In the book “The Twilight Zone Companion” by Marc Scott Zicree, Serling’s wife Carol revealed that he sold the rights to CBS shortly after the series went off the air because the network claimed they would never recoup the costs of the series, which “often went over budget.” She points out that because of syndication, CBS ended up recouping the costs “many, many times” — and if Serling had held onto his rights, he presumably would have shared in that eventual monetary windfall. But the bigger reason Serling hated seeing the show in syndication was there were often significant cuts made that could sometimes make the story impossible to understand. Sometimes the cuts were because of content, but more often they were done in order to add in more commercial time, as the number of commercial breaks increased over the years. When Serling saw the season 1 episode “Walking Distance” on a local TV station, he said:
“You wouldn’t recognize what series it was. Full scenes were deleted. It looked like a long, protracted commercial separated by fragmentary moments of indistinct drama.”
Serling’s frustration was understandable, as local stations would often cut the shows for time themselves, which means there are a multitude of different versions of “The Twilight Zone” episodes out there. Sadly, it looks like history will repeat itself as new media slowly adopts old media models again and streamers start looking to air their shows in syndication, as many of those shows weren’t cut for commercials. Sure, it’ll be nice for new audiences to have a chance to see certain series, but it comes at the loss of potentially important scenes.