SerlingFest Hails Rod Serling With ‘The X-Files’ Alum Frank Spotnitz

The residents of upstate New York will enter the fifth dimension — otherwise known as that eerie plane of sight, sound, and mind — this weekend with the eighth annual SerlingFest.

As its name suggests, the yearly event serves as an all-out celebration of the one and only Rod Serling, who grew up in the city of Binghamton (where SerlingFest has been held since 2017) prior to changing the very face of television with The Twilight Zone.

“Rod Serling is the patron saint of television to me,” this year’s keynote speaker, Frank Spotnitz (a former writer on The X-Files and creator of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle series), tells me over Zoom. “He’s singular. I can’t think of anybody else that occupies a place even remotely close to his … For any TV writer, this is the guy.”

While he can’t give too much of his speech away, Spotnitz teases a rumination on the enduring legacy of the groundbreaking anthology known for its weighty themes, plane-wrecking gremlins, alien cookbooks, and patented twist endings. “Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone are things that remain forever relevant,” he says. “It’s kind of astonishing how a show that premiered 1959 still works [in 2025]. It’s still part of the cultural conversation. I want to talk about that. I also want to not just look back, but look forward … because I think that’s the real achievement of the show, is that it is timeless.

“It rose above the level of politics. It’s not red or blue, as we would say today. It’s human, and it speaks to everyone. That’s what real art does and that’s why Twilight Zone persists. It doesn’t matter when it was made. It doesn’t matter what the film stock was, [the quality of] the sound recording, the style of editing, or the music. It still enchants and it just has grace.”

“What makes it enduring and endearing is the depth that Rod Serling put into it,” agrees Nicholas Parisi, President of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, author of Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination, and one of the main organizers behind SerlingFest. “Even today, we look at it and realize this was not just a show about monsters or science fiction concepts. It wasn’t just a smart show, it was a deep show. It was a show that had something to say, even in the episodes Rod Serling didn’t write. He always made sure his stories were about something. And if they weren’t about something, then we wouldn’t be talking about it now. The messages Rod Serling put into those episodes are still relevant today, if not more relevant today than they were then.”

Moreover, the series predicted the rise of prestige television decades before anyone truly grasped the boundless storytelling potential of the small screen format.

“[Rod] had this ambition for the medium that no one else had. He saw its power,” argues Spotnitz. “For most of my life, TV was considered the idiot box, the boob tube. It really was only in the ‘90s that TV started to become something that people thought had artistic value. But Rod Serling saw it in the ‘50s.”

“Quality survives, and The Twilight Zone was just such a well-produced show,” echoes Parisi. “It was well-written, well-acted, well-directed. These were people at the tops of their game. Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in television at the time, and that tends to attract talent. The best actors, directors, and producers wanted to be on The Twilight Zone. It was a quality production, from from soup to nuts.”

For Parisi, SerlingFest is not merely a “Twilight Zone convention.” The show, which ran for a total of five seasons between 1959 and 1964 on CBS — nabbing three Primetime Emmys along the way — is, of course, a major part of the proceedings, but it’s not the only part.

“We try to cover all aspects of Rod Serling’s career,” explains Parisi, noting that the Twilight Zone mastermind already had three Emmy wins “under his belt” by the time his most iconic endeavor arrived on the air. “This year, [we’ve subtitled] SerlingFest ‘In His Own Words,’ and we’re showing some really rare interviews that I’m sure no one there will have heard [before].”

Having Rod speak for himself isn’t too difficult, given the fact that he recorded everything, from scripts to correspondence, with his trusty Dictabelt machine. “He left a gigantic paper trail behind,” states Parisi. “And thankfully, they have been digitized.” Dictation became such a regular habit for Serling, that Richard Matheson worked it into his script for the Season 1 finale of The Twilight Zone: “A World of His Own.”

And even after Twilight Zone came to an end, Serling continued to work in Hollywood, creating the short-lived Western series, The Loner (starring Lloyd Bridges in the titular role); co-writing the screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes film; and moving over to NBC for his second anthology, Night Gallery, which marked the directorial debut of one Steven Spielberg. With the exception of Apes, however, none of Serling’s TZ follow-ups really found their way into the cultural zeitgeist.

“He wrote about 250 scripts that were produced — 92 of them are Twilight Zone episodes,” adds Parisi. “So you have like 150 other things that Rod Serling wrote. He was about a lot more than The Twilight Zone.”

“He struggled a lot … to try and get his voice out [there] and tell stories that were meaningful and about something,” Spotnitz says. “But he heroically stayed in the fight until the end.”

The complete schedule for SerlingFest 2025 is available here. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door.