One Twilight Zone Episode Required A Policeman On Set For An Unexpected Reason

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"The Twilight Zone" famously takes place in another dimension. The series was filmed, however, in this dimension, and in this dimension there are laws that need to be followed. That's why a season 1 episode of "The Twilight Zone" required police presence on the set, because it was the only way the crew could get access to a prop that was otherwise illegal in the state of California. The prop in question was a slot machine, the focus of the show's 17th episode, "The Fever." 

The episode followed a couple who win a trip to Las Vegas, and even though the husband detests gambling, he soon finds himself addicted to playing the one-armed bandit. He loses a ton of money — and possibly his mind. That night, a vision of the demonic slot machine haunts him, and he falls to his death. It's a pretty straightforward and moralistic episode of the show (you won't find this on a list of the best episodes of "The Twilight Zone"), but making it was tricky because California had outlawed gambling machines.

"A prop house couldn't even have them," producer Buck Houghton explained in the book "The Twilight Zone Companion." Instead, the show borrowed some impounded ones from the police department. "There was a policeman on the set at all times, to make damn sure that somebody didn't take one off and set it up in his uncle's barber shop."

Rod Serling wrote the majority of "The Twilight Zone" episodes, and many of them were inspired by observations from his own life and social criticism, including "The Fever." The biography "Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV's Last Angry Man" recounts how Serling had just signed a contract that obligated him to write 90 percent of the show's scripts. To celebrate the deal for the show being done, he and his wife Carol went to Las Vegas. While Carol was having good luck at the slots, he was losing big time, and yet couldn't bring himself to stop playing. He turned the experience into "The Fever," though thankfully for fans of the iconic anthology series, Serling wasn't killed by a demonic slot machine.

Serling revisited the incident when he adapted "The Fever," along with a couple of other episodes, into short stories in the 1960 collection "Stories From the Twilight Zone." There's one extra detail in this version of the tale, however: The story ends with the deceased gambler's wife at a church event a year after her husband's death. She happens to see that there's a slot machine at the party, and "It had taken three of her friends from the Women's Alliance to stop her screaming and get her back home to bed."