Dreamt up by the legendary Rod Serling as a way to avoid the strict network controls and interference from programme sponsors that he had become increasingly tired of, the first season of The Twilight Zone aired on CBS in 1959.

Like many shows of the era on both sides of the Atlantic, The Twilight Zone was an anthology series, with each individual episode being a self-contained story with unique characters. Unlike many of those other shows, however, the setting for its stories was a fantasy world where ordinary people met the extraordinary, generally with a science fiction twist in the tale, although the supernatural also got a fair look in. And into this fantasy world Serling finally found himself able to surreptitiously deal with the issues and themes that had previously been out-of-bounds on American television.

The majority of the episodes were written by Serling himself, although other writers such as Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson and Earl Hamner, Jr also contributed scripts to the series — a number of which would be based on existing short stories. With accompanying narration from Serling topping and tailing every episode, each of the first three seasons consisted of thirty-minute episodes. Season Four saw a change of direction as the programme changed to a sixty-minute format. The final year, Season Five, saw a return to thirty-minute episodes.

In total, 156 episodes (including An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge which was actually a French production) were made, in the process producing a series which still stands up to repeated viewing today, and whose theme tune and title are now often the first things that spring to mind for many people when something out-of-the-ordinary occurs. The series is also notable for securing Rod Serling two successive Emmy awards for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama, in 1960 and 1961.

The Twilight Zone wasn't to be Rod Serling's last anthology success on television, however, as November 1969 saw the debut on NBC of Night Gallery which concentrated far more on horror and the supernatural, as well as relying far more heavily on adaptations of existing stories. The series ran until 1973, although it never quite managed to replicate the success and critical acclaim of The Twilight Zone. Serling died two years later whilst undergoing heart surgery, aged just fifty, and is now regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of television science fiction.

A movie version of The Twilight Zone, cunningly titled Twilight Zone: The Movie, was released in 1983 and consisted of four seperate stories — three of which were based on episodes of the original television series, although only one of them was based on a story which had been written or adapted by Rod Serling. The opening story, Time Out, was written and directed by John Landis and has now become infamous for a tragic accident in which a helicopter filming the action crashed to the ground killing the star of the story, Vic Morrow, as well as two child actors. The remaining three segments were re-makes of Kick the Can, It's a Good Life and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, which were directed by Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller respectively.

Two years later and The Twilight Zone series returned to its true home on television when CBS picked up a new version of the series. However, unlike the original series which had consisted of a single story in either a thirty or sixty-minute timeslot, the revival was made up of two, or sometimes even three stories within a sixty-minute episode. The series unsurprisingly retained its familiar theme tune (reworked by Merl Saunders and The Grateful Dead), and familiar names such as Wes Craven, Joe Dante and William Friedkin were brought in to direct a number of episodes. Familiar science fiction names writing the episodes included the likes of Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, David Gerrold and Rockne S O'Bannon.

Season One consisted of twenty-four episodes (containing a total of fifty-nine stories), while Season Two saw a slight change as the series reurned to the classic one story per thirty-minute episode format. Unfortunately, despite the talent both in front and behind the camera, the series failed to find an audience and was cancelled by CBS for a second time. However, that wasn't to be the final end for the 1980s incarnation of The Twilight Zone. Having been cancelled after just two seasons there weren't enough stories to sell the series into syndication, so the decision was taken to produce a third season of thirty episodes in Canada which could be sold directly into syndication along with the earlier stories. Unfortunately, as with the fourth and final season of Airwolf which was produced for the USA Network under similar circumstances, the end result just looked cheap — unsurprising as it was made on a far slimmer budget than the existing episodes. The series is probably now best known for including a number of episodes from future-Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski.

Things then fell quiet again until 1994, when The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics was produced as a one-off special for CBS. This two-hour TV movie consisted of two seperate stories: Where the Dead Are which was an unproduced script of Serling's, and The Theater which was written by Richard Matheson and based on a unused story treatment by Serling. Despite there being some talk of a number of follow-ups, nothing was to come of it.

The following year saw The Twilight Zone's 1960s rival The Outer Limits beginning a new seven-season run on television, but with that anthology series coming to an end in 2001, it almost seemed inevitable that The Twilight Zone would emerge from the shadows once more. Beginning in September 2002, a new thirty-minute series was produced for UPN, but yet again the modern interloper was greeted by low ratings and a less than rapturous welcome by fans of the original series. It was cancelled after just one season consisting of forty-three episodes. As ever there were a number of links to the original series with remakes of both The Monsters are Due on Maple Street and Eye of the Beholder, and also a sequel to the classic episode It's a Good Life which reunited Bill Mumy and Cloris Leachman in the roles they had first played some forty-two years earlier.