The Stopwatch Moralist
Available Formats:
Kindle eBook · Paperback · Free Reading PDF
The case for the drama that outlived its airdate, argued from the record and counted in the open. Available as a Kindle eBook and a cream-paper paperback with a page-numbered index, plus a complete free reading PDF with a linked contents and bookmarks, designed for desktop and tablet readers. The audiobook is in production.
About This Book
In the autumn of 1959, American television supported two kinds of drama: the live prestige theatre that died at the final fade, and a filmed half-hour in a genre costume that opened on October 2 with a voice promising a fifth dimension. One kind rehearsed all week and evaporated on contact with its week. The other was shot, printed, and shelved, and it has aired every night since. The Stopwatch Moralist asks why the survivorship ran this way, and answers from the record of the man who engineered it.
Rod Serling came out of the live theatre wounded three ways: the sponsor's memo, the censor's sandpaper, and a writer's credit that crossed the screen in a fraction of a second. Twice, in 1956 and 1958, he tried to tell the Emmett Till story on live television, and twice he watched thirty readers sand the play into another state, another decade, another people. His answer was engineering: the impossible premise stipulated inside the opening minutes, in the open, signed for at the top; the ending computed from the characters' own choices under that single pressure, never lowered from a crane in the last one; and the author's face in the frame every week, until the authorship could never be stripped, cut, or reassigned. The Greeks lowered the god onto the roof to cut the knot. Serling ran the crane in reverse. The god arrives early.
The book's signature instrument is the tally: every episode of the original run written or adapted by Serling, all ninety-two of them, ruled one at a time with the airdate and one line of justification attached. Sixty-three verdicts computed from character. Twenty gimmicks. Five nullifications. Four lotteries. The cheats are named and dated, the most beloved episode in the run conceded in the open, and the hostile reader is invited to do the count again, because a claim in a mood cannot be audited and a claim in a tally can.
And it prices the tragedy, because the tragedy is the proof: the man who built the one property in the medium's history that could not stop earning sold it, cheaply, at the exact hour its earning began, and died at fifty, a year and a half before the forms built for his talent pulled into the station. For readers of The Twilight Zone Companion, for writers who want their endings earned, and for anyone who ever wondered why one drama from 1959 plays tonight while its betters sit in vaults. The god arrives early. The endings are earned. The door still opens.
The god arrives early. The endings are earned. The door still opens.
The Long Verdict
The book runs like a trial. Movement I, The Vapor Economy, walks the wound: the theatre that burned its sets nightly, the Patterns encore the medium could only pay for at full price twice, and the two Till plays sanded beyond recognition on the record's own memos. Movement II, The God Arrives Early, proves the workaround: the stipulation timed with a stopwatch, The Obsolete Man receipted in full, and the lottery exception conceded at length, because the book rules against its own thesis in the open before it asks you to believe anything.
Movement III, The Deed and Its Sale, prices the turn: the rerun empire the machine made possible, the one masterpiece that slipped through a contract clause, and the deed sold at the dawn for a sum nobody in the family could later recall. Movement IV, The Long Verdict, reads the calendar: Roots a year and a half after the funeral, the subscription screen ninety-four days after the table, and the founder's name cleared at last of a charge the author himself once filed. The coda pays the personal debt, at a desk in Nebraska, forty-four years after the charge was delivered there.
The frame is personal and disclosed on the first page: the author coined the phrase the Twilight Zone Effect in 2010 and hung the school's crime on the founder's name, and this book is the correction of that filing, issued at the same reach as the error. The charge the book answers came from a mentor who had produced live drama at the summit of the form, and the answer is built the way he taught the author to build things: on the record, with the receipts, by the rules.
What the Book Contains
The reading editions run 367 pages in paperback dimensions, with the argument followed by a full working apparatus built for readers who want to audit the case.
Introduction: Permanence from Performance · the three roots, the asymmetry the shelf never asks, and the confession of the author's own 2010 error.
Movement I: The Vapor Economy · five chapters on the wound: the encore, the burning theatre, the two sandings, the lie on camera.
Movement II: The God Arrives Early · three chapters on the workaround: the stipulation, the Obsolete Man receipt, the lottery exception.
Movement III: The Deed and Its Sale · six chapters on the price: the rerun, the leak, the sale, Rochester.
Movement IV: The Long Verdict · two chapters on the accounting: the forms that arrived late, the founder's name cleared.
Coda: The Door Still Opens · the answer to Marshall, with love and at last in full.
Appendix: The Tally · ninety-two rulings with airdates and one-line justifications, printed so the count can be checked.
The working apparatus · a glossary of the book's terms, a note on sources with the sources by chapter, a bibliography, ten questions for discussion, and an index with real page numbers.
From the Text
The record preserves the echo and deletes the sound.
preachy the way a fire bell is loud
The endings were earned, the earnings were itemized, and the account was paid, and the payment's proof is playing somewhere tonight.
For Writers, Reading Groups, and the Fandom
If you teach dramatic writing or television history, this book was built to be argued with: the tally's rulings are printed one per line so a class can recount them, and the ten Questions for Discussion in the back matter run from the control group's cleanliness to what the count costs the object counted.
If you run a reading group or a fandom table, the appendix is the argument you can fight with episode by episode, and the fight is the point. Disagreement is welcome; the book was built to host its best objections.
Author Interview
Related Reading
From the Blogs
The Occupied Space from The Empty Space · Boles Blogs
The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych · Boles Blogs
The Claim I Filed in 2006 · Boles Blogs
Related Boles Books
Related Boles Properties
The United Stage · The Human Meme Podcast · Prairie Voice · Boles Blogs
About the Author
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. His titles include the Institutional Autopsy trilogy (Carceral Nation, The Claimed Body, Underwritten), The Broadway Machine, Miscast, The Apothecary of Mantua, Beautiful Numbness, Selling Saturday Morning, the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, The Borrowed Saint, The Occupied Space, and many other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.
Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.
See Also
The Occupied Space · Selling Saturday Morning · The God in the Wire · Fractional Fiction Series · About David Boles