Marc Scott Zicree

First off, I need to confess my bias: I think that The Twilight Zone is absolutely one of the best television programs ever made. I am just old enough to remember watching some episodes during the original run of the show and even now, some 40 years later, I never miss one of those great 24-hour re-run marathons that are broadcast on New Year’s Day or the Fourth of July. At its best, the series provided an almost perfect blend of edginess, creepiness, thought-provoking ideas, and humor. To show more this day, just the mention of episodes such as 'It’s a Good Life', 'Nick of Time', 'The Hitch-Hiker', 'A Stop at Willoughby', 'The Monsters are Due on Maple Street', 'Long Distance Call', or 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' is enough to evoke strong images and poignant memories of watching them countless times.

So, it probably does not come as a huge surprise that I love this book. Organized as a reference guide to the series, The Twilight Zone Companion gives the reader wonderful synopses and critical commentaries—along with cast lists, production credits, air dates, and black-and-white photos—for every episode shown during its five-season run. A particularly nice touch that Zicree adds is the verbatim text of Rod Serling’s iconic opening and closing monologues for each show. To the author’s credit, the research and writing throughout the volume is thorough and loving, but never overtly sentimental. This is a book that any fan of the program needs to have on his or her shelf. show less

This companion to the classic TV series starts out with a couple of introductory chapters. The first one seems to be about Rod Serling's pre-Twilight Zone career, but unfortunately the falling-apart library-sale copy I have is missing most of those pages, so all I can say about it is that at the point where I was able to come in, it was in the middle of a really fascinating discussion of the amount of influence sponsors were able to wield over TV content at the time. (And I thought today's show more product placement was bad!) The second chapter is about the origins of the show, and then the bulk of the book consists of an episode guide, with occasional short features on various aspects of the production or profiles of people who wrote or directed for the show. For each episode, there's a still photo, a list of credits, a short summary, transcripts of Serling's open and closing narration, a few comments from the book's author on the quality and most interesting points of the story, and usually some quotes from the scriptwriter or other people involved in the production. It's well put together, informative and interesting, making it a fun read for anyone who's a fan of the show. (And, really, who isn't? It's The Twilight Zone!)

The only bad thing about this is that it's instilled in me a burning desire to go back and (re)watch all of it, even the not-very-good episodes. I keep clicking over to Amazon and ogling the "complete definitive collection" boxed set and just barely managing to talk myself out of spending the money for it. But I don't think my willpower is going to hold out very long... show less

I read through this while binge-watching TTZ series before it's dropped from Netflix at the end of the month. It's an excellent guide, providing an overview and some history on the program, but even better, lists every episode with notes on all aspects - writers, directors, actors, production, and interesting anecdotes. I only give it four stars because the order in which the episodes are listed is confusing. It seems to be by aired date, which apparently doesn't correspond to the episode show more number. and the episodes aren't listed in the table of contents, so it took some page shuffling to find a particular episode that I was watching. This is probably a non-issue in e-book format, though.

Paperback, came with a DVD set for Season 1. show less

Well organized and put together. The author's personal position as a Hollywood insider certainly added a degree of legitimacy to the work, in general. However, the work is seriously marred by the fact we read mostly about Marc Zicree's personal opinions and anecdotes and very little about the actual twilight zone episodes. Indeed, some episodes have no more than a paragraph devoted to them, all of which is merely the author's opinion of the episode. Very unsatisfying. This deficiency is not show more helped by the fact that Mr. Zicree seems to passionately hate at least 50% of all twilight zones made, and whether or not his criticisms are valid, it is NOT what a die hard Twilight Zone fan wishes to pay money to read about. They wish to relive the pleasure of the episode by learning more indepth details, which they may not have known about, had they not read your book. Rather than expend ten pages on your withering dissection of a particularly reviled twilight zone episode, Mr. Zicree, perhaps we could have trivia about the actors, details about how the production of said episode went (including all relevant bloopers or mix-ups) or something else, similar, which would appeal to actual Twilight Zone fans. For a true fan, the excessively long passages devoted to negative criticism are so distracting they make the reading almost unbearable. Surely, you are aware that fans would prefer trivia or other snippets of information, which really are not all that hard to research, particularly for an insider, like yourself. True fans, such as I describe here, were your target market, Mr. Zicree, so either you need to hire a better marketing consultant, or you dropped the ball, as far as appropriate book concept goes. It's my understanding Mr. Zicree had a veritable monopoly on the Twilight Zone manual market for many years and that's likely why it was so popular, in the 80s and 90s. Luckily, nowadays, there are many competing works that cover the subject in a way much more appealing to those of us who actually like the Twilight Zone. show less