Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone quite often covered serious topics, aiming its lens at society and its dysfunctional functioning in influential episodes like "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." Yet it wasn't those types of episodes that would prove to be its most controversial. In fact, the show rarely pushed buttons hard enough to really generate much in terms of controversy. There wasn't much that crossed the lines of what could or could not be featured on a network television show. Even still, there were a few episodes that ruffled feathers at the time, and a few that might do the same today.
That so few episodes angered people back then and so few 60 years later is a testament to how Serling's show was able to walk a fine line. One that allowed it to convey its messages and rarely display anything that would be considered in poor taste over half a century later (without a doubt a rarity for a 1960s television show).
Like with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, having a Black actor in the lead role of a The Twilight Zone episode didn't sit with every '60s-era viewer. Suffice to say, having a primarily Black cast is not a factor that would make "The Big Tall Wish" controversial now but did to a degree back in the day.
"To a degree" because this episode (as well as other episodes that incorporated Black actors in primary roles, e.g. "The Night of the Meek") helped The Twilight Zone win the Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations in 1961. Serling himself was proud of his show's incorporation of different races. In reference to the topic of casting Black actors, he said "Television, like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of the sin of omission...it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose."
Whenever The Twilight Zone went the comedic route over sticking with horror or sci-fi, it just didn't work. Comedy can be peppered in, but it just can't be the main focus. But, for the most part, the comedy just didn't work because it felt out of place and fell flat. The exception is "The Chaser," which makes the unfortunate error of judgment in tackling a very serious topic with a comedic tone.
The narrative follows a man who uses a potion on a woman that gets her to fall head over heels in love with him. In time, her forced "love" for him becomes irritating, and he plots to once more give her a potion. This time, though, one that will kill her. He doesn't go through with it after she reveals she's pregnant, and he also says that he couldn't have gone through with it anyway. But whether or not he would have gone through with it is irrelevant. He still essentially stole her free will, grew tired of her, then was going to steal her life. Even with a goofy tone it's far from funny stuff. Tales from the Crypt later adapted the same source material (the short story of the same name by John Collier), but there was a heftier price to pay for the manipulative male lead.
Featuring Peter Falk before he started playing the title role in Columbo, "The Mirror" is an episode of The Twilight Zone that was perhaps fine by '60s standards, but not so much today. It's an overall very solid look at how short-lived dictatorships are designed to be, and how much a price there is to be paid for ruling with an iron thumb, but it still features a white actor playing a Cuban man while wearing brownface.
The episode has also received some modern-day pushback for its stereotypical portrayal of Latin American characters. There's not much differentiation between the people we meet in the episode. So, while the narrative itself works, there were certainly better ways to go about its construction.
It was gutsy to air an episode about Nazism just fifteen years after the close of World War II, but that's exactly what The Twilight Zone did. "Deaths-Head Revisited" follows a former SS officer who returns to the concentration camp where he inflicted pain, suffering, and death on thousands of people.
There, he's put on trial by the shots of his victims, and the penalty of his guilty verdict is a series of illusions, each one tailored to the grotesque actions he committed against the camp's prisoners. Naturally, Americans had no problem seeing a Nazi gets his comeuppance, but the episode was never aired in Germany. It's certainly an impactful episode, one that is both rooted in a particular period of time yet holds an air of timelessness. Everyone who has been cruel should be forced to have a version of that cruelty shown to them up close and personal, but that's not often the case in reality. Good thing The Twilight Zone isn't based in reality.
Not many episodes of The Twilight Zone are considered outright failures of storytelling, but with 156 total episodes, that's somewhat inevitable. For instance, the final two episodes, "The Fear" and "The Bewitchin' Pool" fall within that category.
But there is perhaps no better example than the extremely silly "Black Leather Jackets," an episode that elicited eyerolls at the time and hasn't seen its standing improve over the course of 61 subsequent years. The show made extra-terrestrials work on occasion, e.g. in "To Serve Man," but having a trio of aliens dressed up as the Fonz simply didn't work. So really, "Black Leather Jackets" isn't offensive in the traditional sense, it's just a stretch of 22 minutes that sticks out like a lame sore thumb in a pool of episodes that are typically either good or very good.
Featuring a gut punch of a twist ending (the primary thing The Twilight Zone is known for), the dour "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is controversial on several fronts. For one, it's like The Outlaw Josey Whales in that its protagonist is a Confederate soldier. It's hard to feel a surplus of empathy for a character's plights if they're on the wrong side of history.
Two, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" really isn't an episode of The Twilight Zone, like how Tales from the Crypt's "Yellow" and "King of the Road" were technically produced for a show called Two Fisted Tales, but were just given to Tales from the Crypt when that show wasn't picked up. In the case of this The Twilight Zone episode, it's actually an Academy Award-winning French short film. As Serling says in his episode intro, "Tonight, a presentation so special and unique that for the first time in the five years we've been presenting The Twilight Zone, we're offering a film shot in France by others. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival of 1962, as well as other international awards, here is a haunting study of the incredible from the past master of the incredible, Ambrose Bierce." As mentioned, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" does come equipped with a twist ending, but it never quite feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
This episode of The Twilight Zone is without a doubt its most controversial, so much so that it was banned from TV for over 50 years. The episode aired once in May 1964, but wasn't shown again until 2016. You basically had to own The Twilight Zone box set DVD to view it. The reason can be simply summarized as its tough view of race relations. The narrative follows George Takei's young Japanese-American Arthur Takamori, who is looking for work and thinks he's found it when he meets WWII veteran Fenton.
Fenton invites Arthur up to his attic for a beer, and amidst all the clutter in that attic, there's a particularly interesting katana. At first things are peaceful enough, but in time Fenton starts saying some bigoted things and Arthur keeps finding himself holding this katana. Worse yet, the door to the attic is locked, even though it doesn't even have a lock. They're trapped together up there until they can work through their differences or Arthur does what the sword is telling him to do: kill Fenton. Neither option really pans out, but both men end up dead.