We’ve arrived in late January already, down in the bitter pit of winter a little early. Good thing it’ll warm up some later in the week — up toward, but not actually above, the freezing point of water. So the ice crystals I can see on my lawn will stick around a while.

I saw an episode of the original Twilight Zone the other day that I don’t ever remember seeing before, “The Mind and the Matter.” (Been a while since I’ve seen any episodes.) I looked it up later – the urge to do that is a minor curse of the Internet age – and found that it first aired the month before I was born, which was a mildly interesting thing to find out.

Mostly, though, the episode confirmed that every TV anthology is going to have filler. Except for a few moments, it was flat and uninspired, and the cheapness of the production – which often isn’t an issue in the series – was all too clear.

A generally forgotten comedian named Shelley Berman starred (still alive at 88, according to Wiki, and maybe sour about Bob Newhart’s success). He plays a miserable, misanthropic office drone who – with remarkable ease – learns to wish away the rest of the human population of his New York-like city. Almost immediately he’s bored, and decides to wish everyone else to be like him. Almost immediately after that, he discovers that a world of miserable misanthropes is no good either, so he puts everything back the way it was.

My question is, if suddenly everyone else is gone, why would you report to the office to do any work, which is what he does? (Because the show didn’t have money for another set.) And why wouldn’t you be concerned, even in passing, that the utilities would soon go out? Maybe the idea was that this fellow has no imagination whatsoever, but if so, I’m supposed to be sympathetic with that? Never mind. Filler isn’t worth thinking about too hard.