How Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone Transformed TV, with Serling biographer Alan Sepinwall
Thursday, October 15, 2026
4:00 PM
The Paley Center for Media
25 West 52 Street, New York, NY 10019
Scheduled
About This Event
Alan Sepinwall, the television critic who spent 14 years at The Star-Ledger and served as Rolling Stone’s chief TV critic from 2018 to 2025, appears at The Paley Center for Media to discuss his biography of Rod Serling. Sepinwall will trace Serling’s trajectory from 1950s live dramas to The Twilight Zone and consider how the writer-producer’s fights over censorship, racism, and war helped shape television industry standards; Serling was nominated for nine Emmys, winning six.
About The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from October 2, 1959, to June 19, 1964. Each episode presents a standalone story in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone", often with a surprise ending and a moral. The phrase "twilight zone" has entered the vernacular, used to describe surreal experiences.
About the Artists
Rod Serling
Rod Serling was an American screenwriter and producer whose early reputation was built on taut live television dramas before he created the anthology series *The Twilight Zone*. In his work, he repeatedly tested the boundaries of what network television would permit, pushing against censorship and addressing social conflict head-on.
Alan Sepinwall
Alan Sepinwall is a television critic and author, known for a long run at The Star-Ledger and for serving as Rolling Stone’s chief TV critic from 2018 to 2025. In New York City, he appears at The Paley Center for Media to discuss his work on Rod Serling, tracing Serling’s path from 1950s live drama to the cultural afterlife of *The Twilight Zone*.