“Serling” author Alan Sepinwall didn’t know it, but he was about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind and, in his telling, unexpected connections. The scene was Los Angeles, where the veteran TV critic (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) was set to moderate a 20th anniversary panel for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” While making small talk with series star and creator Rob Mac in the event’s green room, Sepinwall casually mentioned he was writing about Rod Serling, creator of “The Twilight Zone.”

Suddenly Mac’s face lit up. “Alan,” he said, “You have to talk to me for this book. Rod Serling is my guy. Rod Serling is a huge influence on me.”

“And thinking in my head, OK. Sure,” Sepinwall recalled. “I was deeply skeptical, but figured, all right, I will indulge him because I like Rob. We’ll see what happens.”

Once they got around to talking, Sepinwall’s doubts dissolved. Instead, he ended up seeing Mac’s shows in a whole new light. “There really is ‘Twilight Zone’ DNA in ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and ‘Mythic Quest’ and a lot of the other stuff he’s done,” Sepinwall said. “And I kept coming across that more than anything else.”

As long as television exists, “The Twilight Zone,” which premiered on Oct. 2, 1959, is unlikely to disappear completely. Heck, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie theme song alone will outlive humanity.

But if some calamity causes the show to fade into the mists of forgetting, Sepinwall argues in his upcoming biography, “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary,” that its creator’s influence is forever woven into the medium. From the greatest genre series to less obvious links, like the preposterous shenanigans at Paddy’s Pub, Serling left his mark on screens large and small, and on American audiences. 

Since Sepinwall wrote the book on TV – no, really, he co-authored “TV: The Book” with fellow critic Matt Zoller Seitz – who better to break down the essence of Serling’s evergreen appeal? That’s what we did in our recent Zoom conversation about the mythic creator, writer and actor who has haunted us for most of a century by changing TV for the better.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

(Courtesy of Alan Sepinwall)

After researching your book, what have you found about people’s common understanding of Rod Serling and “The Twilight Zone” that might not be entirely accurate?

I think people assume that the guy who created “The Twilight Zone” and was this really creepy, ominous host must have been this very dark and tormented person. Obviously, and he had some darkness in him; he came back from World War II really scarred, couldn’t really deal with it . . . but he was also a very outgoing guy. A jokester, warm, fun dad, you know, had this idyllic childhood and was just a very popular people-pleaser kind of guy that you would not expect whatsoever from that image of him.

When people think about Rod Serling and his influence on TV, they basically associate him with genre television like “Lost.” But they don’t necessarily think of shows like “Sunny.” What are some others where you were kind of surprised to find DNA of “The Twilight Zone” on a closer look?

Well, this isn’t one I was surprised to find because it’s quoted a few times in the show, but it’s still like a less obvious one: “The Sopranos.” David Chase is obsessed with “The Twilight Zone.” One of the reasons that he wanted to become a writer was that he just thought Rod Serling was the coolest guy on the planet. So I’d say that’s one.

The work of Pamela Adlon, who did “Better Things” and a lot of other stuff. I mainly knew she liked “Twilight Zone,” but I didn’t realize the depth of it to the point where she named one of her kids after a character in a “Twilight Zone” episode.

So yeah, it’s all over the place. There are the obvious ones like J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof with “Lost,” Charlie Brooker with “Black Mirror.”  But you look at, like, “All in the Family” or “Hill Street Blues” or a lot of these other things, and it’s hard to imagine them existing in the form that they did if there hadn’t been Rod Serling in the ‘50s, and especially with “Twilight Zone,” saying that TV can be asking these bigger questions, can be wrestling with thornier moral issues, and can really challenge people to turn their brain back on and not just, you know, have it on in the background while they’re folding laundry.

One of the things you write early in the book is that he really had a jaundiced view of nostalgia.

I mean, his relationship with nostalgia was really complicated because on the one hand, he has this idyllic childhood in Binghamton, New York, you know: doting parents, popular kid, dated all over the place. Binghamton largely resisted the effects of the depression. Then he immediately goes from there to Hell on earth, fighting in the Pacific . . . And the shock of going from one to the other really affected everything he would write about for the rest of his life.

On the one hand, there’s the part of him that wishes he had never left Binghamton and wishes he could go back to this time before the war, before humanity dropped atomic bombs on civilians, before there was this constant fear of the nuclear apocalypse and all of the other things that people were starting to worry about in the ‘50s and ‘60s and the Cold War.

