It’s a little unnerving how many Twilight Zone episodes that freaked us out when we were younger (or stoned-er) don’t stand the test of time. Sure, some of them retain their camp value (“To Serve Man is a cookbook, dude!”), but most, seen all these years later, suffer from a serious case of Serlingitis, marked by an oppressive self-righteousness and an enervating humor deficiency. (And please, no indignant comments about how Serling was a “genius.” He was an imaginative television pioneer who looked good with a cigarette.) That said, Serling did sometimes hit it out of the creepy park, and none of his own episodes (he wrote the script, based on a 1953 short story) has aged as well as the 1961 classic “It’s a Good Life” — a truly unsettling portrait of power run amok that most pop culturists refer to, simply, as “the cornfield episode.”
The story’s pretty simple: 6-year-old Anthony Fremont (played by Billy Mumy) has godlike powers — he controls the weather, for example — and a cruel, capricious streak best illustrated when people or creatures somehow displease him and he wishes them off “into the cornfield.” What’s especially striking about the episode is not its drum-tight portrayal of one kid’s off-the-rails power trip but instead the fear etched in the faces of the grownups cowed into paralytic, ever grinning submission by the freckled horror. We never learn how little Anthony Fremont came to wield such dominion, but it hardly matters. Like all absolute tyrants, he wields it without mercy, because he can. And the living will envy those poor bastards out there in the cornfield.