njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DaddySatyr
quote:
ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
I am not totally sure but fairly certain that Twilight Zone was William Shatner's first real prime time role.
That depends upon how you define "real" he did quite a few things in which he had small (2-3 episode) story arcs and he was on one of those weekly "SOME COMPANY PRESENTS" shows early on, also.
I think it's the role where he really developed his incredible over-acting style and that's why it stands out so much.
Peace and comfort,
Michael
Shatner did a lot of the Playhouse 90, US Steele hour and so forth drama series, many of which were done live. The sad part is a lot of these were lost, great dramas like 12 Angry Men and Marty and Requiem for a Heavyweight (written by none other then Rod Serling) were done for TV, it was experimental and it hadn't become fodder yet. Obviously there were a lot of crappy shows on TV, Leave it to Beaver did a lot of damage because it portrayed American life as this unreal fantasy that more then a few people really think was 'real life', but shows like the Twilight Zone, Outerlimits, Alfred Hitchcock presents an so forth were intelligently done for the most part.
I agree with Twilight Zone, it is cool seeing all these actors who later became famous. My favorites, in no particular order (I don't necessarily remember the titles)
-The one where the woman is geting plastic surgery, then you find out she is gorgeous but the rest of society is pig faced
-The Monsters are due on Maple Street
-Terror at 20,000 feet (Shatner)
-There was an episode about a down and out Trumpeter (Jack Klugman), who is despondent and ends up getting saved by none other then Gabriel (just call me Gabe).
-There was another one I think with Jack Klugman, where he is this hotshot pool player who thinks he is the best there ever is, and has a shadow over him because he never played Fats, who was supposed to be the greated. He exclaims one day he would give anything to play fats one time, to prove he was the better player...and it happens, `and when he wins he finds out it wasn't such a great thing. Interesting also because Fats was played by Jonathan Winters
-The episode with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Ashley, as the last survivors of a great war, on opposite sides, who end up coming together and falling in love.
-The electric grandmother, where a widower hires an android grandmother to take care of his kids.
-The one with William Shatner where he gets obsessed with the fortune telling machine
In some ways it is kind of interesting that Twilight Zone was made when it was, in the late 50's-early 60's, just out of the McCarthy era, many of the plots had direct parallels to what had gone on, the conformity of the 50's, gross materialism, fear (the Monsters are due on Maple Street, and another one where there is the scare of a nuclear attack and how people react, the one with the ad guy who is miserable and finds solace in a small town C 1880, that pokes a fork on the ideas of success then being promoted). Serling was a genius, it is only too sad he succumbed to DBS (death by smoking), though with what TV became I wonder if he would have been working. I wonder with the advent of cable programming if he could even have gone farther then he did back then.........imagine it with none of the limits commercial tv had and has.
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RE: TwilightZone marathon - 
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