In February 1945, World War II had entered its final year, but 20-year-old Rod Serling didn’t know that. He, like the many soldiers around him, both ally and foe, only knew the death and destruction they were facing. And so when, during combat in Manila, a Japanese soldier caught Serling unawares and took aim with his rifle, the young American thought he was finished.
“That was the moment he said, ‘I'm dead,’” Marc Zicree, Serling expert and author of The Twilight Zone Companion, tells IGN. “He absolutely thought, ‘That's it. This is the end of my life.’”
But Serling was saved thanks to another GI who was behind him and killed the enemy combatant before he could fire his weapon.
“So Rod had that moment of absolutely believing his life was over,” says Zicree. “Having experiences of that profundity really is going to shape you.”
Indeed, even as Serling returned home after the war and went on to become one of the most successful writers in TV history, the so-called "angry young man" of television’s Golden Age, he always carried his experiences from the war with him. This is obvious in many episodes of his iconic series The Twilight Zone, but it would also prove to influence his sense of justice which informed all of his work, including the little known series that he made right after The Twilight Zone, the all-but-forgotten one-season Western called The Loner.
The Golden Boy
In the first episode of The Loner, “An Echo of Bugles,” which aired on CBS on September 18, 1965, we meet the title character, Lloyd Bridges’ Civil War-vet Captain William Colton. It’s just a month after the Battle of Appomattox, and the series’ opening credits voiceover further lays out the premise: “In the aftermath of the bloodletting called the Civil War, thousands of rootless, restless, searching men traveled west…”
Colton of course is one of those men, and in a way, this concept mirrors Serling’s own journey after the war too, although it would take him over a decade to move out west – specifically to Hollywood.
“Each decade was marked by a very different career for Rod Serling,” says Zicree, who notes that in the 1950s Serling ascended to become the “golden boy” of television. “He was the highest paid, most successful TV writer. In all, he won six Emmys, which was the most of any writer at that point.”
The Loner's opening lays out the show's premise: 'In the aftermath of the bloodletting called the Civil War, thousands of rootless, restless, searching men traveled west…'Serling had made his name in the live television anthology dramas of the era, a now all-but extinct form of TV programming that was, at its best, seen as the theater of the then-new medium. “He was the Arthur Miller of television,” Zicree says of Serling, who penned classic dramas like Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Comedian during this time. But battles with censors and network sponsors were a constant source of frustration for Serling, because anytime he tried to write about politics or race or anything perceived as controversial, it would turn into a battle. Things came to a head when he set out to write a teleplay inspired by the murder of Emmett Till.
“He wanted to find a fictional way of writing about this terrible, terrible, brutal murder,” says Zicree, but Serling had hit a wall. “[The network and sponsors] would change it so much that he said, ‘At the end of the day, it looked like a room full of butchers at work on a steer.’ He was just feeling very, very frustrated. So then he got the idea that if he wrote science fiction and fantasy and horror, he could say exactly what he wanted to say, but slip it right by the censors.”
“He said, ‘An alien can say what a Democrat or a Republican can't,’” remembers Anne Serling, whose book As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling charts a more personal side of her father’s life than many fans know about.
Hence, The Twilight Zone was born. And it was a hit, marking a new direction for Serling’s career. “He became Mr. Twilight Zone, which was, again, very different,” says Zicree. “But the good part was he had total artistic control on Twilight Zone.”
Though he didn’t know it at the time, that control would soon prove to be increasingly evasive. The series lasted for five seasons and also made Serling a household name (and face) thanks to his unforgettable on-camera appearances as the show’s host. But as The Twilight Zone neared the end of its run, Serling found himself in yet another stage of his career.
“At the end, he was very tired,” says Zicree. “He said he felt his writing had suffered in terms of quality. He said his bad scripts sounded like two Rod Serlings talking to each other.”
Enter the Loner
In that first episode of The Loner, the Colton character comes to the defense of a weakened, older Confederate soldier (Whit Bissell) after a bully starts picking on him and desecrates the Confederate flag. Colton steps in, defending the men who fought and died for that flag despite the fact that he was on the Union side during the war, mirroring Serling’s own humanist outlook on society. The moment is not about the recently ended war or what each side fought for; rather, it’s Colton taking pity on the weak and defenseless, and doing his part to right the wrongs that he sees.
“Above all, he had this profound sense of decency,” says Serling’s daughter Jodi Serling of her dad. “In every story that he did, there was an attempt to make a comment on the human condition.”
“Rod wanted it to be a way to express issues he cared about, racism and anti-immigrant feelings and all of that stuff,” says Zicree of The Loner. “But the problem was that by the ’60s, remember there were only three networks. If you pissed off three guys, you were out of a career.”
The three guys, of course, were the three men running the networks. And while Serling also wrote film scripts, TV was his first and true love. The problem with The Loner, as far as CBS was concerned, was that it was actually about something. The network execs and sponsors were looking for a weekly shoot-’em-up… This was a Western they were paying for, after all! So why was Serling giving his characters philosophical and moral and social dilemmas to wrestle with?
