Even before he began work on The Twilight Zone, Serling was a well-respected television writer with a flair for dramatic and topical scripts. He had won three Emmy awards for dramas such as Requiem for a Heavyweight, but as his widow Carolyn recalls, he was interested in telling stories that reflected his views on the America he saw around him.

But he met some resistance from the networks. One of his pre-Twilight Zone teleplays was based on the story of Emmett Till, a young black man lynched in the South. Sponsors balked at the idea of advertising alongside something so provocative, and the network revised the script before it could hit the air, turning the victim into an old man in the East.

Frustrated with the reaction of the network, Serling came up with a creative solution. Instead of tossing up issue-laden scripts like softballs that executives could easily hammer out of the park, he would fire his controversy under their radar, disguised as harmless fantasy.

In the original pilot for The Twilight Zone, writer Rod Serling came up with an interesting idea. What if a man from 1958 kept waking up in Hawaii on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor? What if he tried to warn everybody of the coming disaster? And what if nobody listened?

"The Time Element" was written when Serling was still just in college, but it included many of the elements that later episodes of The Twilight Zone would come to exemplify. Mind-bending twists, lonely or confused characters in unfamiliar surroundings, and maybe most importantly, internal commentary on the way these characters deal with the strange situations in which they find themselves. Serling rewrote his early script and sent it to CBS as a potential pilot, but the network tossed the concept onto the shelf.

Serling knew he could use the more fantastic elements of science fiction to address the issues that plagued America without setting off alarm bells under the caps of cautious network executives. Even as he prepared to launch the series, Serling insisted that the new show -- as far as divisive content was concerned -- would be business as usual for the networks.

This was Serling's way of soothing a nervous -- and very powerful -- audience. But for Serling, ever the thoughtful writer, the particular phrasing of that response was telling. He was, in fact, creating the illusion of non-confrontation. And it worked.

All that changed once The Twilight Zone was beamed to television sets across America. Over the course of five seasons and 156 episodes, Serling managed to tackle serious issues from ideals of beauty to paranoia and civil strife, from fear of death to the dangers of technology. And all within a relatively new medium that didn't even realize it was ready to address such themes. Unlikely? Impossible? It might seem like a minor miracle, but it actually happened. And all within the realm of The Twilight Zone.