On the other hand, he knew that this was a bad idea. You can’t go backward; you have to move forward. And that, as good as life was for him in those moments, it was not great for other people. And he kept trying to push humanity forward. He would argue on behalf of civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and all these other causes that he cared about. So almost every time you do a “Twilight Zone” episode where somebody goes back in time, either to their own childhood or even further back than that, it doesn’t go well for them. The past is not a place you should be.

What do you think it is about the metaphorical messages within each episode that keep “The Twilight Zone” eternally relevant?

Because people are people, and we keep making the same mistakes and facing the same challenges, even if sometimes we get better about it than at other times. But you watch these episodes, and he’s asking really elemental stuff about humanity. Like being selfish versus trying to think about the world around you, or taking the easy choice versus the hard one. You know, racism, fascism — how easy it is for us to give in to the ideas of conformity, to give in to the ideas of letting someone else do all of the thinking for us.

That’s there again and again. And so you watch those episodes, and it’s like they’re 60-plus years old. They’re in black and white. The fashions are what the fashions are, and yet over and over it feels like, really, he could have written this yesterday.

“Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary” hits bookshelves on Tuesday, Oct. 13. You can pre-order your copy by clicking here.

All five seasons of “The Twilight Zone” are streaming on Paramount+.

The post TV never left “The Twilight Zone” appeared first on Salon.com.

Before digesting Zoe Kazan’s seven-part reconsideration of “East of Eden,” I never would have suspected that we, as a society, had been conditioned to misread Cathy Ames, the angel-faced succubus at the broken heart of John Steinbeck’s novel.

Cathy has always had her champions, mind you. The internet is laden with Reddit arguments and academic examinations questioning Steinbeck’s portrait of her beastliness. The author himself was conflicted about her, writing Cathy as a dangerous beauty incapable of empathy in his book, yet expressing how dear she was to him in letters to his editor, Pascal Covici. My English teachers and literature professors were probably too tired to parse such nuance, and I don’t blame them.

Besides, Cathy is not an easy empathy object. She killed her parents, drove a man to suicide when she was young, and shot her way out of marriage and motherhood later. She changed her name to Kate Albey but never changed her ways.

Steinbeck never points to a definitive incitement to explain her behavior, instead writing, “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” to open a chapter devoted to Cathy’s backstory.

When read in the author’s voice, that seems like a conclusive diagnosis. But to hear Florence Pugh deliver it as Cathy’s belief, and the establishing paradigm of Kazan’s limited series, changes things. Once we discover more about Pugh’s Cathy—once we’ve seen her do the horrible acts I’ve listed—her observation that the only true freedom in this world is economic freedom makes more sense.

“For the modern woman,” she adds to that thought, “that presents a problem.” In her time, and in her opinion, a sensible woman’s paths to financial freedom were limited to hoping for a windfall or making one’s fortune off others’ backs as a madam. In other words, you can be forever reliant on the universe’s mercy or merciless in bending it to fulfill your ambition. That doesn’t magically justify Cathy’s criminality. But she isn’t completely wrong, either.

Central to both Steinbeck’s novel and Kazan’s update is the author’s interpretation of the Hebrew word timshel, which he translates as “thou mayest.” Adam’s servant, Lee (Hoon Lee), who raises the twin boys Cathy abandons, explains that the term expresses free will. It’s a blessing of agency that sounds much easier to accept when you have more options than Cathy.  Besides, she says in the opening scene’s voiceover while clawing her bloodied, broken body across a dirt field toward the home of Charles Trask (Mike Faist) and his brother Adam (Christopher Abbott), “normalcy” is relative: “Everyone is normal to himself.”

Netflix’s Cathy-centered take on “East of Eden” comes before us at a very different time than the one in which Zoe Kazan’s grandfather Elia introduced his acclaimed 1955 film. It arrives in a season dotted with trauma plots serving as gateways to female rage – some well executed, like Hulu’s extraordinary “Furious,” and others slicked in a messy goo of “been there, done that” tropes, a la “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.”

