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I enjoy these discussions, too, Bela. Perry Mason is blocked where I live due to a local station owning the exclusive rights, thus MeTV substitutes Mission Impossible instead. That one premiered the same year as Star Trek, became the hit that ST never was on prime time, and it ran for something like seven years. I can still occasionally watch a first season episode but I felt that the show began to slip when Steven Hill was replaced by Peter Graves. Nothing against Graves here but he lacked Hill's authority, was a more conventional hero type. Still, so long as Landau and Bain were on hand the show had some good qualities. When they left, it fell apart IMO. Apparently the ratings were good enough to keep it going for another three or four seasons. It must be the longest running of the secret agent type shows of its era. Most of them didn't last all that long. The Man From UNCLE, which it would be fun to see again (the first two seasons especially) had a four year run, I Spy, three. The secret agents were bigger in feature films, and the genre, such as it was, did far better in that format, with James Bond getting his share of competition from Harry Palmer, then Matt Helm, and a host of one offs.

Those spy flicks are products of their time, and to me feel locked in their time, the way the action heroics of, among others, Schwarzenegger and Stallone, seem locked in their time. The action heroes had a much longer run, 80s-90s; and they outlasted the Reagan era that spawned them, and in some ways seemed to be a response to it, a call to arms and all that. Those secret agent pictures belong to the 60s, and while they began when JFK was still alive (Dr. No was the sleeper of the year in 1962), it seems that they really began to gain a head of steam starting around 1964, around the same time as the Beatles and other British rock groups began to take off. It's like music and the movies were dominated by Brits and Europeans for a while. Everything American seemed old hat. Westerns went on life support around the same time, though they'd been slipping for a while. Was America turning against itself or was this a way of popularizing, so to speak, the Cold War? I think there were other issues at work, though the spy craze did sort of make the Cold War hip for a while, but not all or even most of those kinds of films dealt with U.S.-Soviet issues or with the threat of global Communism.

As to television during this period, it was in transition, nearing the end of its black and white golden age, what I think of as the real golden age of television; not the live shows of the very early days but the filmed shows that began to dominate after 1955. First it was the westerns, with some quality anthologies thrown in for good measure; and then the detective shows, with Warners leading the pack with their Sunset Strips and Hawaiian Eyes, but also the non-Warner two Blake Edwards shows some of us like to chat about around these parts, and also things like Richard Diamond and The Detectives. I suppose The Untouchables belongs, roughly, to this group. Perry Mason was the only "lawyer show" that really caught on back then (though The Defenders had a decent run a few years later). Things really began to heat up around 1960, with quality anthologies and dramas everywhere, and the Kildare and Casey doctor shows around the corner. The two Silliphant-Leonard Screen Gems show, Route 66 and Naked City, are a part of this mix, too. Things were going nicely for television drama for a few years there, with my only gripe being that anthologies, my favorite genre, appeared to be slipping during this period, even as some of the best of all were products of it. Then came the switch to color. I see no reason to carry on about it but to add that it killed at least two popular long running shows, Combat! and The Fugitive, and gave rise to Batman and the Camp TV craze that last only a year or two.

I watched the first part of The Twilight Zone (which didn't show the opening credits, or didn't where I live), didn't watch it all the way through. Serling's description of Fred Renard as a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of the national debut always gets a chuckle from me.

Some people who've reviewed the ep on the IMDB pointed out a certain mean spiritedness in its presentation of Renard, far and above the neediest character Mr. Pedott encountered. Of all the people in the bar he was the most in need of a ticket, a briefcase fully of money, a girl, something to brighten up his life. Instead, he has "murder in his eyes".

Since he was wasn't given much backstory, all we know of Renard is that he's had a hard life, that maybe there's something in him that makes him his own worst enemy, which is how it looks to me every time I watch that opening scene. As the episode reveals, he's a something for nothing guy who won't let up. Even when he wins it isn't enough. He's greedy, and he has a bullying streak. Fair enough, some guys are like that, but since the Zone often tells moral tales,--and this one has a moral center--Pedott could have perhaps have helped poor Renard out so as to make his bitter life more satisfying.

Sometimes, what we need isn't material, not something tangible; more like a change of heart, a new perspective on life and what it has to offer. Oh well. What You Need was a "hard Zone", not a soft one, which wasn't apparent in its opening moments, with the old peddler making like old St. Nick. I guess the casting of B actor Steve Cochran should have been a tipoff, but I like Cochran and find him often quite sympathetic, have seen him in films in which he played hard luck guys who, when given a chance to change, changed.