Ranking Every Episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’
A door appears in front of you. You unlock it with the key of imagination. Before you know it, you’re moving into a land of both shadows and substances, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into … The Twilight Zone.
For 60 years, Rod Serling’s classic anthology series has remained the gold standard of supernatural television. The show’s makeup, special effects, TV cinematography have all aged, but the ideas behind The Twilight Zone resonate just as strongly — and, in some cases, more strongly — than they did six decades ago. And no film or television show today can conclude on an ironic twist without drawing comparison to Serling’s iconic endings.
A cult hit in its day, it has been revived numerous times, including the latest version produced and hosted by Jordan Peele. Before diving into the new Twilight Zone on CBS All Access, I decided to revisit the original — a personal favorite since childhood — to watch and rank every one of its 156 episodes. As of this writing, all of them are widely available online: Both Netflix and Amazon Prime have four of the show’s five seasons available for streaming. If you want to watch The Twilight Zone’s fourth season — the one year with hourlong episodes — you can find those on Hulu.
That’s the signpost up ahead. You know the next stop. Unlock the door.