The Twilight Zone: One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1986)

I first learned about him through Star Trek.  I don't know if it's the most common way for people to become fans of his, yet that's how it happened for me.  When it comes to speaking of a writer like Harlan Ellison, there are always going to be a number of factors in play.  The first is how it's difficult to avoid anecdote and bombast.  We're dealing here with one of those writers who liked to cultivate an air of folklore about himself.  It's not too difficult to see why he might do this, either.  In many ways, Harlan was his own best publicity agent.  All he had to do was insert himself into any public situation, act out, and then exit.  No matter what he did, he knew how to make sure his actions were always talked about.  It's a strange way to guarantee immortality for yourself, though in his case, it worked well enough when he was alive.  In the years after his passing, however, Ellison's impact on pop culture seems to show signs of being in danger of slipping away into obscurity.  There will be some inclined to say good riddance, yet I am not one of them.  There's a lot to complain about with an artist like him, yet there is also, thankfully, enough genuine talent on display to be worth celebrating, even if it does drive you up the wall, sometimes.  I said that there were always two factors at play when talking about this particular writer.  If the first amounts to a legacy of notorious self-promotion, then the second has to do with a constant, sliding scale of aesthetic and personal response that Ellison was able to dredge up from his readers and viewers.

He's the kind of author whose fame and literary reputation will always exist somewhere between the poles of Derision and Enthusiasm.  This is an important, perhaps the key point to keep in mind.  This guy likes to force his audience into a spectrum between these two results of reaction.  He didn't care to do anything else.  If he ever got less than something between censure and approbation, then he'd come away feeling like a total failure, and probably then proceed to tear a new one into his own work as the most unglorified trash ever written, something not even fit for the tabloids and men's magazines.  For those that don't know who on Earth I'm talking about, you really are going to have to trust me on this.  I am not making up a single word I've said about this guy, so far.  You can take my word further when I say things are just getting started here.  The challenge will be finding a way to keep this article from becoming a book, and the book ranging anywhere from a tirade to an ode.  This is the kind of effect Ellison was always happiest with from his audience.  If he were to read this now, I'd have to prepare myself for anything from a raging bull scream fest to the warmest sort of congratulations, with maybe even a publicity boost for a moment or two.  At least it could go that way until I said or wrote something that pissed Harlan off, then it would all be a game of mortal enemies at daggers drawn.  Again, I can't say that I'm making much of anything up here about the guy.  It's all just a matter of who he was.

When it comes to the response scale between Acclaim and Derision, I always find myself moving back and forth between the two poles in my regard for this author.  If there's any comfort to be had in this kind of situation, it's knowing that it would make Ellison proud, even if it is at your own expense.  I can't believe I just wrote that.  At the same time, I'm forced to admit that this also is the truth.  If the guy I'm talking about sounds like he fits the general description of "Quite the character"...Go home....You have no bloody idea what you're about to get into.  I feel a warning of that nature is necessary, because while Ellison could be one of the wittiest, charitable, and urbane souls when he was in a good mood, when he was in a bad one...Let's just say, there are folks out there with a million stories they can tell you about him.  I think the best introduction I can give about this facet of his life is best told in the way he seemed to like the most, through folkloric anecdote.  With that in mind, this all happened once upon a time.  I'm going all the way back here not just to another time, but also something of another world.  I'm in a used bookstore chain, and I'm at the height of my Sci Fi movie and TV show geek out phase.  This was the point in my life when I was just getting to know the ins and outs of pop culture, and would eagerly grab off the shelf and gobble up the contents of any book that would sate this very desire.

On the particular day I recall now, I was lounging my way through the upstairs Entertainment section of this second-hand booksellers shop (an institution and pastime which will forever be precious to "we happy few" who have a surreal yet devoted following to the written word) and I happen to notice this neat looking book with the title Inside Star Trek, by Herbert F. Solo and Robert H. Justman.  I already owned a copy of William Shatner's Star Trek Memories, and so I was intrigued by this book promising a lot of further backstage anecdotes of The Original Series by two of the show's executive producers.  So I decided to give it a shot, paid my fee, and took the copy home with me.  Before we get into the main topic, let me just say here, that I now regard Justman and Solo's text to be perhaps one of the key Primary sources related to Gene Roddenberry's initial star fairing brainchild.  It is here that you will find a great deal of insight into the how the entire concept of the Starfleet universe was first pitched, and the struggles Gene, Bob, and Herb all went through in just getting the pilot greenlit, and letting the show's first season both find and then be able to keep it's voice.  It really is that good of a backstage history.

However, I'm not here to talk about any of that.  My concern is with one erstwhile member of the show's rotating roster of famous (or at least once famous) part-time contributors.  Solo and Justman emphasize that Gene really wanted his concept to be seen as legit in the eyes of the Sci-Fi community.  To that end, they had the very smart idea of reaching out to the best writing talent within that then burgeoning field, and asking them if they would be willing to leave their mark on the show by submitting scripts for potential broadcast.  "Scientific fact notwithstanding", the producers write, "it was Roddenberry's intent to employ the world's most famous science-fiction writers and convert their futuristic ideas into the visual medium of dramatic television.  The "future" belonged to them, to the science-fiction magazine writers and novelists, and to the sprinkling of science-fiction screenwriters, and Gene wanted to share their excitement.  Richard Matheson was the most experienced film writer and, as such, found less of a challenge than did the others.  Several, like A.E. Van Vogt, failed in their efforts to understand this plot-and-budget constrained medium.  Van Vogt submitted a number of story idea premises that contained unusual ideas and characters.  But his premises lacked story ideas and plot twists and contained elements that were unshootable.

"Some of them - Robert Bloch, Ted Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinard, George Clayton Johnson, and science fictions incredibly angry young man, Harlan Ellison - actually wrote episodes for the show.  But to his dismay, Roddenberry soon discovered that some of the science-fiction writers had great difficulty with the transition.  While their inventiveness ran amok with wild and exciting concepts, they were often incapable of developing them into believable dramas and do-able scripts.  Unfortunately, they were both marvelous storytellers and lousy dramatists.  And unfortunately, Roddenberry had given himself yet another problem.  Most of the science-fiction writer scripts had to be heavily rewritten - and he had to do it (127-28)".  Producer Herb Solo then recalls a brief anecdote about how this process worked with scribbling fellows like Theodore Sturgeon.  If he's remembered for anything at all, now, then it would have to be for just two things.  The first is the classic line that has since become known as Sturgeon's Law.  It's the one that goes, "99 percent of everything is crap".  The other thing he might be known for is in helping Gene to pioneer the concept of the Vulcans.  He did this by coming up with the ideas in a script that became the now classic episode, Amok Time.