We’re also witnessing, from a distance, the legal perils of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse tried, on TV, for killing her three children, all under the age of 5, before attempting suicide in January 2023.  Clancy pleaded not guilty, and her trial recently ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The question of why she did what she did may remain unanswered. During her trial, Clancy’s defense argued that postpartum psychosis drove Clancy out of her mind. The prosecution’s argument is simpler and meaner, almost reminiscent of Steinbeck: Clancy’s actions were premeditated, her way of escaping a life she didn’t want anymore. Now Clancy’s lawyers are arguing she should be found not guilty due to a lack of sufficient evidence that she killed her children, and by lack of criminal responsibility due to insufficient evidence she was not in psychosis at the time. Another status hearing is scheduled for Nov. 2.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

When Steinbeck first introduced Cathy Ames to the public in 1952, and when Elia Kazan brought his version to the screen three years later, we were only allowed the slightest glimpse into her soul. Elia Kazan’s movie, written by Paul Osborn, barely covers the last third of Steinbeck’s 600-page epic. It also omits Lee and focuses primarily on James Dean’s Cal Trask, one of Cathy’s sons, leaving most of her story to secondhand whispers. When a lawman confirms to Cal the rumor that Cathy, known by then as the nearby town’s madam, Kate, shot his father, Cal muses, “He must have done something to hurt her.”

“No, sir,” the man counters. “He gave her everything that any woman could ask for.”

But how would he know? Zoe Kazan’s Cathy, which closely hews to Steinbeck’s original vision, defies easy assumptions about a woman’s wants and needs. Nothing about her, or the way Pugh plays her, is simple.

“East of Eden” parallels the Biblical story of Cain and Abel first through Adam and Charles Trask, then again through Adam’s twin sons Aron and Caleb. Cathy, meanwhile, deciphers the key to life through Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” a story about a girl like her who survives an upside-down world.

Both Steinbeck and Zoe Kazan infer that something happened to Cathy when she was very young. The filmmaker does this through spare imagery: a man baiting a little girl in a blue dress with sweets, coaxing her to follow him into a dark hole that could lead to Wonderland or much darker places. With this, Cathy’s favorite book and her mysterious violation teach her it’s better to be a predator than prey, to be the queen calling for her the heads of her enemies instead of a man’s pawn.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

Cathy Ames is a complicated symbol, as the countless people who glommed on to Clancy’s case want her to be. Viewers accustomed to crime stories about perpetrators whose behavior is explained, perhaps even justified, by what they survived may see Clancy as another alleged trauma plot come to life—a sum of biological and social hazards, as Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in The Atlantic.

“And some elements of it seem inarguably true, such as the idea that Clancy’s psychiatric care was woefully uncoordinated,” Bruenig added. “But this theory also has the odd effect of making Clancy the star of her own murder trial, for whom the viewer at home may be encouraged to root, which risks eliding the gravity of what she did.”

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We must be clear that differences between the entirely fictional Cathy and Clancy, a real and suffering person, are vast. But if the best fiction can also be instructive, maybe the last moral of Kazan’s “East of Eden” can help us hold multiple truths at once. Cathy’s reasons for doing terrible things may be understandable, even relatable, while the transgression remains unforgivable. A person may even warn us by crying for help or, as Cathy does, advising those on the verge of falling into her trap to turn back.

“You’re so kind to me, and I’ll only ever bring you trouble,” she purrs when it’s clear that Adam is smitten with her. But he refuses to listen and marries her anyway. When Cathy discovers she’s pregnant, she warns him that she’s going to leave the first chance she gets, even attempting to self-administer an abortion with a knitting needle. Not to worry, a kindly male neighbor assures Adam — her maternal urges will kick right in after the babies are born. They do not.

Instead, Cathy makes good on her many cautions, leaving her wailing infants and bleeding husband behind for a new life and a fortune earned by cunning, a con and poison. But for a few twists of fate, she could be any of us. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Pugh’s exquisite, gorgeously brutal rendition leads more of us to her defense.

“East of Eden” is streaming on Netflix.

The post Netflix’s “East of Eden” asks if we’ve misread its monster appeared first on Salon.com.

Confession: I was never a Beatles girl. Put away your pitchforks, people – a lack of love doesn’t preclude appreciation. After all, without The Beatles, The Monkees wouldn’t exist. And in one of those head-to-head, “One has to go” challenges the internet is so fond of, I’d tell Ringo and the rest to kick rocks every time.

