Design for Loving

I have been watching many episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" using my Roku and watching the shows on the Peacock app. However, I was surprised as I watched because they somehow mixed up the reels and they were shown in the wrong order! Try to find it elsewhere if you can!

The story is set in a weird Jetsons-like world where doors slide automatically and folks have elevators in their homes. They also have a secret 'thing' they can buy to make their lives better...a robot that is your exact double. Amazingly, the episode is supposed to be set in the mid-1960s!!

Charles (Norman Lloyd) hates his wife and his wife and he has found a solution....to buy an intelligent robot that looks and acts like him. His plan is to have the robot stay home with the wife while he's actually out carousing!! The plan seems perfect...but you KNOW that there is an awful (and well deserved) twist!

Although it's ridiculous for the episode not to have been set many decades in the future, it is most entertaining...even with the screwup by Peacock. And, it's also darkly humorous and one of the better episodes of season four.

This is a great episode, the plot is pretty simple, but the twists are delightful and the first shows that this episode is not sexist at all!

Charles Brailing (Norman Lloyd) purchases an android, marionette, to replace him so he can escape a wife with whom he doesn't get along. His friend, Tom Smith (Elliott Reid), wants to escape a loving, but smothering wife. Charles' android gets along quite well with his wife, much better than he does.

SPOILER: I figured out the first twist when Charles asked Tom to listen to the android's chest. The first twist made me laugh, even though I knew it. It just shows that women can often be ahead of men. The second twist chilled me to the bone! Well done!

Alright, alright -- The Twilight Zone didn't *invent* sci-fi. But this is definitely an episode you'd expect to see on TZ rather than AHP! (I believe AHP has 2 other sci-fi episodes, which I haven't revisited or reviewed yet.)

You can never go wrong with Ray Bradbury, and his "Marionettes, Inc." story is such a classic that it is STILL a pop culture staple. (Of course, these days you're more likely to see it played for comedy in animation, like The Simpsons and American Dad.) The other "1965" technology is also pretty amusing.

Still, I think this episode shows exactly why we needed The Twilight Zone. AHP didn't exist to put forward ideas about technology, society, racism, paranoia, etc. It existed to tell little mystery stories where someone gets their comeuppance. Rod Serling wanted to challenge society through metaphor. He would have had some words of wisdom to drop on us before and after this Bradbury story. (Fortunately, he gets his own chance to adapt Bradbury multiple times.)

This is a really fun episode that does something completely different than we generally expect from AHP... But if you're into sci-fi, head on over to TZ!

The story adapted from the science fiction master Ray Bradbury seems better suited to the Twilight Zone than to Hitchcock. It's likely the producers were looking to spice up a new season with something a little different, and they succeeded.

Norman Lloyd and Elliot Reid are two average middle-age husbands going through a mid-life crisis. Unhappy with his stale marriage, Lloyd figures out a way to escape without losing either respectability or the affection of his wife (Marian Seldes in a very affecting performance). Since the episode is set in the near future, he has a number of novel options not available to audiences of 1958.

A very well-produced episode by Lloyd who both oversaw production and acted in the lead. The future is suggested by a number of low-key but effective automated devices. There're also a couple of nicely ironical developments that the series was noted for. However, the premise has probably lost some of its novelty for sci-fi drenched audiences of the new millennium. Nonetheless, the possibility of having a humanoid duplicate do all the nettlesome chores while the real person goes off and plays, I'm sure, plugs into a lot of secret desires, even 50 years later. After all, presidents may come and go while the seasons may change, but there's still something infernally eternal about the captive "work week"!

This is based on the Ray Bradbury story "Marionettes,Inc." which I used to teach to my students. Bradbury actually wrote the screenplay. It tells of two unhappy men. One is adored by his wife, to the point of suffocation. The other claims to be hated by his wife, although he is unwilling to give her even a modicum of affection. Mr. Brailing purchases a robot, an exact likeness of himself, so his wife will think that he is home while he is actually going to Rio. He keeps his likeness in a box in the basement and uses a dog whistle to call him. Anyway, he decides to cut his friend in on the action, knowing how insufferable his life is. Well, the problem is that this sort of knowledge isn't always exclusive to one party and the fireworks start. Of course, the story is about as sexist as can be. The women in many of these fifties things are portrayed as needy or conniving or emasculating. This is no exception. A pretty ordinary episode.