David Melbye provides meticulous analyses of the groundbreaking television series’s use of irony as a narrative strategy to critique postwar America…. Melbye’s book is often compelling reading and offers an important contribution to the reader’s understanding of The Twilight Zone and to the use of irony as a tool of social critique. As such, this book could be used in numerous popular culture, American studies, and cultural studies courses and on reading lists.

Journal of American Culture

While The Twilight Zone’s stylistic reliance on irony, particularly in its twist endings, has often been noted, David Melbye is the first to effectively extend this observation, as he seizes upon irony as a useful trope for laying bare a host of cultural issues with which America, as well as much of the postwar world, was struggling in the 1950s and early 1960s. The story he tells of the various sorts of irony that Rod Serling and other writerswove into his series reminds us that the show bulks beyond the traditional genre boundaries of science fiction to form an influential critique of the various cultural pressures that were shaping contemporary America, including the new medium of television wherein serious commentary had to be spoken somewhat obliquely. Irony in The Twilight Zone is a significant addition to the literature on this series and on television itself.

J. P. Telotte, Georgia Institute of Technology; author of Science Fiction TV; editor of The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader