The voice was unmistakable. The stories were "weird" and "spooky," the twist endings intriguing. But there was an added element that happened to be a rare commodity in television entertainment—a moral point of view. Rod Serling … was always trying to get a point across.

The format was pop science fiction, but the themes were the basic operatives of the human mind. The characters either rose to their situations or were destroyed by them. While other shows portrayed World War II as an epic of brave men in combat, Twilight Zone gave us "Death's Head Revisited," the story of a Nazi commandant returning to Dachau and there confronted by the ghosts of the inmates he slaughtered. And Serling's humanity always showed through, as in a Christmas episode, "Night of the Meek": A drunken loser whose only joy is playing a department store Santa each year, finds the real...