Anthology TV Shows As Morality Plays

Anthology programs have been around since the early days of television and radio, where each installment featured different stories and characters. The program, Studio One, started the trend by adapting short fiction, novels and other literary works for live performance first on the radio and later television. This early effort provided the foundation for later anthology programs by presenting the concept of different settings, but later ones diverted to bring the theme that connects all these radically diverse stories together: the character learning a lesson at the end of the episode.

These future anthology programs grew to be the contemporary answer to the morality play. A morality play is a form of entertainment popular in the 15th and early 16th century that presents personified abstract qualities as characters, and presents a lesson toward the end of the story. This idea is now brought to television, where each episode presents a different lesson told through copious contexts.

While naming multiple episodes will take too long to do, the following below will be standalone episodes from three different anthology programs. The programs used will be The Twilight Zone (original series), Tales from the Crypt and Black Mirror. Though the first two have been off TV for decades, it’s good to revisit older shows. You can’t appreciate anything new unless you know their roots.

Morality Within Genre Conventions

Tales from the Crypt is rooted in the horror genre, while Black Mirror is strictly a science fiction program. The Twilight Zone is mainly science fiction, but has an occasional horror episode. The programs use their genre conventions to teach characters, and viewers, lessons on how to be better people.

Episodes of Black Mirror utilizes our technological fears, and developing technologies, to examine human nature. The Twilight Zone also uses those fears, and adds many “what if…?” type scenarios. Tales from the Crypt, as common within the horror genre, uses violence, monsters, tension and gallows humor as subtext for commentary on society.

As with short story collections, the quality of episodes vary from great to really poor. The episodes below stand out for not necessarily being the best ones, but ones that are effective in teaching a lesson.

Prejudice

The Twilight Zone covered topical, and sadly relevant, issues during its original run. An iconic episode, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, teaches viewers the dangers of prejudice. How that blind hate can lead to the destruction of a society.

The denizens of Maple Street learn that a UFO and aliens will arrive on their quiet street. Unfortunately, no one knows what the aliens will look like or what they want, so they assume the worst. The collective paranoia of a possible invasion leads the people of Maple Street to suspect, and assault, anyone who appears or acts odd or different from the norm of the neighborhood.

At the episode’s end, it turns out no one on Maple Street is an alien. The real aliens observe from above, and marvel at the Earthling tradition of destroying something they don’t understand. Aliens successfully invaded Earth without firing a single shot.

The episode parallels both the West’s fear of the Soviets during the Cold War, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Fear of the different and unknown led to unnecessary violence. The moral of this story, from what I gather, is to talk and try to understand issues before making rash judgments.

You Will Pay For Your Sins

The majority of episodes from Tales from the Crypt involve stories with the cliché of “crime doesn’t pay” or a variation of that. A character believes they are clever in crafting the perfect crime, but in the end, get what they deserve. In Two for the Show, it got chosen not for supernatural elements, but the classic get-away-with-the-perfect-murder plot.

Over dinner, a wife tells her husband that she does not love him, wants a divorce and that she is seeing someone else. In a fit of rage, the husband attacks and kills her. He then proceeds to stuff her body in a trunk and take it on a train to get rid of it out of state. A police detective, who stopped by due to a neighbor calling about noise, naturally suspects something is off, and follows him onto the train.

The husband thinks he is clever by getting rid of the body to hide his crime, but since he doesn’t have the mind of a crime boss, ultimately fails. A nice little twist is that the body that gets discovered on the train is not his wife, but the body of another woman. The lesson is that you have to pay for your sins, and that there is always someone smarter out there who will make your situation worse.

Helicopter Parenting

As with Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, the series Black Mirror uses a recurring theme to tie all these unrelated episodes together. It uses our fears and dependence on technology to teach lessons to its characters and viewers. This episode shows what can happen when helicopter parenting goes too far.

When an overly cautious mother’s child goes missing, she purchases an experimental chip to implant in her daughter. With a tablet, she can see what her daughter sees, track her whereabouts and block things that she deems age inappropriate. With this cutting edge device, her daughter becomes the ultimate sheltered child, which proves hazardous as she grows older.

Due to the restrictive nature of the device, the girl has never witnessed a fight, is ignorant about sex education and even did not see or hear a barking dog until she got older. It leads her to rebel, fall into a bad crowd and has her mom cyber-stalking her. Witnessing things no parent should see their child do.

The episode brings up the point of respecting boundaries, to let your child make mistakes and to show that the world can be scary at times. All parents want their children to be safe, but should not shelter them to the point where the child lacks common sense and life experience.

Anthology Shows: Final Thoughts

Prior to Black Mirror, the anthology series was a near-dead TV genre like the Western. Like all things, people have shifts in taste, and the anthology series is making a minor comeback. Black Mirror led the way to Amazon Prime’s series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and the talk of a third reboot of Twilight Zone.

These modern day morality plays continue to entertain viewers and teach valuable lessons in an engaging and non-corny way. If you have a streaming service or possession of physical media, give these shows a chance. Rod Serling and Cryptkeeper intros are always a laugh.

Do you have a favorite anthology show? Is there an episode you wish I included? Please leave a comment below.