FAQ

It was not originally, but has been ever since.

While the book "The Twilight Zone Companion" by Zicree does not list it as a season 1 episode the author states it was aired on Oct 2, 1959 as the premier episode of season 1 . Further, the Definitive DVD collection lists it as Episode 1. Of course this applies to the episode as aired and as shown all these years since, edited from the pilot. The original version of the pilot, used to sell the series to sponsors, had a different opening & closing, a different narrator, and had slight differences in the first few minutes, which was not shown until on DVD.

The Twilight Zone was about to be canceled after the third season, because Rod Serling took up teaching. However, at the half of the next season (1962-1963) another CBS show was canceled and TZ was put in it's place as a replacement. Because this show was an hour long, new TZ episodes had to be produced in this format. The resulting hour-long episodes are generally considered weaker, save for a few exceptions. This was due mostly to episodes becoming overly padded in their hour-long running time. The experiment was considered a failure, and the next (and final) season, the show returned to its original format.

There were up to three. Serling wrote a script called "The Time Element" as a pilot for an anthology series. It was first shelved by executives. It was then aired on the Desilu Playhouse in 1958 and garnered an enormous viewer response. CBS then ordered a new Twilight Zone pilot. This one, titled "The Happy Place," about a community that sends its elderly members off for extermination, didn't score well with executives either. Then, An hour-long teleplay titled "A Stop at Willoughby" was written. Exchanges between actor James Daly, his agent, and Rod Serling, was going on a full year before the series was produced, but Serling's production company and the network contract failed, so it was shelved. Finally, Serling sat down and wrote out a third script: "Where Is Everybody?"

Six episodes in season two were shot on videotape because CBS felt that after season one, ratings didn't match the expense of production, and they thought that videotape would be less expensive to use. But, the quality wasn't as good, shootings could not be done on location, and four cameras had to be used at one time. So, ultimately it didn't save them money, and they returned to using film.

As the landmark series which it was, there have been several attempts to revive it in some way without its creator Rod Serling. The first was "Twilight Zone: The Movie", a theatrical anthology film released in 1983, with most of the stories being remakes of episodes of the original series. Two years later saw a new series for television which is known as "The New Twilight Zone", it lasted for three seasons and was hosted by. In 1994, a television movie was produced called "Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics" and it consisted of two previously unmade stories written by Serling. 2002 saw both a new, ultimately short-lived, revival series hosted by Forest Whitaker on UPN, and a radio drama series hosted by Stacy Keach. As of 2019 a third TV revival of The Twilight Zone will go into production, with Jordan Peele doing the hosting, this version of will air on the On-Demand Channel CBS All Access.

No, contrary to popular belief, it is not. While "The Bewitchin' Pool" was the final episode of the series to be broadcast as a "new" Twilight Zone episode, it was in fact not the last episode produced. The last episode of the series to be filmed was actually "Come Wander With Me", which starred Gary Crosby and was directed by Richard Donner. Additionally, according to the The Twilight Zone Companion book by Marc Scott Zicree, the last episode may also be considered "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", yet this is tenuous because it was actually an unrelated short film from France that was simply re-packaged as an episode of Twilight Zone.