It was there that the character of Spock, or more precisely his background, culture, and way of life were shown for the first time.  It might not seem like much, yet for Trekkers everywhere, this was the start of one the most famous of intergalactic beings in the history of Sci-Fi.  Bear in mind, this is what it was like to work with any of these guys on a good day, when the ideas could fit the limited budget of a mid-60s TV show.  Here is how Solo sums up what it was like to work with one of the most creative minds in the field on a regular basis.  After asking Sturgeon to whittle down his original novella Killdozer to fit the regular format of an ABC Movie of the Week, he gets back a rewrite that is still too complex and expensive, so he asks Sturgeon a question.  "Teddy, listen.  You were going to concentrate on character and conflicts.  What happened?"  The reply he got was simple, "Nothing".  Solo concludes, "I quickly realized Ted's world didn't permit him to accept that flying pterodactyls were out of the realm of character conflict.  Needless to say, much judicious rewriting was needed before the film was made (128)".  Let this stand as an introduction to the crux of the later conflict that Ellison had with the show.

For what it's worth, I'm reminded of something to do with Tolkien's work and the question of adapting the Rings novel to the big screen.  I've been told the author himself always held a very healthy skepticism about such a prospect, even as he was busy shopping the rights over to whichever Silver Age Hollywood studio was the next in line to show interest that week.  For what it's worth (and I know I'm going to get flack for this), I think Tolkien was essentially correct.  I've never seen any film version that was ever able to capture the full reality of that one single book that so many of its fans still mistake for a trilogy.  For me, it all comes down to a simple case of the Imagination forever outpacing our ability to set it down in anything like a definitive adapted image.  Even just the artwork of the great Alan Lee still never comes quite as close as it should.  For whatever it's further worth, I also believe this problem applies to any possible adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, no matter what the current fans of the films say.  If you want, it might be possible to try for something like a radio adaptation, where the question of capturing the right imagery is neatly sidestepped.  For the rest, however, we've still got the pages, and that's enough for me.  Tolkien, however, kept a level head about the whole thing.  Harlan Ellison, on the other hand, turned out to be a whole different sort of beast altogether.  Here's where the legend begins.

From all accounts, the first season of The Original Series was pretty hectic to begin with in general, and that makes a goodish amount of sense.  Part of the problem facing the cast and crew was the need and ability to see if they would even be able to conjure up an entire secondary world from nowhere but the mind of this one inspired ex-cop and airline pilot.  Considering that an agreement was made to give Trek a chance only on the condition that an entire initial run of episodes was to be in the can and ready to ship to network stations by a certain given date, it's not too difficult to imagine those first initial efforts as one big scramble against the clock and the calendar.  That's the least ideal of conditions for any production to labor under.  The last thing a setup like that needs is an intemperate teammate to act as a kind firebrand willing to gum up the works all for the sake of making a point.  So the way Gene and company brought this blight upon themselves was when he made the most brilliant mistake of his life.  He decided to reach out to Harlan to see if there were any ideas he could throw their way as they were getting the show off the ground.  Ellison claimed his original idea came after he'd just read the biography of this old school Evangelist named Aimee Semple McPherson "and thought that it would be an interesting idea to have Kirk travel back in time and fall in love with a similar woman of good intent, but someone who must die in order to preserve the future. Ellison considered that it would have a heartrending effect on Kirk (web)".  With this in mind, Harlan began to work on a script for the show.

The rest of the process of was something of a self-created nightmare for all parties concerned.  To start with, the writing process itself was something of an endurance test.  Ellison would take his sweet time in bashing out the initial idea, and when it was handed in, the routine went something like this.  What Justman and the showrunners had on their hands was the draft outlines for the making of a great Sci-Fi romance.  It was also too damned uncontrollable to work as a Trek episode.  The worst part is that once this was explained to Harlan, he sort of went into warpath mode.  The man was notorious for insisting that his original idea not be tampered with, and it put Gene and his crew in a real bind of their own.  What makes this one of the most fascinating creative clashes I've ever read about is that it's just possible to see how both sides have legitimate points to make.  It is just possible to make a cautious and careful defense of Ellison's idea that a story should not be messed with up to a certain point.  This is when the Creative Idea can be said to have achieved it's fullest possible artistic expression.  The moment when the narrative can be said to have found its own natural voice, for lack of a better word.  It's the goal that every story at least tries to work toward.  All that's required is a writer with enough skill to work as much of the fossil out of the ground as possible.  Ellison seems to have had this sort of idea in mind.

If that's the only point he's trying to make, well, then, I'll have to admit I can't really disagree at all.  Stories can be fragile things, in the wrong hands.  The trick with any good narrative is that in order to be itself, it's voice must not be interfered with.  The moment someone does that, if a character or a scenario is bent out of the wrong sort of joint, if the story is "emasculated" (to use Harlan's word) in any way, shape, or form, it loses its own particular brand of "magic"; it dies.  I have no idea how that must sound.  All I can say is that it is a core concept of the Romantic Movement, and Ellison appears to have developed a liking for it, making him something of an inheritor of this outlook.  He's not the only one who thinks of storytelling like this, by the way.  It undergirds everything I'll ever write on this blog.  So if that's the perspective he's coming from, then I'll have no choice but to say it's the correct one.  The best possible irony comes in when you turn to chapter 18 of Inside Star Trek and read the following paragraph.  "Despite their hopes, it was evident to Roddenberry and Justman that the first draft of "City" was far from being shootable.  There were more than budgetary problems with this first Ellison script.  Both men were concerned that some of the "guest" Starship officers, as written by Ellison for this episode, didn't behave in the upright manner Roddenberry expected from proper Starfleet personnel.

"And Justman had other concerns: 'Although Harlan's writing is beautiful, it is not Star Trek that he has written.  It is a lovely story for an anthology television series or a feature (279-80)".  Now tell me something.  How familiar does this complaint sound in the aftermath of shows like Picard and Discovery?  Without ever meaning to at all, Justman has more or less summed up the key problem confronting the modern incarnation of a very lopsided Sci-Fi franchise that for some reason is calling itself by the name of Star Trek.  It's not opening a can of worms, so much as triggering a chain reaction in a very old, yet still dangerous minefield.  There's been a lot of spilled ink on the problems that Gene's brainchild has had to put up with in recent years.  I think Patrick Stewart was right about one thing, in a very ironic sense.  "It wasn't Starfleet".  That's the whole point Justman made years ago.  I'll say no more about the still recent enough kerfuffle that Trek finds itself embroiled in, except to point out that this is not a lone phenomenon, but rather one besetting multiple film and TV franchises, plus the Hollywood industry at large.  This is not the place to look for solutions, though most us know that would be a big help.  Instead, I'll just say this.  No matter what problems Ellison may have had while working on Gene's series, he never once took any of it as far as it's gone now.  For proof of this, go pick up a copy of Steve King's Danse Macabre, and you'll hear yet another touching Ellison anecdote.

