So, why didn’t Bradbury turn out to be a good creative fit for the show? Serling explained a bit of it in a 1975 interview (as quoted in Marc Scott Zicree’s “The Twilight Zone Companion”), saying that Bradbury was “a very difficult guy to dramatize, because that which reads so beautifully on the printed page doesn’t fit in the mouth — it fits in the head.” Bradbury’s dialogue was often poetic and impressive, but it’s the sort of thing that’d sound awkward coming out of a real person’s mouth. There are sci-fi writers like Ursula K. Le Guin who place a lot of importance on how the text sounds when spoken aloud, but Bradbury wasn’t one of them. The result was that he was a much better novelist than he was a screenwriter.
Then there was the sheer scale of Bradbury’s imagination, which often led to short stories that were sort of impossible to film without a massive budget. Much like how “Doctor Who” is often at its best when confined to a single (cheap) location, many of the best “Twilight Zone” episodes were filmed within just one or two sets, with most of the fantastical elements being implied or shown sparingly. For Bradbury’s “Here There Be Tygers,” which prominently featured a spaceship, a mobile oil drill, monsters, volcano eruptions, lightning storms, and so on, the story was just too expensive to properly bring to life on a 1961 CBS budget. “Any one of those I would have tackled without any particular trepidation,” said the show’s producer Buck Houghton, “but two of them would have been a worry and three of them would have been a deal-breaker.”