Television writer Rod Serling, right, huddles with producer-director Fielder Cook, backstage at a New York rehearsal for a precedent-making telecast of Serling's "Patterns," on Television Theater.

Four years ago, TV Playwright Rod Serling made his reputation with Patterns, a cliche-ridden but highly effective drama about a ruthless power struggle inside Big Business. Last week, as if to even ...

The show was memorable not as a play but as a document of the frightened fascination with which some writers regard Hollywood, as if it were a basketful of hypnotizing snakes. In The Velvet Alley, ...