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Rod Serling's daughter had no idea he was the creator of The Twilight Zone
Anne Serling was eight years old before she watched her first episode of The Twilight Zone.
How old were you when you finally understood what your parents did for a living? While Rod Serling is known to the whole world as the narrator and creator of The Twilight Zone, his fame was relatively unknown to his two daughters. Anne, his younger daughter, was born in 1955 and was still a child when The Twilight Zone began its run.
Her age, coupled with the series’ heavy subject matter, meant that Anne was left relatively in the dark about what her father did for a living, and certainly was not a regular watcher of the series. In Anne's book As I Knew Him, Anne recounted discovering what her father did for a living not from Rod Serling, but from a classmate on the playground.
“One day when I am in first or second grade, an older boy on the school playground runs up to me, taps me on the shoulder, close enough that I can see that the freckles on his right cheek form a perfect constellation," wrote Anne. "[He] asks, ‘Where does your dad get all of his ideas? Hanging from the ceiling?’ He runs off hooting and laughing, and I stand there, perplexed.”
Anne later pressed her father about the interaction.
“‘It’s a show I do that’s on every week,'" her father said. "'There are other writers too. It’s a series called The Twilight Zone. Some of the episodes are too old for you; some are maybe a little scary.’” He later took his daughter to an MGM set where The Twilight Zone was filmed, and a few years later, Anne was able to watch her first Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” In her book, she remembered watching the episode and the conflicting emotions that came with it.
“Although it is initially disturbing to think that my father is connected to this scary stuff, the thought almost immediately vanishes because this is not the dad I know," wrote Anne. "There is nothing scary about him.”
Anne didn't start properly watching The Twilight Zone until more than eight years after the death of her father. This time, Anne wasn’t necessarily consuming the show for the same reasons as the average Twilight Zone fan. She wrote, “I am sure I am doing this more to see my father than the actual show.”
At the time, Anne was still struggling with the loss of her father. But she found that the experience of watching him on the show, as well as seeing the more biographical elements in specific Twilight Zone episodes, helped to subdue her pain, and even connect her to her father once more. “I am still haunted by the void, by the reality of this empty space," wrote Anne. "Yet, these past thirty minutes spent watching this Twilight Zone have brought a reconnection with him in a most unexpected way.”
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