It features Sci-Fi's Angry Young Man going to bat for none other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself in the face of a bunch of uncomprehending movie producers.  Say what you will about the man (and believe me, many have, and probably continue to always do so; he liked to give even his staunchest fans plenty of ammunition to work with) he knew how to stick up for the integrity of the Creative Idea, even when it came to secondary worlds that weren't his own.  It's also in King's pages where he'll tell you one of the most obvious traits about the author under discussion here today.  The guy never met a controversy he didn't like to court.  He's put all of these ingredients of himself into a blender and out pops one of the most talented and mercurial careers in the history of the Popular Genre fiction.  Not too long ago, I had the chance to catch another of this man's works adapted to the small screen.  What's funny about it is that once the final credits had rolled around, I came away with the impression that I'd gotten to know the writer a lot better than I ever had before.  It's this sense of learning a lot of vital information about the artist that finally made me decide to write up what I found out and share it here in this article.  This is the story of One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.

The Story.

"You unlock this door with the key of Imagination.  Beyond it is another dimension.  A dimension of sound.  A dimension of sight.  A dimension of mind.  You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.  You've just crossed over into...The Twilight Zone (web).

Opening Narration (v.o.): "He had to go back. It was that simple. Back to the place where his anger had first taken root. Back to find the turning point which had set him on the road to success... and loneliness. Because here, in a small Ohio town, lived the shadows of the boy he used to be, and the man he could have become. Gus Rosenthal is returning home — to the Twilight Zone." 

"Gus Rosenthal, a depressed and bitter writer, instinctively returns to his childhood home and unearths a toy soldier he buried in the yard. In doing this, Gus finds himself transported back to the 1940s, where he meets with his childhood self. After protecting his younger self from a gang of bullies, little Gus takes a strong interest in his older self. Taking on the pseudonym "Harry Rosenthal", Gus proceeds to act as a mentor and father figure to his child self, who loves having a friendly male authority figure in his life. When Gus learns that his time in the past is slowly making him ill, he tells the younger Gus that he has to leave, which doesn't exactly bode well for the boy (web)".

Reviving a TV Treasure: The 80s Twilight Zone.

Perhaps the greatest blessing in my life is that I was born in the year that Orwell made famous.  It meant I got to have a child's eye, front row seat to all the action as the 1980s really began to take off in a big way.  I remember this conversation once where someone said that whole decade must have been one of the peak experiences of humanity.  Well, it's easy to see where that person was coming from if you were an 80s kid like me.  At the same time, I don't sugarcoat everything.  There was a lot of bad to go along with the good.  Among the good, however, was some of the best entertainment ever produced for both biblio and cinephiles.  In retrospect, it's now possible to say that the whole decade amounted to the last major renaissance in the Arts, at least so far.  If you need a demonstration of what I'm talking about, then it's easy to point to a number of examples.  The Breakfast Club, Top Gun, Back to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, Pretty in Pink.  There's a long and admirable list to go on from there.  I'm not saying anything that most pop culture geeks don't know about.  The legacy of 80s entertainment has long since passed into the realm of being a treasured institution of sorts.  All of it seems to be down to the fact that it was a moment in the culture when all the right elements came together to create the right sort of voices at the right time.  It resulted in a lot of celluloid monuments being built up over a good time.

The 80s has pretty much become it's own subject at this point, in other words.  It's one with an almost endless amount of stuff to talk about, and we'll do a great deal of it in time.  For the moment, our subject for today takes us into what I guess you might call one of the less traveled roads of that decade's entertainment.  I've said just now that it was a time for the building of monuments.  These are your E.T.'s, your Amadeus's, or Ghostbusters.  It's titles like those that tend to dominate whatever discussions are held about the decade nowadays.  To be fair, it's kind of easy to see why.  When you're good enough to cast a long shadow, everything else sort of has to live within it, sometimes even to the point of obscurity.  The TV show I have to talk about today doesn't count as one in the strictest sense of the term.  In many ways, it's as much an American institution as Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  I think even the Zoomers have at least a working knowledge of Rod Serling's little television show about the various exploits of hapless mortals as they wander into off the Fifth Dimension.  The Twilight Zone is one of those showbiz properties that has long since gained it's own level of pop culture ubiquity.  At the same time, it's kind of funny.  If the trick with casting a long shadow is that everything else that lives within it tends to get lost in the haze, then the Zone has to be an interesting case where that very thing happened to the franchise itself.  Everyone remembers Serling's classic incarnation, what about the 80s version?

Who here even remembers that there was a brief span of time when the show saw it's own revival during 80s?  It happened as part of a trend of that period.  By the time the Spielbergian Era appeared on the calendar, there were a lot of classic TV shows that guys like Uncle Steve himself had grown up on which had long since had their day.  In the decade's inaugural year, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and One Step Beyond had long since gone off the air.  I guess part of the magic of 80s media was that it could achieve one of those minor miracles every now and then that the current (and perhaps even the last) incarnation of Hollywood seems incapable of.  There was enough creativity to go around, coupled with the right amount of effort necessary for a show like Serling's to get a second chance on the airwaves.  Figuring out how the Zone got its second shot on the airwaves has been something of a curious challenge.  We're talking here about the first of many revivals of a TV Treasure, and it's like I can't find all that much out about how this revamp got off the ground again.  The single best source I have to rely on comes from within the page of the short lived (yet fondly remembered) Twilight Zone Magazine, which ran from 1981 to 89 as published by Montcalm, and edited by T.E.D. Klein.

It's in the April 85 edition that that an article written by Jefferson Graham gives off as much detail as we're likely to get now about how this show was brought back from the grave.  To the credit of the people Graham interviewed, they're willing to be up front and honest about their motivations for the revival.  The idea to bring back Serling's brainchild came about out of desperation during what was apparently a pretty fallow season for the CBS network at the time.  Graham sums it up like this.  "Networks are funny institutions. Someone makes a decision one day that mysteries don't work, and all of the sudden they're gone from television. Then one person decides to bring 'em back, and you've got Twilight Zone, Hitchcock, Amazing, and Scene of the Crime all in one year. 'These cycles just go round and round," says Jon Epstein, producer of Crime and another old mystery show, McMillan and Wife. "Police shows were a no-no four years ago, now they're back. Westerns have disappeared; they will be back when one clicks. Bloopers were in, now they're gone. But they were a fad. Mysteries are more of a staple. I don't think the mystery genre has ever really been completely away. It never disappeared. It just wasn't on tv. All it takes is some courage from a network to try it (85)".  The long and short of it is that CBS was eager to avoid a potential mid-season slump, and they were looking around for any show that would go at least some way toward lightening their load.  The Zone would be a cheap, easy solution.

