Here is the shape of it. In 1955, American television had no memory. A play aired live, once, and it was gone: no rerun, no archive, no second pressing. Serling wrote a play called Patterns, and the country went so crazy for it that the critic at the New York Times closed his column with ten words that had no mechanism under them: "a repeat performance at an early date should be mandatory." There was no mandatory in 1955. So the network bought the play a second time and performed the identical play live again, because the only instrument the medium owned for showing a thing twice was human beings. That was the economy Serling worked in. And when he tried to tell the Emmett Till story in that economy, twice, in 1956 and 1958, the sponsors and the agencies and the network censors sanded his plays into other states, other decades, other people.
