Serling’s Re-Zoning Efforts: “Execution”

“I was amazed at what Rod had done.” — George Clayton Johnson

If you’re a Twilight Zone fan, you know the work of George Clayton Johnson. He wrote some of TZ’s most beloved episodes, including “A Penny For Your Thoughts”, “Nothing in the Dark”, and “Kick the Can”, which was remade for “Twilight Zone: The Movie”.

But even before he sold his first script to TZ, Johnson was contributing to the series. Rod Serling adapted two of his short stories for the first season: “The Four of Us Are Dying” and “Execution”.

I’ve already outlined how drastically Serling overhauled a story that Johnson called “All of Us Are Dying”. The changes he made for the then-unpublished “Execution” weren’t quite as extensive, but still — he made it uniquely his own.

Spoilers lie just ahead, of course. If you’ve never watched “Execution”, I urge you to check it out before reading the rest of this post. (It’s on disc, of course, as well as streaming on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.)

If you have watched it, though, you know it tells the story of Joe Caswell, a criminal who lived in the Wild West. When we meet him, though, he’s not about to do much more living. His neck is in a noose.