Twilight Zone

I've been in a reminiscent mood lately, so I've been watching a lot of programming that I grew up on, including several episodes of The Twilight Zone. For its time, this show was a groundbreaking series, with its science fiction themes sewn throughout each of its premises. Still, for some reason, The Twilight Zone never received high accolades amongst the television viewers, but instead fell among the group of cult classics.
Some of the noticeable aspects that I liked about the show was the specific detail to lighting the crew took. Though I'm sure to some degree that lighting was especially important to black and white pictures, so as to be sure the image is correctly seen, but I'm sure there is more to it than that. Rod Serling was very particular to details and I'm sure lighting was so exception. The illumination was cast at several different angles, some to cause several shadows behind the subject, some to cause shadows on parts of the face to create definition and even some shadow across the face to allow the viewer to imagine the situation of the scene is real. To further that final point, shadowing is a common theme in film noir with shadows such as light streaming through shades onto the subjects face.
On the other hand, the show was not without its imperfections, including a few stale storylines that lacked creativity, but more importantly, in a couple of scenes, even if only for a split second, a microphone could be seen dipping into the scene from up above. Even the most interesting story or adventure could be dashed by an unintentional breaking of the "fourth wall", even if it comes from a different direction.