Throughout this search, I was reminded of the ingenuity of television’s most provocative voices at the midcentury mark. As noted by the late John Frankenheimer, who directed several Serling scripts for big and small screens, there were no old days when he and other television pioneers like Serling got their start. “We were the old days,” he said. Circumnavigating censors at that time was commonplace. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, Serling recounted his frustrations in trying to bring an unvarnished account of the murder of Emmett Till to air on The United States Steel Hour in 1956. After the location was shifted from Mississippi to New England and even Coca-Cola bottles were removed from the set to satisfy sponsors’ fears of a Southern connotation, Serling knew he needed to escape even further, to other planets if necessary, to smuggle his socially conscious messages onto American airwaves. Less than three years later, The Twilight Zone was born.