The Earnest Ironist

Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination

By Nicholas Parisi, University Press of Mississippi, $38

ROD SERLING’S TALENT AT USING CLICHéS WAS ONE OF THE things that, paradoxically enough, made him such an innovator in “Golden Age” television. His teleplays teem with personages that populated American pulp hokum—ballplayers in slumps, washed-up prizefighters, sentimental drunks, buttoned-up-and-down corporate men mourning the glory days that never were, military martinets, and more. To these characters he applied a sincere if facile humanism before subjecting