On the one hand, it was a proven commodity.  It had done a modestly successful four year run on the network at the start of the Sixties, and had managed to find a place for itself in constant syndication reruns ever since it went off the air.  This, coupled with the rise in popularity of Fantasy/Sci-Fi in the wake of the original Star Wars 77, meant shows like Serling's got to experience a rebirth of fan enthusiasm.  In retrospect it's easy enough to say it was pretty much the same as with the nostalgia craze everyone has for the media of the late 70s and 80s of today.  The major difference is back then, we had actual talent at the wheel, instead of whatever this is.  When CBS began to notice the uptick in profitability from the Fantastic genres, someone with half a functioning brainstem managed to put a genuine sum of two and 2 together and realize that now might be a good time to see if the Zone still had some wings left in it.  "In its attempt to reach Spielberg fans", Graham writes, "CBS hopes to tap the same audience that flocked to recent films like Poltergeist and E.T. Yet Spielberg followers didn't line up at the box office for his Twilight Zone — The Movie. There he hooked together four stories, three from the original show, with new casts, bigger and better special effects, and directors John Landis, Joe Dante, and George Miller.  

"DeGuere responds by calling the film and his new show "two completely different animals. The film had many unfortunate aspects," he says, "and the film was an homage to the original show. One can say now, with twenty twenty hindsight that there apparently weren't enough people who wanted to see an homage. We're not an homage. We're 'Let's do it now (ibid)".  While there were a lot of good reasons for DeGuere to steer the conversation clear of the controversy surrounding the Zone film, it doesn't seem to rule out the possibility that the fact Spielberg was even able to get the film into theaters in the first place which proved the final spur to make CBS give the revival the green light.  It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to learn that Spielberg might have come to the network at some previous point to sell them on the idea of bringing back the Zone to the small screen, and offered the success of a potential Serling film as a potential proof of concept.  This is all just speculation, however.  What isn't is Graham's assessment that the 80s Sci-Fi and Fantasy boom was the key motivating factor.  The way that Lucas and Spielberg redefined the direction of cinema and showbusiness away from the played out "Realism" of crime pictures and melodramas was evidence enough that the future of storytelling would be geared toward the Futuristic and the Supernatural.  In a word, they had made it okay for stories to be Romantic once again.  The choice to revive the Zone was all of a piece with the new-yet-old, incoming zeitgeist.

CBS's decision to revamp Rod's greatest creation debuted to mixed results on it's first airing.  With the passage of time, however, modern fandom has begun to rediscover this overlooked piece of the 80s, and there's been a good deal of much needed reconsideration about it's quality.  As luck would have it, Graham's article makes mention of one particular member of the cast and crew that the network was bringing onboard to helm the refurbished ship.  "As we were about to go to press, we heard rumors that, in addition to head writer James Crocker, fantasy novelist Alan Brennert (Kindred Spirits) had been hired as a story editor on the new Twilight Zone—and that Harlan Ellison will also be working on the series. Says Ellison "am officially the creative consultant. I'll be working with raw story ideas to insure there is no imitation of stories that have already been published or that have previously been on the air. If a plot idea is already familiar to an audience that's grown up with The Twilight Zone and with science fiction and fantasy in general, or if there's a problem with its logic, it'll be my job to suggest other ways in which the story can be done more originally and with greater impact." He adds: "I am not buying scripts, and I cannot help anyone get a job, so don't phone me! I'm already getting calls from friends I haven't heard from in five years (ibid)".  This turns out to be have been nothing less than the truth.

Harlan really did serve as one of the crucial creative consultants for the 80s Zone.  His job on the show was to read through any all and possible scripts that might make for a good choice of to put in front of the viewing audience.  Here's the part where production details get pretty sketchy, yet it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Ellison is the one responsible for giving us William Friedkin's adaptation of Robert McCammon's "Nightcrawlers".  Another memorable episode that Harlan had a hand in was in adapting Stephen King's short story "Gramma" for an episode of the first season.  One of the high points for him was getting a chance to see his screenplay for "Paladin of the Lost Hour" make it to broadcast intact.  He got himself fired from the job, of course, right after two whole seasons.  The fact that he stuck around that long makes his tenure on this series something of a personal world record for him.  With all this trivia under the hood, we're now ready to take a look at the main event, and what it says about Ellison not just as a famous writer, but also as just another flesh and blood human being.   

Conclusion: The Why of Harlan.    

Stephen King said something in Danse Macabre that's very pertinent to this review.  At one point, he notes a particular challenge that comes with talking about Ellison's fiction.  The surprising bit for many will be to learn that he's not talking about the man's legendary temper (at least not directly, anyway).  Instead, it's to do with the how difficult it is to tell where the art ends and the artist begins.  This is because, as King notes, "here it is impossible to separate the man from the work (394)".  King elaborates on this aspect of Ellison's literary output in the following way.  "It is not the purpose of this book to talk about people per se, nor is it the purpose of this chapter on horror fiction to fulfill a “personal glimpse of the writer” sort of function; that is the job of the Out of the Pages section in People magazine (which my youngest son, with unknowing critical acuity, insists on calling Pimple). But in the case of Harlan Ellison, the man and his work have become so entwined that it is impossible to pull them completely apart...(Each) Ellison collection seems built on the collections which have preceded it— each seems to be Ellison’s report to the outside world on the subject This Is Where Harlan Is Now. And so it becomes necessary to discuss this book in a more personal way. He demands it of himself, and while that doesn’t specially matter, his work also demands it, and that does matter (397)".

That whole entire assessment couldn't be more true than in this obscure episode of an old 80s Sci-Fi-Horror/Fantasy TV revival.  I suppose one of the biggest criticisms to get out of the way on this story is the charge of the author committing a form of plagiarism.  The one aspect of Ellison's narrative that's bound to jump out at any veteran Zone fan is it's familiarity.  Here is a tale that bears an uncanny (some might even call it a too coincidental) resemblance to the fifth episode of the original show's first season.  It was called Walking Distance, and like Harlan's outing, it concerns the exploits that a tired and worn out Mad Avenue executive gets up to as his longing to get away from the rat race somehow sends him back in time to his old hometown, when he knew it as a child.  I won't go into spoiler territory for this one, except to say that it's gone on to be considered not just a classic, but one of the quintessential examples of what the Zone is supposed to be at it's best.  Even today I'd have to say that judgment holds true.  What makes that earlier entry work so well is the way that Serling both indulges in a nostalgia for the past, while also refusing to take such desires at face value.  The episode's protagonist is given a soulful performance by Hollywood veteran Gig Young, that manages to be a combination of genuine longing mixed with hints at a fraying personality that gives the show a necessary amount of edge.

