page_title: The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
section_title: Season 2 (1960–61)
hierarchical_section_title: The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) / Episodes / Season 2 (1960–61)
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Rod Serling and actress Inger Stevens with Serling's model airplane collection at his home. Stevens starred in The Twilight Zone episode "The Hitchhiker".
context_page_description: The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Each episode presents a stand-alone story in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone," often with a surprise ending and a moral. Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror. The phrase “twilight zone, ” inspired by the series, is used to describe surreal experiences.
  The series featured both established stars and younger actors who would become much better known later. Serling served as executive producer and head writer; he wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show's 156 episodes. He was also the show's host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling's opening and closing narrations usually summarize the episode's events encapsulating how and why the main character had entered the Twilight Zone.
context_section_description: You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.
  — Rod Serling
  The second season premiered on September 30, 1960 with "King Nine Will Not Return," Serling's fresh take on the pilot episode "Where Is Everybody?" The familiarity of this first story stood in stark contrast to the novelty of the show's new packaging: Bernard Herrmann's stately original theme was replaced by Marius Constant's more jarring and dissonant (and now more-familiar) new guitar-and-bongo theme. The blinking eye was replaced by a more surreal introduction inspired by the new images in Serling's narration (such as "That's the signpost up ahead"), and Serling himself stepped in front of the cameras to present his opening narration, rather than being only a voice-over narrator (as in the first season).
  A new sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive, replaced the previous year's Kimberly-Clark (as Liggett & Myers would succeed General Foods, in April 1961), and a new network executive, James Aubrey, took over CBS. "Jim Aubrey was a very, very difficult problem for the show," said associate producer Del Reisman. "He was particularly tough on The Twilight Zone because for its time it was a particularly costly half-hour show…  Aubrey was real tough on [the show's budget] even when it was a small number of dollars." In a push to keep the show's expenses down, Aubrey ordered that seven fewer episodes be produced than last season and that six of those being produced would be shot on videotape rather than film, a move Serling disliked, calling it "neither fish nor fowl." Two additional episodes filmed in the second season ("The Grave" and "Nothing in the Dark") were held over to the third season.
  Season two saw the production of many of the series' most acclaimed episodes, including "Eye of the Beholder," "Nick of Time," "The Invaders," and "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?." The trio of Serling, Matheson and Beaumont began to admit new writers, and this season saw the television debut of George Clayton Johnson. Emmys were won by Serling (his fifth) for dramatic writing and by director of photography George T. Clemens and, for the second year in a row, the series won the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. It also earned the Unity Award for "Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations" and an Emmy nomination for "Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Drama."
  Five weeks into season two, the show's budget was showing a deficit. The total number of new episodes was projected at twenty-nine, more than half of which, sixteen, had already been filmed by November 1960. As a cost-cutting measure, six episodes (The Lateness of The Hour, The Night of The Meek, The Whole Truth, Twenty-Two, Static, and Long Distance Call) were produced in the cheaper videotape format, which also required fewer camera movements. In addition, videotape was a relatively primitive medium in the early 1960s; the editing of tape was next to impossible. Each of the episodes was therefore "camera-cut" as in live TV—on a studio sound stage, using a total of four cameras. The requisite multi-camera setup of the videotape experiment made location shooting difficult, severely limiting the potential scope of the story-lines. Even with those artistic sacrifices, the eventual savings amounted to only $6,000 per episode, far less than the cost of a single episode. The experiment was not attempted again. Kinescope versions of the video taped episodes were rerun in syndication.
caption: Serling models an airplane with actress Inger Stevens, who appeared in "The Hitch-Hiker" and "The Lateness of the Hour."
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