Not long ago some music purists would have called that sacrilege. Some still would, I’m sure. Bear in mind that I didn’t grow up in a household where a Beatles album ever graced a record or CD player. But we had TVs in the kitchen, the family room, and my parents’ bedroom, and that meant that on any given weekday after school, you could find me in one of those places hanging out with Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones.

I’ve had The Monkees on my mind recently because yellow buses are rolling through my neighborhood again, and because this month marks the 60th anniversary of their show’s 1966 series premiere. But I was also reminded of their cultural impact all these years later by a Rolling Stone story that came out this week titled “Seven Reasons Why You Should See Harry Styles Right Now.”

Styles is one of the 21st century’s pop supernovas whose musicianship and charisma evolve with the times – “the kind of pop spectacle that leaves feathers all over the floor and hysteria lingering in the air,” gushed the magazine’s Rob Sheffield in his May review of the performer’s tour-launching show in Amsterdam. He’s also the most successful member of One Direction, a boy band created by and for the British edition of “The X Factor.”

That show didn’t magically endow Styles with talent, but it gave him one of the world’s biggest stages to showcase his gifts. That’s similar to the way producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson brought together four unknowns and accidentally formed one of the last century’s most influential pop bands.

Nobody expected that, though. Schneider and Rafelson initially sought to build a show around Jones – the Harry Styles of his generation – and recruited the rest of the band with a Hollywood Reporter ad that read, “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.”

Tork, Nesmith and Dolenz were among the 437 who responded. They also happened to be talented musicians.

The once-in-a-century specialness of The Monkees, a made-for-TV creation that became a pop culture force, cannot be overstated. For example, years after “The Monkees,” NBC tried to capture some of The New Kids on the Block’s audience share with the short-lived sitcom “The Guys Next Door.”  It only takes listening to a few of their songs to realize why most people don’t remember they ever existed, which probably suits recording artist Damon Sharpe just fine. Before he became a Grammy- and ASCAP award-winning producer, songwriter and DJ, he paid the rent with this short-lived gig.

That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Many boy bands are created by enterprising producers looking to manufacture stardom using renditions of a well-worn formula of dreamboat archetypes. They are live performers first, though.  

(Michael Ochs Archives via Getty) Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones

In Schneider and Rafelson’s initial vision, Peter, Mike, Micky and Davy were simply characters living out whimsical two-dimensional adventures built around musical interludes. Ask me to describe any episode’s plot off the top of my head, and I couldn’t. But their music is forever.

“The Monkees” ran for only two seasons, from 1966 to 1968. During that period, the quartet disparagingly nicknamed the Pre-Fab Four made music history, even influencing movies with their post-TV series feature “Head,” the Jack Nicholson-written and produced film that eventually achieved minor cult status.

People still sing along to the Neil Diamond-penned “I’m a Believer,” “The Last Train to Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer,” all of which shot to No. 1 on the charts. Those interludes also foreshadow the music videos that defined the 1980s.

But the musical cuts that earned them cred as stealthy proto-punkers are “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” and Dolenz’s “Randy Scouse Git,” thrashers that had grade school kids leaping off their parents’ couches for reasons they may not have understood until many years later.

These details are crumbs of the fascinating lore surrounding The Monkees. What impresses me most is their ripple effect on TV and music. Without them, “The Partridge Family” may never have rolled out of their driveway. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats may never have become American animation classics, with the former snagging a radio hit with 1969’s “Sugar, Sugar.”  

Much of the appeal of “The Monkees” was that its live-action stars were as animated as every other show in the after-school TV blocks that programmed it. They were eternal cool kids, which people celebrated and mourned when Jones’ sudden death in 2012 sparked a multitude of ruminations on what he and the band meant to a generation.  Tork died in 2019, followed by Nesmith in 2021, leaving Dolenz to carry the band’s legacy to this day. He’s still touring.

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However, in a recent interview with AARP, Dolenz emphasized that The Monkees were never a group in the conventional sense. “It was a musical comedy television series about these four guys that wanted to be a band,” he said.

He noted that on the TV show, the band never actually became famous.  “It was the struggle for success that was important, and I think helped endear it to all these kids around the world,” he said, “which does, of course, beg the question of how we could afford a Malibu beach house. But that’s Hollywood.”

Pre-Fab, but still fabulous.

The post The Monkees was our first boy band appeared first on Salon.com.