Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" used aliens, robots, and time travel to talk about prejudice, war, conformity, and the bomb at a time when television rarely touched those subjects head-on. Serling had spent the 1950s fighting network censors over his live dramas. On another planet, he found he could say almost anything.
The original series ran five seasons, from 1959 to 1964, and produced 156 episodes. Most of them run 25 minutes. Many of them end with a twist so famous that viewers know the punchline before they've seen the setup (and the episodes still work anyway).
Hollywood has spent decades trying to bottle that formula again. A 1983 film produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis was followed by television revivals in 1985, 2002 and 2019, the last hosted by Jordan Peele. None has displaced the original.
For this list, we ranked the top 10 episodes of the original 1959-1964 series using IMDb user ratings as of October 2026, with ties broken by the number of user votes. The film and the revivals are not included. Keep reading to revisit old favorites, catch episodes you may have missed and see whether your personal picks made the cut.
1 / 10
#10. The Shelter
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- IMDb user votes: 4,300
- Director: Lamont Johnson
- Season 3, Episode 3
- Air date: Sept. 29, 1961
A small-town doctor's birthday dinner is interrupted by a radio bulletin: unidentified objects are headed toward the United States. The doctor has a bomb shelter in his basement, built for his family and no one else. The neighbors who teased him about it now want in. The alarm turns out to be false, but not before the friendships are beyond repair.
Jack Albertson, who played Grandpa Joe in "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," is one of the neighbors left pounding on the door.
2 / 10
#9. The Obsolete Man
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- IMDb user votes: 4,900
- Director: Elliot Silverstein
- Season 2, Episode 29
- Air date: June 2, 1961
In a totalitarian state that has outlawed books, a librarian is declared obsolete and sentenced to death. The state lets the condemned man choose how he will die and broadcasts the execution live. He has one more request: The chancellor who sentenced him must be in the room.
Burgess Meredith, who later played Mickey in the "Rocky" films, is the librarian. Fritz Weaver plays the chancellor. Meredith returns on this list at #4 in "Time Enough at Last."
3 / 10
#8. It's a Good Life
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- IMDb user votes: 5,400
- Director: James Sheldon
- Season 3, Episode 8
- Air date: Nov. 3, 1961
Six-year-old Anthony can read minds, and he rules his small town with them. Anyone who thinks a bad thought gets wished away "to the cornfield." The adults smile through clenched teeth and tell him everything he does is "real good." Billy Mumy, later of "Lost in Space," plays Anthony. Cloris Leachman plays his mother.
The episode is adapted from Jerome Bixby's 1953 short story. In 2003, it received a direct sequel, "It's Still a Good Life," with Mumy and Leachman reprising their roles. Time magazine ranked it third on its list of the show's best episodes, behind "Time Enough at Last" (#4 here) and "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (#5 here).
4 / 10
#7. Living Doll
- IMDb user rating: 8.7
- IMDb user votes: 4,400
- Director: Richard C. Sarafian
- Season 5, Episode 6
- Air date: Nov. 1, 1963
A man's wife brings home a talking doll for his stepdaughter, and he dislikes it immediately. Then the doll starts talking to him. "My name is Talky Tina, and I hate you." He tries a blowtorch. He tries a saw. Tina, with help from a flight of stairs, wins. Telly Savalas, a decade before "Kojak," plays the stepfather.
Tina was modeled on Mattel's Chatty Cathy, and she's voiced by June Foray, who also voiced Chatty Cathy (and Rocky the Flying Squirrel).
5 / 10
#6. Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
- IMDb user rating: 8.7
- IMDb user votes: 5,300
- Director: Montgomery Pittman
- Season 2, Episode 28
- Air date: May 26, 1961
Two state troopers follow the tracks from a reported flying saucer crash to a roadside diner, where a bus is stranded by a snowstorm and an unsafe bridge. The driver swears he had six passengers. There are seven people in the diner. The troopers try to work out which one is from another planet, while the alien quietly works on plans of its own.
