At RogerEbert.Com, Matt Zoller Seitz has a fantastic piece on Rod Serling and how he used genre to write about political, social and moral concerns. “‘The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.’ 

That’s a quote from Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, which ran on CBS from 1959-64. 

Today, The Twilight Zone is thought of first as a sci-fi and fantasy anthology, with a dash of the ‘morality play’ and cool twist endings. The show was definitely that. But it was also a vehicle for Serling and his collaborators to critique the United States’ reactionary, xenophobic, and materialistic behavior, which included the censure and even blacklisting of citizens with socialist or communist sympathies, and the enforcement of racial segregation through violence. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of lingering McCarthyism, Cold War paranoia, rampant racism, and relentless pressure to conform to a middle American, white, heterosexual, three-kids-and-a-suburban-house idea of normalcy. Serling knew how to make accessible, entertaining, politically astute art in an era that was repressive and conformist.”

Read more here.