So, a few days ago, I talked a bit about how police procedural portrayal on television was largely shaped by Jack Webb, an evangelist for the police force, including the then horribly corrupt LAPD, as a force of good and a noble profession worth reverence. https://twitter.com/WillMcAvoyACN/status/1272665935317471233

I want to take a few minutes to talk about a playwright who wanted to tackle the topic of race and injustice on the new medium of television in the late 50s, and the censorship he faced when producing the show. I only ask that if you know how this story ends, you not spoil it.

So, the following is a THREAD about a playwright, network censorship in the 1950s, the intersection of race and violence and televisions role in telling those stories. It will feature some vivid descriptions of violent crimes.

Our story begins with Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old boy who traveled from Chicago to Mississippi during the summer of 1955. There are multiple versions of the inciting event, but it is generally agreed that Till made a audible reaction to a married white woman's appearance.

Three days later, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam kidnapped Till, beat him and pistol whipped him. They then dragged him to the river where they forced him to strip naked before shooting him in the head. They then desecrated his corpse and threw it in the river.

Till's story became national news when his body was shipped home to Chicago and, in order to show how her son was treated, his mother had an open casket funeral. LOOK Magazine ran uncensored photos of his mutilated corpse. Civil Rights activists rallied to the cause of justice.

But Mississippi was not ready for Civil Rights to come to their towns in 1954. The town where Till was lynched rallied around Bryant and Milam. The jury was all-white and all local. They deliberated for a little over an hour before reaching a verdict of not guilty.

Bryant and Milam weren't just free men, they were heroes in their town. They sold the rights to their story and openly confessed to the crime. Since they had already been tried and found not guilty, they could not be re-tried.

Bryant and Milam would later tell their story, to LOOK Magazine, and would profit from the telling. Their confession led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which allows the Federal Government to take over for local law enforcement is failing to protect civil rights.

A playwright watching all this unfold became obsessed with the idea of the town rallying behind Bryant and Milam, two men who proclaimed their innocence while openly admitting to having kidnapped Till--a crime they were ultimately never even tried on.

Now this playwright knew that the story of Till could not be told directly--he knew from experience that no network would accept a straightforward deception of racial injustice on television in 1956. So he developed another story that would serve as an allegory.

The teleplay focused on the murder not of an elderly Jewish pawnshop owner, who is murdered by "a neurotic malcontent who lashed out at something or someone who might be materially and physically the scapegoat for his own unhappy, purposeless, miserable existence.”

“It struck me at the time that the entire trial and its aftermath was simply ‘They’re bastards, but they’re our bastards,’” the playwright would later say. His wrote a play where the murderer wasn't just a person but a regional idea that the area would rally around and celebrate.

But the playwright gave an interview, and the interviewer, picking up on the allegory, commented on the similarity. The playwright could only respond "if the shoe fits".

As you might imagine, the teleplay, as originally written, never made it to television.

The script went through a page one rewrite. At least 30 people from the network reviewed the script and highlighted changes that needed to be made. The victim was no longer an elderly Jewish man, but instead a nameless foreigner. The killer an American boy momentarily gone wrong.

Anything even remotely Southern in the original script was removed. The setting, which was originally set in a nameless town, was moved to New England. The final result was a program called “Noon on Doomsday” which was largely a mess that was well acted but had nothing to say.

And if this story were to end here it would be a tragedy. One that is all-too-typical of Hollywood and television in the 1950s.

But I suppose you know by now that this story is not typical. I'm sure some of you already know the ending here, and some of you have guessed.

The playwright was both discouraged and emboldened by his experience. He decided to create a television show for the type of story he wanted. One that could tackle heavy topics of the day via allegory and metaphor.

The playwright was Rod Serling. The show was The Twilight Zone.

And as a result, science fiction has become the genre of television where, through allegory, social and political issues can be discussed and dissected. His progressive stance also left a legacy on the genre felt for generations, even today.

If Rod Serling had not had such an awful experience trying to tell this story, would science fiction be the socially aware, politically active genre that it largely remains to this day?

How much of our society can be traced back to the lynching of Emmett Till?

The Civil Rights movement existed before Till's murder, but the funeral and trial brought it to the forefront of many American's minds with the access to the brutal reality of what was happening. Rosa Parks cited Till's lynching as part of her motivations for her actions.

History is created in moments, and those moments cause ripples through time that often outlive those who spark the first motions.

Something to ponder as we perhaps find ourselves at another such watershed moment.

What stories are you telling, and how are you telling them?

Thanks for indulging me for another thread on classic television and its connection to modern day life. I promise I don't have any other long stories like this planned on the subject.

If you want to read more about Serling and "Noon on Doomsday" here are a few links that I used when writing this thread:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/early-run-censors-led-rod-serling-twilight-zone-180971837/
https://rodserling.com/noon-on-doomsday-1956-reviewed/
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/1/3078/files/2012/06/Article-for-Activity-2-Submitted-for-their-approval-Rod-Serl.pdf

And now, just for my own knowledge, did you know the "twist" that was coming?