Jack Elam and John Hoyt are among the suspects. The script name-drops Ray Bradbury, Serling's fellow science-fiction writer.
6 / 10
#5. The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
- IMDb user rating: 8.9
- IMDb user votes: 7,500
- Director: Ron Winston
- Season 1, Episode 22
- Air date: March 4, 1960
The power goes out on a tree-lined suburban street, and a boy suggests that aliens are behind it. The neighbors laugh. Then a car starts on its own, and they stop laughing. Suspicion turns to accusation, and accusation turns to a mob. The aliens watch from a hilltop as the humans do the work for them.
Claude Akins stars. Jack Weston, who played resort owner Max Kellerman in "Dirty Dancing," is one of the neighbors.
7 / 10
#4. Time Enough at Last
- IMDb user rating: 8.9
- IMDb user votes: 9,500
- Director: John Brahm
- Season 1, Episode 8
- Air date: Nov. 20, 1959
A bank teller who would rather read than do anything else is in the vault on his lunch break when a hydrogen bomb levels the city. His wife and his boss never gave him time to read. Now he has nothing but time, and a library full of books. Then his glasses break. Burgess Meredith plays the teller. It remains a poignant, if cruel, ode to bibliophiles and introverts everywhere.
It has the most IMDb votes of any episode on this list, and it's adapted from a short story by Lynn Venable. Series creator Rod Serling said this was one of his favorite episodes.
8 / 10
#3. To Serve Man
- IMDb user rating: 9.0
- IMDb user votes: 6,200
- Director: Richard L. Bare
- Season 3, Episode 24
- Air date: March 2, 1962
Nine-foot aliens arrive at the United Nations and offer peace. They end hunger, cure disease and make the world's weapons useless. They also leave behind a book in their own language, and a government codebreaker spends the episode trying to translate its title: "To Serve Man." It's a cookbook.
The script is based on a 1950 story by science-fiction writer Damon Knight. The alien is played by 7-foot-2 Richard Kiel, who later played Jaws in the James Bond films.
9 / 10
#2. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
- IMDb user rating: 9.0
- IMDb user votes: 6,500
- Director: Richard Donner
- Season 5, Episode 3
- Air date: Oct. 11, 1963
William Shatner plays a man flying home after six months in a sanitarium following a nervous breakdown. Out his window, in a storm, he sees a creature on the wing, tearing at the engine. Every time his wife or the stewardess looks, it's gone. The more he insists, the crazier he sounds, and the longer the creature works on the engine.
The script comes from Richard Matheson, adapting his own short story. Director Richard Donner went on to make "Superman" and "Lethal Weapon." John Lithgow took over Shatner's role for George Miller's segment of 1983's "Twilight Zone: The Movie," and the episode has been parodied on "Saturday Night Live," "The Simpsons" and "3rd Rock from the Sun" (where Lithgow and Shatner compare notes).
10 / 10
#1. Eye of the Beholder
- IMDb user rating: 9.1
- IMDb user votes: 7,500
- Director: Douglas Heyes
- Season 2, Episode 6
- Air date: Nov. 11, 1960
A woman lies in a hospital bed, her face wrapped in bandages, waiting to learn whether her 11th procedure has made her look normal. If it hasn't, she'll be sent to live among others like her. The doctors and nurses stay in shadow until the bandages come off. Then viewers finally see what everyone else looks like. Serling's critique of beauty standards and conformity feels even more pointed today.
Maxine Stuart plays the patient under the bandages. Donna Douglas, soon to be Elly May Clampett on "The Beverly Hillbillies," plays her once they're off. Makeup artist William Tuttle, longtime head of MGM's makeup department, designed the faces, and Bernard Herrmann (Alfred Hitchcock's go-to composer, who also wrote the show's first-season theme) provided the score.
Data reporting by Luke Hicks. Additional writing by Kaiya Shunyata. Story editing by Carren Jao. Copy editing by Lois Hince.
Data reporting by Luke Hicks. Additional writing by Kaiya Shunyata. Story editing by Carren Jao. Copy editing by Lois Hince.
