greek god. tres bien.

Just recently, I finished a kick of re-watching all 156 episodes of the original Twilight Zone series. If I were to average out all my individual episode rankings, that number would probably fall between 7-8 stars. Yet, when looked at as a whole rather than the sum of its parts, The Twilight Zone is 10/10 all the way.

When TZ is hitting on all cylinders, it is easily one of the greatest anthology pieces ever produced. The lion's share of the credit here goes to show creator and writer Rod Serling, who is truly one of the most inspired individuals to ever put pen to paper in screenplay format. The deeper themes about society or humanity are just as relevant now (if not sometimes more so!) than they were upon original airing.

It absolutely astounds me that this show premiered in 1959. That was ten years before the moon landing! I can't imagine what my grandparents would have thought about a show like this, dealing with space travels, aliens, and all manner of oddities hardly a decade removed from the Second World War and firmly in the Cold War.

Like I said, the best TZ episodes are treasures that will be enjoyed and studied for decades to come. Does the show have its share of clunkers? Of course. But only a true handful of episodes are truly bad. The others largely depend on personal sci-fi tastes or the time-period in which they are viewed.

About the only reason I would even consider dropping this from a perfect ranking is the fourth season of the show, which produced hour-long episodes. Those efforts aren't bad, per se, but are simply padded with dialogue to fill time rather than written for a longer runtime, for the most part.

When taking the long view, however, The Twilight Zone firmly resides in my top-five television programs of all-time. Despite premiering well before it could fully be appreciated, having to deal with the inane TV standards and practices of the era, and being constantly underfunded, Serling managed to keep everything afloat and write some of the best multi-genre material ever seen on the small screen. Whether comedy, mystery, horror, sci-fi, human drama, or any other genre is your game, you'll likely find something to enjoy in the breadth of The Twilight Zone.

Whatever incantation, whatever form, whatever decade, this show has managed to intrigue and defy logic with its use of imaginary story lines and ideas, mixing a palate of intrigue and genius to allow the common viewer to become engrossed in the weirdest television has to offer. While the original series was cheesy at some points, this show was always different, always something to look forward to in regards to the eeriness it created. Rod Serling helped usher in a generation of paranoia and science fiction thanks to this groundbreaking show, and I'm thankful for this. I could only imagine what the world would be like if all we had were terrible dramas and average sitcoms filling the airwaves. This show will rank as one of the best in my book, no matter what people say.