It's easy to identify with the main lead as he retraces his steps through childhood, and yet there's the sense that's he coming so unglued as the episode proceeds apace, that you begin to wonder if even being allowed the chance to got back to the past is all that healthy for him if it's just going to make him act out in ways that sometimes come very close to damaging others, including himself.  I don't think Serling is against the idea of nostalgia in and of itself.  He appears to have been more concerned with the sort of mind frame that we approach it with.  If it's an essentially healthy one, Rod's script suggests, then there's really no need to worry.  The trouble for his erstwhile time traveler is that it soon becomes clear we're dealing with a man in the midst of the sort of mid-life crisis that runs the risk of shaking loose one too many bears from the sixpack.  That's not the healthiest sort of combination, even at the best of times.  What Serling has given his fans, then, is a neat and somewhat heartbreaking character study that ranks up there with the best that television has been able to give its audience.  Now comes Harlan's story, and it feature a bitter, angry, and wayward Tinseltown player who (much like his author) is prone to letting his temper get the better of him.  One tantrum causes a minor inconvenience for him to the point where he accidentally destroys one of the few treasures he's always kept with him since he was just a boy.

He sent an old, tin figurine soldier flying across the room, shattering it.  Those things weren't bought off the latest store shelf, either.  Those things were genuine antiques straight out of an era when Norman Rockwell was still a struggling young painter from New York.  Luckily, Harlan's protagonist always knew that he'd buried an emergency replacement of the same figurine in a patch of dirt by an old tree on his parents' old property.  It's located in the same small town were he was born, and grew up.  So, in making a trek back to the house he used to live in as a child, Ellison sends his hero on a journey into that fabled, Fifth Dimension.  Notice any similarities in all that?  It's easy to see how a skeptic could take one look at all that and go, "Aw, he's just swiping from Serling wholesale on this one, and not doing a very good job at covering his tracks".  My problem with the accusation of plagiarism is that it rings a bit too hollow and superficial to me.  There are too many differences marked out in each episode to maintain the idea that Ellison is guilty of copy and pasting here.  For one thing, the details of his character are at 180 degree variance with Serling's.  Gus Rosenthal is full of anger and resentment over his past, where Martin Sloane yearns for it as a lost idyll and icon.  Gus is eager to distance himself from his past, whereas Marty (no, not that one, although interesting coincidence, wouldn't you say?) opens his narrative journey by actively pining to return to a time without a care in the entire world.

The differences go further from there to where the the narrative arc of each episode heads off in different directions.  If Rod's script is concerned with how to look back with love and nostalgia, Ellison's short story, and Alan Brennert's screenplay adaptation is all about looking back in anger, and then posits for itself a very simple question.  How do you overcome it?  This seems to be the driving motivation for Gus, the episode's main lead.  When we meet him at the start of the show, it's pretty clear he's not in the best of all paces, at least on a personal level.  We're introduced to him right in mid-action, as he's busy pacing around his New York penthouse, doing his best Les Grossman impersonation for which ever studio exec he feels has screwed him over this week.  As far as opening scenes, and establishing character moments go, Brennert does pretty good for himself.  The quality of his writing has a crisp and clear sense of both dialogue and pacing that is able to carry the story, and hence the audience, through from starting to finish line.  It's this skill in translation, as much as Ellison's inspiration, that is what allows the episode to work as well as it does.  Thanks to these twin skills sets working in combination together, rather than being at variance, the reader is able to piece together more than a few interesting character notes about the story's main lead from just the opening scene, alone.

We can tell that Gus is the kind of fellow who sort of can't help wearing his emotions on his sleeve at all times.  The man is like a guitar chord that's been poorly strung together.  Even the slightest vibration is enough to set him off.  This portrayal, like just about everything else in the episode, is based to a great extent on Ellison's own life and personality.  To claim that the man was notorious for his temper is a bit like saying Niagara Falls has no choice except to run downhill.  Harlan Ellison has been called Science Fiction's Angry Young Man with plenty of damn good reason.  I suppose I'll have to label him as one of those guys with a Jekyll and Hyde personality.  When he's in a good mood, he could be the life of the party.  When you got on his bad side, you might have just made a mortal enemy.  Harlan liked to collect grudges the way antique book dealers gather rare first editions.  Though unlike the Bookmen, I've never found too much proof that he liked to cater his to a fine, pristine point.  Like the main lead of this story, he just let too many inconsequential things get to him, is all.  If there's any good news to be had with such a mixed up bundle of negative personality traits, then it would have to be this one, crucial fact.  I've never heard any accounts of him using his fists against a woman.  I don't know how much cold comfort for change that amounts to.  I'd just like to think it's at least a saving grace, however slight.  

Going back to the character proper, you get the sense that Gus is always just one bad day away from a total nervous breakdown.  Perhaps it's for the best, then, that the only thing to break is one of his few treasured items from his childhood.  It's what sends him back first to his old, Ohio hometown, and then even further back into his own past.  In other words, the nature of Ellison's story shares a lot in common with the basic premise of a film like Back to the Future.  If the premise is the same, however, then it's execution and overall tone mark it out as a different beast all of its own.  The woods and fields of Sci-Fi/Fantasy are full of stories about protagonists who journey back into the days of yesteryear in search of various forms of discovery and enlightenment.  Zemeckis and Gale's film was by no means the first.  If anything, you could argue that it wouldn't even have existed if it weren't for episodes like Serling's Walking Distance.  I suppose it makes sense, then, to claim that all of these artists were working with either the same or similar story template to tell their otherwise respective narratives.  If that's the case, then while Harlan's version shares a handful of superficial similarities with the journey of Marty McFly, it's overall tone, plot beats, and denouement owe a lot to more somber works like King's Stand By Me.

This isn't a Brat Pack inspired romp through one magical summer, where everything is bright and nostalgic.  Instead, Ellison paints a different sort of picture for his audience.  This is a past viewed through the fading haze of memory tinged with regret.  Rather than the colors popping and singing, this version of small town Ohio near the start of the 20th century is painted in a series of fine, amber, autumnal shades.  This kind of setup is in reality an example of a personal artistic touch that has gone on to become something of a modern shared artistic trope.  It was most likely pioneered by the fiction of Ray Bradbury.  He was the one who first gave us the idea of the nostalgic small town in works like Dandelion Wine.  All Ellison has done is to take this conceit and apply it to his own narrative, both real and imagined.  The washed out and faded landscape of Gus's childhood is indicative of a number of ideas.  On the surface level, it suggests nothing less than one of those old Currier and Ives daguerreotype photo prints come to life.  On a more thematic one, it tells the implicit tale of a life that has somehow been squandered and come to a dead end.  This is the aura that hangs around Gus's family and their home.  It also belongs to and defines the general feel and tone of the neighborhood where the protagonist grew up.  Everything gives the idea of life winding down, or innocence coming to an end.