Or perhaps the real question is, looking back at Serling’s work up until this point, what did the network think they were going to get when they hired him?
'In every story that he did, there was an attempt to make a comment on the human condition.' -Jodi Serling“By [this point], the networks wanted shows that would defend nobody,” says Zicree. “They wanted Petticoat Junction and Green Acres and Beverly Hillbillies and I Dream of Jeannie and Bonanza and Mannix. They wanted shows that they wouldn't get letters [from the public about].”
Instead what they did get was – and this is still just in the pilot episode of The Loner – flashbacks which show us how Colton was forced to kill a teenager in battle (in self-defense) on the last day of the war, and how that drove him to quit the service despite the prospect of promotion. So yes, there were gunfights, just not the kind the network expected.
“Rod was no longer the golden boy,” says Zicree. “He was treated increasingly with disrespect by the powers that be because they started to see TV as not art, but product.”
The War That Never Ends
William Colton is carrying the scars of the Civil War with him in The Loner – the emotional and mental scars. For Rod Serling, it was a different war that he returned home from, but he was similarly, and forever, affected by the experience. In fact, he didn’t set out to be a writer, but had originally planned on working with children after college.
“When he got to college, he was so traumatized, like so many, from the war, that he switched his major to language and literature,” explains Anne Serling. “His quote was he needed to ‘get it out of his gut.’ He needed to get it off his chest. And I remember him having nightmares, and in the morning, I would ask him what happened, and he told me that he had dreamt that the enemy was coming at him.”
“He came from an idyllic childhood, and then he went right out of high school into the war, and it was incredibly traumatic for him,” says Jodi Serling. “For some sort of pacifying, cathartic way, he put it in writing. And he talked about what happened over in the Philippines, and it changed him for sure. He was not the same little boy that left at 18 years old.”
Certainly the effects of war creep into his work, and World War II in particular is a recurring element in The Twilight Zone. One particularly memorable episode is “The Purple Testament,” penned by Serling, which presents a lieutenant in that war (played by William Reynolds) who finds that he can see a strange glow on a person’s face just prior to their death. Of course, by the end of the segment the lieutenant catches his reflection in a mirror, realizing that his own demise is imminent. It’s an effective half hour of TV, but the main character’s eventual resignation to the inevitability of death that surrounds him and his comrades must surely have been a feeling Serling had experienced himself during his time in the Pacific Theater.
“It's one of the best things ever written about World War II, the sense of exhaustion and fear and just the griminess… it's tactile,” says Zicree. “And you know that the guy who wrote that lives that.”
For Serling, it was a different war from Colton's that he returned home from, but he was similarly, and forever, affected by the experience.For The Loner, Serling would write 15 of the series’ 26 episodes, and Colton’s war experiences were never far from his mind, even if, as it proceeds, the show becomes less about the direct aftermath of that conflict and more about Colton seeking to do good in the wake of all the bad he has managed to survive. In “The Vespers,” Jack Lord guest-stars as Reverend Booker, an ex-Rebel captain who has promised God he’ll never kill again – even though men are coming to town to murder him. “One of the Wounded” sees Colton meeting Agatha Phelps (Anne Baxter), whose husband Colonel John Phelps is in a catatonic state since returning from the war, apparently suffering from PTSD. He rouses himself in the episode’s climax, which leads to the following unforgettable nugget of Serling dialogue:
Phelps: “I sometimes think a man can die from killing, as well as from being killed.”
Colton: “Which is one of the things that distinguishes him from an animal.”
“I guess my dad identified with the main guy in The Loner, William Colton,” says Jodi Serling. “Colton was a just man who just stepped in and fought for the little people and anyone who was bullied, dismissed, or abused or powerless. … And I think, in a way, when dad was writing it, he really imagined himself as Colton. He wanted Colton to right the wrongs.”
One of the best episodes of The Loner is “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove,” which finds Colton befriending the African American soldier of the title (played by the legendary Brock Peters). A former slave who fought for the Union in the war, Lemuel’s homecoming proves to be tragic as he finds that the night before his return, his father has been hanged by what is essentially the KKK. Colton helps his new friend to fend off the murderers and bury his father, but there’s no happy ending here. “Lemuel Stove, you’re not alone,” Colton tells the young man as the episode ends. “It may seem so. But you’re never alone.”
“I'm certain that his own personal experiences must have been present when he was writing [The Loner], but that show didn't last very long at all,” says Anne Serling. “It was canceled because they said there wasn't enough violence, and my dad had tried to write about many of the themes he wrote about in The Twilight Zone. And they just weren't buying it.”
The “they” was CBS, and they most certainly were not. Serling publicly feuded with the network over the show, and the last new episode aired on March 12, 1966, just six months after The Loner debuted.
Little seen in the decades since (it didn’t have enough episodes for a standard syndication package), The Loner sat in relative obscurity for far too long. Some years back, the series was finally released on DVD by Shout! Factory. For any fan of Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, or just good, classic TV, it’s well worth checking out.
Top image credit: Photos by CBS via Getty Images and Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
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