The Evolution of Serling's Characters
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Rod Serling
!!!deleted!!! (11230246) — 13 years ago(July 12, 2012 01:31 PM)
Has anyone noticed that the characters Serling wrote later in his life are much different than his early ones? Take, for instance, Gart Williams in "A Stop at Willoughby." He was a pretty likeable guy, and you felt sorry for him because he was stuck in a crummy job that he just couldn't take anymore. You root for him, you want him to find out more about Willoughby and find peace at last. He was a sympathetic character. But all of Serling's later characters all became these hateful, wretched beings that deserved no sympathy and, in typical Serling style, they each get what's coming to them.
With the exception of "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar," almost every character Serling wrote on "Night Gallery" were all the same: mean, cold-hearted people who interact with equally cold-hearted people. What happened to Serling's kind-hearted good guys, the guys we wanted to see succeed? What do you think influenced him to change his writing so drastically? -
ck1-5 — 13 years ago(January 04, 2013 05:39 AM)
I'd say it was a result of his dissolutionment with Hollywood and life in general.by the time "Night Gallery" came along, he had a pretty pessimistic opinion of mankind. I remember reading a Serling quote from late in his life that went something like (I'm paraphrasing), "The older I get, the more I yearn for five cent ice cream cones". He may have died relatively young, but he lived long enough to sit around wishing for life to be "the way it used to be". Looking for his own Willoughby, I guess.
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!!!deleted!!! (11230246) — 13 years ago(January 04, 2013 12:34 PM)
Interesting observation. I can definitely see how that would impact his writing. I haven't read a lot of interviews from later in Serling's life, but even when he started, he was Hollywood's "angry young man." I guess all that anger just started to build up.