Best Twilight Zone Episodes For Beginners

The Twilight Zone is one of the foundational shows of modern television, and an amazing number of other series take their inspiration from Rod Serling’s brilliant writing. The original black and white show was one of early TV’s most popular shows, and the modern reboots are a mix of older stories and totally new ones.

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Most of the best Twilight Zones are part of the original series and were created by Serling, and many of them are still famous. For someone new to The Twilight Zone franchise, there are a few select episodes that embody the spirit of the show more than others.

7

Where Is Everybody?

The Pilot Episode Was Designed To Introduce The Series

• Director: Robert Stevens
• Starring: Earl Holliman, James Gregory, Garry Walberg, Paul Logan
• Air Date: October 2, 1959
• Episode Number: Season 1, Episode 1

The pilot episode of The Twilight Zone perfectly encapsulates one of the show’s underlying themes: the fuzzy line between reality and fantasy. The show’s introduction reflects this perspective, and the time of twilight is not quite day or night.

“Where Is Everybody?” is a mix of science fiction, dark fantasy, and psychological horror, which sets the stage for the rest of the series. Like many other stories, this one is about an astronaut, or to be more accurate, someone who aspires to be one. Also like the rest of the series, however, things are not what they seem, and the whole adventure happens in the mind of the protagonist.

6

Eye Of The Beholder

A Common Theme Is The Uncommon PoV

• Director: Douglas Heyes
• Starring: Maxine Stuart, Donna Douglas, William D. Gordon
• Air Date: November 11, 1960
• Episode Number: Season 2, Episode 6

Rod Serling understood that the audience would assume certain things about a story based on a typical setting or storyline, and this is what makes the twist at the end of “Eye of the Beholder” so impressive. This is a pattern that appears in a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, and this is one of the best episodes to demonstrate it.

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The title of the episode is a clue to how the story unfolds, but it’s chilling from the start and never lets the viewer go. The setting is a hospital, and the main character is a deformed patient whose hideous face is always covered, and since the viewer sees a lot from her PoV the faces of the doctors are also obscured, but closer observation reveals that the camera is deliberately hiding other faces for some mysterious reason.

5

Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?

A Twist On The Alien Invasion Concept

• Director: Montgomery Pittman
• Written By: Rod Serling
• Starring: John Hoyt, Jean Willes, Jack Elam
• Air Date: May 26, 1961

Humans fear an alien invasion, but what if the aliens were already here? In fact, what if there was a whole neighborhood of aliens who were fighting over which one of them gets to exploit and colonize Earth, and they accidently met in a roadside cafe after a strange and tragic accident?

It’s a crazy idea that could only come from the Twilight Zone, and as usual, the script plays on tropes and stereotypes that the audience already knows. The story is more of an experimental one that overlaps with the absurd, even though it’s still mainly horror.

4

The New Exhibit

An Example Of Fantasy Horror

• Directed By: John Brahm
• Written By: Charles Beaumont, Rod Serling, and Jerry Sohl
• Starring: Martin Balsam, Will Kuluva, Maggie Mahoney
• Air Date: April 4, 1963

“The New Exhibit” is one of the best examples of horror and dark fantasy in the whole series, and it’s a fairly simple story that’s easy to follow. Even people who like wax museums think they’re creepy, and this episode leans into that common fear.

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As the title suggests, the plot of this episode hinges on a new wax museum exhibit, but this isn’t a depiction of actors or world leaders. The subjects are famous serial killers, and when the museum closes down, the main character takes them home. A series of strange and sordid events follow, and the twist at the end reveals what the viewer might have suspected the whole time.

3

The Midnight Sun

The Terror Of Realism

• Directed By: Anton Leader
• Written By: Rod Serling
• Starring: Lois Nettleton, Betty Garde, Tom Reese
• Air Date: November 17, 1961

It could be one of the darkest episodes of The Twilight Zone or any show ever, featuring a doomed planet from which there is no escape. After a mysterious celestial event knocks the Earth out of orbit, it spirals closer to the sun on an inevitable crash course. By the time this episode starts, there is no more night, the Earth is slowly burning to a crisp, and humans are struggling to survive.

The whole episode is difficult to watch because things get progressively worse with no possibility of a reprieve, and tragedy follows tragedy as society falls apart. As is tradition with The Twilight Zone, there’s a twist ending, but there’s no relief or salvation to be found there, either.

2

To Serve Man

The Infamous “Friendly Alien” Episode

• Director: Richard L. Bare
• Adapted From: “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight
• Starring: Lloyd Bochner, Richard Kiel, Susan Cummings
• Air Date: March 2, 1962

This is the episode that gave birth to the most infamous phrase in all of television history, and it’s not just the play on words but the twist ending that puts an arrogant humanity firmly in its place. As with many other episodes, the story begins with the appearance of an alien, but this one is friendly and benign.

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It insists that the extraterrestrials only want to help humans, to serve them, so to speak, and even carries a book called “To Serve Man” to back up his story. He also wants to enlist some exceptional humans to take back to his planet in a sort of galactic exchange program. The cryptologists working to decipher the book get past the title, however, and by the time they discover the horrible truth, it’s too late to save the brave volunteers from their sordid fate.

1

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

The Real Moral Of Every Twilight Zone Story

• Director: Ronald Winston
• Starring: Claude Akins, Barry Atwater, Jack Weston
• Air Date: March 4, 1960
• Episode Number: Season 1, Episode 22

Maple Street is a Norman Rockwell picture of idyllic small-town America until strange events, like flashing streetlights and mysterious noises, start to turn neighbor against neighbor. It only takes a few hours of these random disruptions to turn the formerly amiable townsfolk against each other in a frenzy of panic and violence.

There are aliens in this story, and they do happen to be planning an invasion, but they don’t take the usual role of openly dividing and conquering. They prefer instead to toy with their intended prey, but this isn’t revealed until the end and is more like a reveal than a twist. The real message is that the only true horror is in the human mind, and the only refuge we have is a compassionate society.

The Twilight Zone

Release Date

1959 – 1963

Showrunner

Rod Serling