This New Year's the Sci-Fi Channel ran a Twilight Zone marathon, and I
watched Rod Serling's little gem called "The Monsters Are Due on Maple
Street" for the umpteenth time, and am compelled once more to marvel
publicly at the genius of this man. He could pack so many levels of
meaning into a brief 30 minute screenplay, and without a single special
effect in sight.

My age hadn't quite hit the double digits when TZ first aired, so I
guess I wouldn't have realized it then, but he did quite a lot of
pieces that referred in some way to the Blacklist and the McCarthy era.
And I noticed that Art Carney's character in the Santa Claus teleplay
was named "Corwin". Did he know Norman Corwin? Serling himself was
never blacklisted, was he? But clearly the issue affected him deeply.