One Of The First Twilight Zone Episodes Ever Filmed Featured A Future Sitcom Legend

The classic anthology series "The Twilight Zone" is full of actors who became huge stars – and that's been true for as long as it's been around. "The Lonely," the first episode of "The Twilight Zone" to be produced after the pilot, even featured future "Mary Tyler Moore Show" star Ted Knight in a small, uncredited role.

While the first episode of "The Twilight Zone" to be filmed was "Where Is Everybody?," which premiered on October 2, 1959, "The Lonely" was the first shot as part of the show's regular production schedule. The episode stars Jack Warden (who would later appear in one of the worst episodes of "The Twilight Zone") as a convicted murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a desolate asteroid. A spaceship captain tasked with delivering occasional supplies brings him a robot woman (Jean Marsh) that he soon falls in love with, blurring the line between human and machine until an inevitably tragic ending. Knight plays Adams, a member of the spaceship crew.

Even though he has a few lines, Knight is not credited in the episode. This was early in his career; he'd previously appeared in episodes of shows like "Highway Patrol" and "Gunsmoke." His career picked up in the '60s, however, and, in 1970, he began playing Ted Baxter on CBS' "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" — by far his most beloved role. That said, he found success in the '80s, too, playing Henry Rush on ABC's "Too Close for Comfort."

Ted Knight only has a small role in his "Twilight Zone" episode, but "The Lonely" was not an easy episode to make. The show was in need of a filming location that could plausibly look like a desolate asteroid, so they went to Death Valley, a place in California notable for being literally the hottest place on Earth. This, as you might imagine, made for a challenging production.

"The temperature was around 130 degrees," Jack Smight, who directed the episode, recalled in "The Twilight Zone Companion." "One day the caterer very foolishly served a very heavy meal for lunch, and about eight crew members just dropped in the afternoon." At one point, cinematographer George T. Clemens got so overheated that he fell off a camera crane into the sand.

"I thought he was having a heart attack, because he was up on the crane, we were setting up a shot, and he just toppled off," Smight said. After two days in Death Valley, they gave up and returned to the studio, where they finished shooting interior scenes on a nice, cool set.