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SYFY WIRE Rod Serling

Why This Classic Episode of The Twilight Zone was Delayed Almost 3 Months from its Original Air Date

Even in its time, The Twilight Zone was eerily prescient.

By Josh Weiss

On February 7, 1964, The Twilight Zone  (airing regularly on SYFY) officially crossed the halfway mark on its fifth and final season with the airing of "Night Call." Adapted by series mainstay Richard Matheson from his own short story "Long Distance Call," the episode tells the story of Elva Keene (Gladys Cooper in her third TZ appearance), a lonely old woman who begins to receive strange calls in the night from a ghostly-sounding man.

After several complaints to the phone company, which disregards her growing fear as the innocent ramblings of an elderly mind, Elva traces the phantom caller to the grave of her late fiancé, Brian Douglas. He died in a grisly car crash 30 years prior a week before they were to be married. Elva was behind the wheel when the vehicle hit a tree and sent her soon-to-be-husband through the windshield, tearing him to pieces. She's carried the guilt for decades of loneliness, but finds some solace in the fact that she'll be able to talk to Brian again. But when he calls back, Mr. Douglas vows to leave Elva alone after her repeatedly frightened demands that the calls stop.

Like Henry Bevis (Burgess Meredith) in "Time Enough at Last," Elva is left to plead with a cruel and ironic universe as creator Rod Serling waxes poetic on humanity's cosmic responsibility. Still, it's a rather mean-spirited ending for a character who acted like any rational person would if they started receiving messages from beyond the grave. "To have permanent solitude visited on her as a result of a perfectly natural frailty seems extremely unjust," writer Marc Scott Zicree points out in The Twilight Zone Companion. He goes on to say that the ending of the televised adaptation is a lot more tame than the original short story, which ends with the dead man promising to pay Elva a Monkey's Paw-style visit in person.

Interestingly, "Night Call" was originally slated to air in late November 1963, but was delayed by nearly three months as the result of a national tragedy. You can probably guess what that tragedy was.

How the assassination of President John F. Kennedy delayed The Twilight Zone episode "Night Call" by almost three months

John F. Kennedy rides with other passengers in an open top car.

As fate would have it, the episode's original premiere was set for November 22, 1963 — the very day on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Naturally, all of the major television networks reshuffled their regular programming slates to cover the unfolding tragedy (famously reported on by journalism legend Walter Cronkite) and pay deference to the nation's fallen leader, whose funeral took place three days later.

“The only thing on television anywhere in the country was the Kennedy assassination,” former CBS News anchor Dan Rather told The Los Angeles Times in 2023 while marking the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. In this blog post from the University of Oregon, he added: "The Kennedy Assassination was the day that the television became the new national hearth around which people gathered when there were important events… and from that moment on, television became dominant as a news source for the country."

Besides, it would have been incredibly insensitive on the part of CBS to show an episode of television involving the story of a man who died horrifically in a vehicular setting. Even in its time, The Twilight Zone was eerily prescient.

The Twilight Zone airs regularly on SYFY. Check the schedule for more details.