Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?

Season One

Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?
Original Airdate: October 2, 1959



Plot: An amnesiac wanders through a deserted town, trying to piece together who he is and where everyone has gone. He grows increasingly paranoid and eventually breaks down – at which point Air Force officials pull the plug on what is revealed to be an experiment in isolation in preparation for manned exploration of the moon.


"Where is Everybody?" was actually the third script Rod Serling wrote as a pilot for The Twilight Zone. The first, "The Time Element," was made into an episode of Desilu Playhouse. The second, a story about a future society that euthanizes its senior citizens, was deemed too depressing to sell a show to sponsors. Immediately after it was turned down, Serling wrote "Where is Everybody?" a story that he concocted while walking around an empty cityscape on a studio back lot. Reportedly, Serling grew to dislike the episode as the years went on; he cited the protagonist's running monologue as unrealistic and thought the ending was too straightforward. When the episode was shown before sponsors, Serling was not the narrator. A fill-in was selected while the studio decided who to cast. Orson Welles was considered, but demanded too much money. Eventually (thankfully), Serling was chosen.

The pilot's title card was also quite different. It looked like this:


Instead of the classic that was shown on television:



I think this was the perfect episode to premiere television's most beloved series. I have "The Time Element," and I'll get around to reviewing that too, but "Where is Everybody?" is far and away the superior script. It leaves so much to the imagination that it could possibly be any sort of science fiction story. You can't help but run the scenarios through your head: was the town evacuated for some reason? Were the townspeople abducted by aliens? Did everyone die of disease, causing the survivors to bury them before packing up to leave? And then there are the little hints that someone is operating behind the scenes: a warm pot of coffee left on the stove, a burning cigar. You constantly feel that the protagonist is one step behind some shadowy figure, and he slowly starts to feel that he's being watched. Had The Twilight Zone begun with an alien story or a time travel story, the audience would have expected more of the same the next week. Because there are so many possible scenarios until the matter is resolved at the end, the possibilities for where the show could go next were endless.