It is the first of three revivals of Rod Serling's acclaimed 1959–64 television series, and like the original it featured a variety of speculative fiction, commonly containing characters from a seemingly normal world stumbling into paranormal circumstances.
The multi-segment format liberated the series from the usual time constraints of episodic television, allowing stories ranging in length from 8-minutes to 40-minute mini-movies.
Even so, the network was slow to consider a revival, shooting down offers from the original production team of Rod Serling and Buck Houghton and later from American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.
Their hesitation stemmed from concerns familiar to the original series: The Twilight Zone had never been the breakaway hit CBS wanted, so they should not expect it to do better in a second run.
"We were looking at the success of the original series in syndication and the enormous popularity of the Steven Spielberg films," said CBS program chief Harvey Shepard.
Despite the lukewarm response to Twilight Zone: The Movie, a theatrical homage to the original series directed by a quartet of directors headed by John Landis and Steven Spielberg, CBS decided to move forward with a new Twilight Zone series under the supervision of Carla Singer, the CBS Vice President of Drama Development in 1984.
Writers and filmmakers involved included Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin, Rockne S. O'Bannon, Jeremy Bertrand Finch, Paul Chitlik and directors Wes Craven and William Friedkin.
Casts featured stars including Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Shelley Duvall, Season Hubley, Morgan Freeman, Martin Landau, Piper Laurie, Janet Leigh, Tom Skerritt, Ralph Bellamy, Louise Fletcher, Martin Balsam, William Atherton, Richard Mulligan, Danny Kaye, Norman Lloyd, Jonathan Frakes, Frances McDormand, John Carradine, Victor Garber, Maury Chaykin, Donald Moffat, Melinda Dillon, Tess Harper, George Wendt, Charles Martin Smith, Adrienne Barbeau and Fred Savage, among many others.
[3][4][5] The Twilight Zone debuted the night of September 27, 1985[6] to a warm reception: it won its Friday-night time slot in four of its first five weeks.
[7] "Paladin of the Lost Hour", an episode written by Harlan Ellison, won the 1987 Writers Guild of America Award for Anthology Episode/Single Program.
Executive producer Philip Deguere stated that CBS initially told him the show would air at 10 P.M., and therefore the earliest episodes were written with that time slot in mind.
[citation needed] The "Nackles" incident generated a flurry of press which ultimately proved inadequate to revive public interest in the series.
"I can see why people who were expecting The Twilight Zone were disappointed with it," said staff writer Michael Cassutt of the show's low ratings.
In regard to writing for the episode "The Girl I Married", J. M. DeMatteis commented "I have a feeling that the show that appears will not bear much relation to what I wrote.
Harlan Ellison was coaxed back to The Twilight Zone in the third season, and wrote what would be the third-to-last episode of the series, titled "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich".
Alan Brennert, one of the writer-producers who contributed to the series, wrote that the picture quality of the DVD set was "NOT a 'bad transfer'" but rather that the episodes were "shot on film, but edited on video.