It's into this world that Ellison sends his fictional alter-ego.  I mentioned films like Stand By Me just a second ago, and the comparison between that film and this TV episode is apt for a very specific reason.  Much like with Stephen King's semi-autobiographical narrative, One Life is a story of growing up as part of a small town community.  Another element the Zone story shares with King's is it's determination to avoid the kind of rose colored view of Americana as that found in Norman Rockwell.  In each writer's work, there's this shared emphasis on the potential dark side of Main Street USA.  Again, much like with King, a lot of the plot points of One Life are conditioned by the kind of childhood the author had growing up.  This is a crucial aspect of the story that Ellison himself was at pains to emphasize.  If you want to know a great deal about the thematic aspects of this story, go hunt down a copy of the complete series run of Zone 85.  There you'll be able to listen to an audio commentary by Ellison himself on one of the DVDs.  Right off the bat, he makes no bones about the autobiographical nature of this piece.

"Now this (episode, sic) is the second one written by Alan Brennert from a published short story of mine...Let me start a long way back.  This is a marvelous...script.  Alan Brennert is a consummate artist, and the only person, as I say, whom I have ever trusted with adapting my work to any of the visual mediums.  Alan wanted to do this for a long time.  And this was, I think, the first script that he did for the show.  Or maybe it was the second.  It was the first by anybody else.  Let me tell you a thing about where it comes from because there is more of my actual life in this than in any other story I've written.  I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934.  My family; my mother, my father, my sister and I moved to Painesville (a little town about 30 miles northeast of Cleveland) when I was very young.  Two, three, four years old, five years old?  Something like that.  And, at the time, we were the only Jewish family in the town.  And while Ohio flies under the banner of the Great American Heartland, and is filled with wonderful people (and it has produced some wonderful people like Milton Caniff, (Ruth McKenny, sic) who wrote My Sister Eileen, Gardner Rea, the great New Yorker cartoonist; a bunch of other impressive people) it is also a place where (in pre-1940s and probably very late after that) (a) Heartland full of antisemitism, bigotry, racism, and the worst kind of male chauvinist misogynism you can imagine.

"Well, we were the only Jews in town.  And, I was a loudmouth.  I was a feisty little kid.  And they used to be the crap out of me everyday, in the schoolyard.  (This) went on for a long while, and they kept getting bigger and I kept staying smaller.  They would gather around in a group.  One would engage me in a fight, usually Jack Wheeldon.  Behind me, somebody would kick me.  Knock me down, and they would all kick me usually unconscious.  One time they stomped me hard, and the Third Grade teacher Ms. O'Hara (nice woman), came and gathered up my mangled semi-corpse.  (She) took me inside, and they put me in the Nurse's Room on a cot, and the window was open.  So, I guess it was sort of Spring, and I heard the kids under the window saying, "Dirty Jewish Elephant".  And it puzzled me.  I couldn't figure out the connection "Dirty Jew" and "Elephant".  Then I realized, 'Oh yeah!  Jews are supposed to have big noses.  How charming".  This is as far from the kind of classic, Norman Rockwell idyll of childhood that guys like Bradbury, Serling, or even Tolkien got to enjoy.  In fact, Harlan's experience amounts to a total 180 degree opposite.  These are the formative years viewed through the lens of a mostly unprotected young mind having to run though the daily gauntlet of a Closed Society suburban jungle.  His worst incident was when he was stripped down to his undershorts in the dead of winter.

He didn't even walk home, at first, just crawled into and underneath some bushes, and just sort of waited there, for some reason.  Maybe out of some misplaced sense of shame, or I don't know, or care to speculate what.  Anyway, the future writer of City on the Edge of Forever finally mustered up the courage to emerge from his hiding place and, almost stripped down to the skin, began to trudge home through an unforgiving Midwestern snowfield.  The real gut punch came when (through what had to have been a miracle) the young Ellison got home.  After a minute or two, instead of commiserating with her son's plight, his mother asked, "What did you say to get them angry"?  So far as I'm able to tell, the answer was nothing.  Guys like the ones who beat up on little kids aren't looking for motivations like ethnicity.  If you ask me, that's all just a dodge.  It's not even anger they're experiencing.  It's the desire to lash out, plain and simple.  "If I'm going to pound someone into the dirt today", the logic of this mindset goes, "then why on Earth shouldn't it be you?  Hell, what else is there to do in a world like this"?  The correct answer to such a question is "More than plenty, that's for sure you lunatic!  You want a match?  You and a mouse, that's the match"!  I'm pretty sure the adult Ellison would have come up with a better response and defense for himself than that.  However, the victim of Jack Wheeldon and his gang wasn't a Hugo Award winning scribe.  He didn't have a clue that other little kids like him, boys with peculiar yet memorable names like Roddenberry, or a fellow Jew like Serling, even existed.

This kid was just some frightened, angry all the time social outcast who didn't even have anyone there to console him all the times when it mattered most.  That's a good way to warp a developing young mind.  One of the best, in fact.  It's got to have a chapter all it's own in the Book of How to Ruin Your Child.  Anyway, that about sums it up for the growing years of one Harlan Ellison.  He never really seems to have had much of one to begin with.  Hence, as far as I'm concerned, not just the famous artistic "temperament", but also a great deal of the hidden mainspring for the vast majority of the ideas he set down on paper.  Another midwestern author by the name of Thornton Wilder once pre-empted James Baldwin in the sentiment that all Art amounts to a form of confession, in one way or another.  In the case of a short story and script like One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty, we seem to have one of the few examples where the artist is willing to meet this usually hidden sense of self-confession head on.  I'm not too sure how much of a lesson Ellison was able or even willing to take from this incidental bit of therapy.  However, when the pieces are put together, it does become possible to understand the thematic weight in back of the story's title.  The poverty it speaks of is of the emotional variety.

This is a story about the neglect of a child, and how this manages to rob him of a lot of the normal experiences most kids need if they ever want to grow up right.  Ellison seems to have been one of the lucky.  Somehow or other, he managed to survive.  There are many others out there who were never able to say that.  At the same time, there is a kind of bittersweet quality to it all.  The man may have triumphed over whatever adversity he had to put up with as a child.  Yet if the notorious aspects of both his career and public personality are anything to go by, then it's clear whatever he went through was bad enough to leave a lot of lingering scars.  Getting into spats with guys like Roddenberry and various other network suit types is just the tip of the iceberg.  I have no interest in dredging up sordid details.  This not that kind of blog.  All I'll say is that I found out something about Ellison that puts a lot of his past and action into a greater perspective to me.  It all starts with noted writer and genre legend J. Michael Staczynsky.  Along with Isaac Asimov, he has somehow managed the feat or remaining one of the few close friends that Harlan ever had.  I think it's telling just how close the two were that when after years of cajoling to see if he should seek professional help to deal his temper issues, rather than finally losing it and telling Mike to go fuck himself, or something like that, instead, Ellison listened. 

