Rod Serling's Daughters Share Their Favorite“Twilight Zone” Episodes — And The Creepy Prop They Loved (Exclusive)

• The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling would have turned 100 on Dec. 25, 2024

• To commemorate the anniversary, Rod’s daughters, Jodi and Anne, are looking back on some of their most meaningful episodes from the series

• “It was important for him to entertain and motivate his audience, which created lasting thoughts and pertinent lessons that we would all carry forever,” Jodi says

Rod Serling was best known as the creator and narrator of the science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone. When he died in 1975 at age 50 from a heart attack, he left behind a lasting legacy —  for fans and future screenwriters, but also for his two daughters, Anne and Jodi.

Now, on what would have been Rod’s 100th birthday, the sisters are looking back on their father’s memory — as well as the Twilight Zone episodes that most impacted them.

Both daughters say that they didn’t watch The Twilight Zone regularly when they were kids, but came to appreciate the series, which aired from 1959 to 1964 on CBS, after their father’s death.

“The one that really brought the writer and my dad together was the episode ‘In Praise of Pip,’ because he'd used some dialogue that was a routine that my father and I had,” Anne, author of the memoir As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, tells PEOPLE. The season 5 episode follows a father who learns his son has been wounded in the Vietnam War.

“‘Who's your best buddy? Pops, you are.’ And it was just this amazing moment where I literally found my father in The Twilight Zone,” she says.

Related: The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling Would Turn 100 This Christmas: Remembering the Icon and His Legacy

Another standout episode, Anne notes, is “The Dummy" from season three, about a ventriloquist who believes his dummy is alive. Though the episode is the stuff of nightmares, Anne says that her father brought the dummy prop home — and the kids fell in love with it.

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“We'd sit it at the dinner table and we'd fight over who could go to bed with it,” Anne says. “And then my dad had to take it back to the studio. Sometime later, I watched the episode and it was terrifying.”

One of the series’ most beloved — and emotional — episodes is season one’s “Walking Distance,” about a man who time-travels to his hometown, only to find himself stuck in the time period of his childhood. While it offers a critique on the pitfalls of nostalgia, the man is also able to interact with his dead parents — a plotline that Rod’s daughters say was pivotal for him, as a World War II veteran.

“When he was in the war, he wasn't able to make it home to his hometown in Binghamton [N.Y.],” Jodi says. "His father died [while he was deployed] so he never saw his father again.”

"Walking Distance resembled the pain that he had and the longing to see his dad again,” she adds. “The story is just so touching and heartwarming and tearful, but a lot of his writings were cathartic for him and a way of coping with some of the losses in his life. Those are the stories that really touched the family.”

Anne and Jodi also recognize that The Twilight Zone was ahead of its time in many ways. Serling famously developed the series after a teleplay he wrote, in response to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, was censored by the network. Many Twilight Zone episodes, like “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” touched upon real-life issues.

“It was important for him to entertain and motivate his audience, which created lasting thoughts and pertinent lessons that we would all carry forever, [about] issues like racism and prejudice and hatred and fear and bigotry,” Jodi says. She adds that her father’s “deep caring” for the younger generation also played a role in his work beyond TV.

“This is also why he went into teaching, but all his stories were parts of him,” she says. “Every story that he wrote, there was something that was personal about him.”

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Both Anne and Jodi also want to honor the person their father was beyond the screen.

“My dad was a kind and generous and bright person who I miss every single day,” says Anne. “And after 50 years to have that still so present, that loss, I know how incredibly lucky I was.”

“The time goes by so fast, but my father's torch never goes out,” Jodi says. “I mean, his memory, his persona, his messages of society and his work just resonates today, and it just never goes away.”

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