I've been watching old Alfred Hitchcock re-runs from '63 and '64. I must have seen some of these as a kid, but I've forgotten them all. On the night of 10 August I saw "The Magic Shop." What struck me was how similar in theme this is to the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life."
The very next morning I checked to see if a Twilight Zone episode was airing on the Sci Fi channel. There was, and it happened to be "It's a Good Life." So that is the coincidence, and you can make of it what you will.
Hitchcock is good, but he can't hold a candle to Serling. Rod Serling's 1959-1964 series was and is TV at its very best. The best of the episodes are inexhaustibly rich especially 50 years later. They provide an insight into the speech patterns, the mores, the sartorial habits, the politics, and the cinematography of the day. More importantly, many of them are morality tales that convey important moral truths and life lessons. Serling was above all a moral teacher. We have nothing like this on TV today. What we have are endless quantities of degrading garbage.
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