The Twilight Zone (1959–64) appeared after the American television industry completed a shift in the way it produced drama that transferred creative authority of the storytelling process from writers to producers. Rod Serling, a decorated dramatic writer from the 1950s, tried to control the situation by becoming a producer in order to protect his interests and those of writers around him from the onslaught of powerful producers. Serling allowed writers to mix fantasy with a variety of genres on The Twilight Zone in a way that enabled them to customize the level of character development, the narrative point of view, and the generic identity of episodes on a script‐by‐script basis. These choices were reserved for producers in the 1960s. This paper offers a production history of The Twilight Zone through an analysis of unpublished correspondence between Serling, CBS, and the Ashley‐Steiner Famous Artist talent agency housed in the Rod Serling Archive at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison; these documents reveal Serling's use of fantasy during the production of The Twilight Zone was a valiant effort to protect the creative authority of writers at the dawn of the 1960s, but his ultimate employment of fantasy was short‐sighted and ill‐conceived.