Marc Scott Zicree

I read through this while binge-watching TTZ series before it's dropped from Netflix at the end of the month. It's an excellent guide, providing an overview and some history on the program, but even better, lists every episode with notes on all aspects - writers, directors, actors, production, and interesting anecdotes. I only give it four stars because the order in which the episodes are listed is confusing. It seems to be by aired date, which apparently doesn't correspond to the episode number. and the episodes aren't listed in the table of contents, so it took some page shuffling to find a particular episode that I was watching. This is probably a non-issue in e-book format, though.

Paperback, came with a DVD set for Season 1.… (altro)

Well organized and put together. The author's personal position as a Hollywood insider certainly added a degree of legitimacy to the work, in general. However, the work is seriously marred by the fact we read mostly about Marc Zicree's personal opinions and anecdotes and very little about the actual twilight zone episodes. Indeed, some episodes have no more than a paragraph devoted to them, all of which is merely the author's opinion of the episode. Very unsatisfying. This deficiency is not helped by the fact that Mr. Zicree seems to passionately hate at least 50% of all twilight zones made, and whether or not his criticisms are valid, it is NOT what a die hard Twilight Zone fan wishes to pay money to read about. They wish to relive the pleasure of the episode by learning more indepth details, which they may not have known about, had they not read your book. Rather than expend ten pages on your withering dissection of a particularly reviled twilight zone episode, Mr. Zicree, perhaps we could have trivia about the actors, details about how the production of said episode went (including all relevant bloopers or mix-ups) or something else, similar, which would appeal to actual Twilight Zone fans. For a true fan, the excessively long passages devoted to negative criticism are so distracting they make the reading almost unbearable. Surely, you are aware that fans would prefer trivia or other snippets of information, which really are not all that hard to research, particularly for an insider, like yourself. True fans, such as I describe here, were your target market, Mr. Zicree, so either you need to hire a better marketing consultant, or you dropped the ball, as far as appropriate book concept goes. It's my understanding Mr. Zicree had a veritable monopoly on the Twilight Zone manual market for many years and that's likely why it was so popular, in the 80s and 90s. Luckily, nowadays, there are many competing works that cover the subject in a way much more appealing to those of us who actually like the Twilight Zone.
… (altro)