He went and had a psych exam, and the diagnosis came back that he'd been suffering from Bipolar Depression for some time now.  I'm going to step out on a limb here and claim that it's point of origin might have stemmed from the shit he had to take from guys like Jack Wheeldon.  It comes from being left to freeze to death in the dead of a midwestern winter.  If the Zone 85 episode is any accurate barometer or portrait of the artist as a young child, then I think there's one scene in particular that showcases the final, and perhaps ultimate reason for what makes Harlan run.  In order to make that whole moment make sense, some narrative context is in order.  The key scene revolves around the main character's father paying a visit to the adult grown adult version of his son.  The character of Gus has somehow traveled back into the past, and in a twist on the McFly situation, it is himself rather than a son befriending his father at a young age that becomes the focal point of Brennert's adaptation.  In managing to catch up with himself as a child, Gus winds up having this odd, yet genuine bit of a talk with his own, externalized mind, if that makes any sense.  Strange as it may sound, the point is that in doing so Gus begins to understand why he's been allowed the chance to take a step or two back into time.  He's being offered a chance to help straighten himself out, maybe even make a better future for himself later on.

While he's doing that, however, the very fact of being in the past seems to be taking a toll on his health.  The implication is that if he lingers around too long, then time will take an accelerated toll on him, and he'll be gone.  This creates an interesting dilemma for the main lead.  It gives the story a nice ticking clock kind of tone that manages to add a necessary layer of narrative tension to what is otherwise a classic, slow-burn coming of age story.  In addition to this going on, there's the added problem of a growing suspicion on the part of the child and/or the man's own father.  It's impossible for Gus's Dad to recognize his son as an adult, of course.  So is it any wonder that he begins to grow concerned for his kid's safety, or that it leads him to hunt down the grown-up version of his own boy to confront him about it?  However much sense that makes, the key point is that it's the confrontation scene which I believe contains the greater kernel of truth within the lie.  It's one that gets at the heart of who Harlan Ellison really is, and above all, why that should be.  With that in mind, the scene runs as follows:

Lou Rosenthal: "Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway?!  The boy already has a father, or hadn't you noticed?!  I appreciate what you did for him after the fight, but that does not give you the right to interfere in my family"!

Gus: "He's been calmer lately, hasn't he?  No more fights, no more stealing"?

Lou: "That's not the point"!

Gus: "He just needs someone to talk to.  Someone to listen to him".

Lou: "He's got - me"!

Gus (his anger rising, meeting, and matching that of his father): "HE DOESN"T HAVE YOU!!  WHY DON'T YOU TRY TO LISTEN TO HIM FOR A LITLLE WHILE"?!!

Lou (anger being replaced with a sense of smoldering defeat): "Don't you think I try?  Don't you think I try to understand him?  To feel what he feels?  But I can't.  He's angry.  And he gets angrier the older he gets.  (Genuine, anguished regret)...And can't control him anymore".

Gus (a lot of realization sinking in, mutual tone of regret): "...I'm sorry, I had no right to talk to you that way".

Lou: "...It's not your fault.   I was jealous of your friendship with him.  You see, I get angry too.  But I let it out.  Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.  I can't keep it inside.  It's just the way I am".

Gus (still realizing) "...He's a good kid, Lou.  He just got a little lost there, for a while, but he's back on track.  You can keep him there.  I've got to leave.  My research is finished.  It's just that he reminded me of myself at that age.  I was a problem kid, too.  My father and I...we just never talked.  And then in my teens, he passed away...And it was too late".

Lou (understanding, somewhat) "...I'm sorry".

Gus (a son consoling his father): "He was a good man.  A gentle man.  And all I ever wanted to tell him was, 'Dad, you'd be proud of me now.  I may not be the happiest guy in the world, but I turned out to be a good guy.  And what I do, I do well...And I love you...And why did you go away?...and leave me like that...I'm sorry, Lou.  I never meant to interfere with your family".

Lou (almost as if he understands in full) "...You're a good man, Harry.  (He offers a handshake)...A fine man....(turns and leaves)".

It's interesting to listen to Ellison's voice on the DVD commentary for this episode.  In fact, it's rare to find out that he decided to participate in such an affair at all.  Harlan's was always the kind of mind that preferred to keep a cautious distance from the way Hollywood adapted literary source materials.  He felt that if no respect was going to be paid to the text as written, then the final result would always amount to a botched job, no matter how well put together the final result was.  If I'm being honest, this is one of those double-edged sword type deals.  There are going to be times when such caution is justified to the point where the end product deserves nothing more than all the contempt and scorn you can pour on it (and here I am thinking of Game of Thrones, and Rings of Power; Harlan would have a field day with those two brain farts; hell, he could have written a whole volume of scathing critiques at white heat).  It is always just as possible, however, that there will be times when the operative command isn't "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", but rather, "This story could use a little work, let's keep trying to fine tune it to the best it can be".  It's this second type of circumstance that I tend to think Harlan always struggled with.  It seems he may have had at least some difficulty in telling friend from foe in this regard.  Well, I mean, nobody's perfect.  It's sort of what makes his commentary for the Zone 85 DVD box set fascinating.

Ellison was the kind of guy who liked to cultivate a reputation as the bad boy of popular literature.  You expect someone who's tone and words are meant to be abrasive and confronting.  You expect to hear from this tough-talkin' dude who's out to maybe name names, but he sure as hell won't be in the mood to take any prisoners.  This was the persona Harlan was most comfortable showing to the world.  It was a performance that seems to have always been made up of equal parts truth and showmanship.  In fact, it appears to be the exact same similar approach that guys like Alan Moore have cultivated into an artform of character.  Which makes me wonder if maybe he was taking note on how to present yourself to the public by reading, watching, and listening to the author of One Life.  Whatever the case, when you turn to the author's commentary for the home media collection, it can be shocking to find none of that anywhere on the voice track.  Instead, what we get is just this guy, you know?  He tries to put on a brave face here and there, and yet the overall tone is that of a man who seems ill at ease, perhaps a little bit confused, and not sure what to do with himself.  It may even be that the audience is dealing with the artist in a rare state of disarmed shock.  If that's the case, then it means I have no choice but to give Al Brennert a full standing ovation.  If you've managed to tongue-tie Harlan Ellison, that's a real feat.

