The Twilight Zone

An explosion, a death, a tiny deck of cards. These are the things tying the two strange worlds of Isaac Ezban’s The Incident together.

The Twilight Zone: Shadow & Substance #1 Written by Mark Rahner Illustrated by Edu Menna, Thiago Ribiero Published by Dynamite It hardly needs to be said that the original televised incarnation of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) was a high water mark for fantastic fiction. The second (1985-1989) was a more than worthy successor that drew …

Excavating through the vastness of television history to feature programs from broadcast past that were critically maligned and/or lost on the way to home video.

Just beneath that perfectly manicured rose garden is a nest of vile insects. When the drapes are closed on the house across the street, unspeakable acts are being perpetrated. Behind those well-practiced smiles lie tortured minds, the sufferers and the perpetrators both. For every exhortation of the glorious American Dream, there is an equally on …

A week after James Gandolfini died, we lost another Jersey boy: novelist, short story writer, film and TV screenwriter Richard Matheson. His was not as well-known a name to the general public as Gandolfini’s, certainly, and perhaps only familiar to sci fi and fantasy fans, the genres within which he scored some of his most …

When starting a new television show, the thing I look forward to the most is the title sequence, so it only felt right to devise this list when I heard the theme was favourite television shows this month. In early television there wasn’t a huge focus on title sequences; their only purpose was to present the …

For most, Jacob “Jack” Klugman’s defining role was Oscar Madison, the quintessential white collar guy with a blue collar New York sensibility – loud, oafish, impulsive, a compulsive gambler and an inveterate slob – on the TV series adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, which ran on ABC 1970-75. Those among the AARP crowd …

Last week I did a piece on how early syndication of movies to TV provided a culturally unifying base for Baby Boomers.  Most of us, however, probably think of syndication as being less about movies and more about recycling old TV shows.  And, in time, so it became. TV writer/producer/director Bill Persky remembers syndication being …