It's got to mean we're dealing with a work of high quality here.  I'll get to whether that's true or not in a minute.  For now, it's enough to let the author do the talking, as Harlan explains what this episode means to him.  "In a minute you'll understanding why I'm sighing, and feel so strange watching this.  Because I'm watching me.  Peter Riegert is playing me, as an adult returning to my childhood.  Which is a dream we all have.  'Oh if I could only go back, for one day, to say to my father, 'Dad, you'd be so proud of me.  I turned out so well'.  And I (am given just such as chance, sic) and I walk up to the dining room window.  And I looked in at me, having dinner with my Mom and Dad...Yeah...Anyhow, where was I".  As I said, it is a genuine Blue Moon occurrence when you can get the Man of Dangerous Visions to that kind of stunned, and awe-filled mental state.  I even had to add in an additional bit of dialogue that wasn't in the commentary.  That's how extraordinary it all is.  This just leaves us with how good the show is as a story.  In order to give my final thoughts on the matter, I think it helps to have a bit of further context under the hood.  The way to do that is to talk about the way showbusiness still has of trying to piggyback off it's own successes.  What I mean is that one big hit at the box-office can sometimes still result in a rush to create more where that came from.  It's a common phenomenon.

One that happened all that time during the powerhouse years of the 80s.  To give just a few examples, try and point to all the films of a similar nature that came in the wake of Star Wars.  There's enough content there to fill an entire pop culture list book.  Now let's take a lesser known instance.  How many of us are still aware that there were attempts to create the next Indiana Jones knock-off in the wake of Raiders of the Lost Ark?  The trick here is that some of these efforts were able to carve out a genuine shelf space for themselves.  Chief among these are The Goonies, and Romancing the Stone.  At the same time, you have cheap, forgotten cash grabs like Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  That film was, of course, made by Yoram-Globus.  There's an entire gulf of difference in quality between the Rider Haggard rip-off, and the efforts of Donner and Zemeckis, even with Sharon Stone onboard (yes, really, check that bit of trivia out for yourself)  Last but not least, how many Sci-Fi flicks were about a group of outcast kids going on adventures with visitors from outer space in the wake of a simple little personal project known only by the initials E.T.?  The two that I'm most familiar with are three.  Two of them (Explorers, Flight of the Navigator) are pretty, sometimes even worthy of being cult classics, the other one is Mac and Me.  I think that Harlan's efforts here fall into a similar piggyback category.

At least that's the way a lot of newcomers are going to have to think about if they come in blind.  They'll watch it and, even if they can say they like the episode, will still come away thinking, 'Well, it's pretty obvious this is just a knockoff of Back to the Future, in many ways'.  The problem with that thinking comes from taking a close look at the original short story's publication history.  That's when you learn that it first saw the light of day in a genre slick called Orbit 8, edited by Damon Knight.  That all happened in the year 1970.  From there, it made it's way to an Annual 1972 World's Best SF.  At last, it made it's way from there to one of the offerings found in Ellison's 1974 anthology, Approaching Oblivion (web)".  This sort of creates its own amusing temporal paradox, if you like, wherein rather than Spielberg and Zemeckis's efforts being the breakout performance, they're in fact the ones who are the copycats.  If Harlan ever found that out, he would have been amused as hell, then he would have called his lawyers and taken everybody to court.  The fact that this never once happened tells me it's highly unlikely that Zemeckis and Bob Gale ever knew about the short story when they were coming up with the script for their own Time Travel movie.  It's just a case of awkward timing for everyone.

The funny thing is while it's chronologically impossible to claim that Harlan was riding the coattails of Back to the Future, it is still possible to claim that there is a sense of shared themes between the two efforts.  Both of them concern the personal plight of one individual with a poor family life, and the lessons they learn when they go on a journey back to the past, and get a chance to see what their parents were like during younger days.  In each story, this ends up revolving around the protagonists relationship with his father.  The only twist Harlan brings to the proceedings is that he never sends his time traveler back to the youth of his old man.  Instead, Gus merely takes a trip back to his own boyhood.  There's one other major difference between the film and the TV episode, and that's down to how the two main leads relate to their fathers.  Both of them can be spoken of as having loving fathers.  The difference is that there's greater deal of open, simmering antagonism by between Gus and Lou that is totally absent from George and Marty.  If Zemeckis and Spielberg choose to emphasize this kind of Capraesque sense of longing and nostalgia, then all it does is speak to their experiences of growing up in the 50s and 60s.  In that sense, all they're doing is being true to life as they experienced it.  Ellison is doing the same with One Life, the difference is that his was a lot more sad and angry.  It's more or less the same premise, yet with a much darker angle and tone.  It's a different road from Bob and Steve's.

The other two guys got to have actual childhoods.  Harlan just wasn't that lucky, and a lot of the lifelong resentment stemming from that is able to survive in Brennert's script.  A better way to frame it is to say that this is what Back to the Future is like as shown through a similar lens as that of Stephen King and Rob Reiner's Stand By Me.  It's a story about Springsteen's fabled Darkness on the Edge of Town.  At the same time, the great news about this episode is that it shares another key element in common with that of Spielberg and King.  It hold out the same possibility for being able to make peace and amends with the past, and being able to move forward as a better person.  That's something that requires a bit of further comment, because that seems to have been something of a shared goal between Ellison, Spielberg, and King.  All three of these men went through some rough patches in their youth, and Harlan seems to have had it the worst of all, in retrospect.  They knew something of the breakdown of the family, and of abuse from the outside world.  They each show what it's like to be saddled with the kind of emotional baggage and damage that it can leave a child with.  Strange as it may sound, this also appears to be one of the crucial reasons for their continued success as artists, even long after their heyday has come and gone.  They're experts at helping kids and adults deal with tough situations.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty is all of a piece with that shared artistic thematic.  In fact, I had an idea that sounds funny, even if it is true.  It's almost as if Harlan has given us his own version of The Fabelmans.  The difference is his version of Sammy had a much more difficult relationship with his Mom and Dad, and yet still the outcome amounts to the same.  It's with this concluding message in mind, that I'm able to give this particular piece of forgotten 80s nostalgia one of the highest recommendations I'll ever have.  To cap things off, I'll just mention one final bit of uplifting trivia.  After J. Michael Staczynsky got Harlan the proper psychiatric treatment, a lot of the writer's famous anger issues began to subside.  I'd like to think that this makes the episode something of an optimistic prophecy fulfilled, the story of one man's journey into his own personal hell, and of how he was ultimately able to work his way out of it.  It makes for the best possible real life capper to the main lesson delivered in the episode's closing narration: 

"It's rather bittersweet how we spend so much time trying to justify ourselves to the shadows of those who are long gone. And even if they were alive, would they remember? Would they recall what they had said or done that made you spend the rest of your life proving yourself? And if you could go back, wouldn't you learn that you were always the master of your fate?" (...) "And if you learned that great truth, wouldn't it free you of a useless burden? Dead cargo — from the Twilight Zone (ibid)"?