The Twilight Zone - Cavender is Coming

*½/****

Look, in every series—even the best ones—there are going to be duds. As much as I love The Twilight Zone, I am the first to admit the show had some less-than-satisfying episodes. Sometimes they just don’t work. I will bet Cavender is Coming looked great on the script. Carol Burnett is a fine comedienne who went on from here to have a great career, so this minor hiccup can be forgiven. She always had the perfect face for comedy and she is likable in this episode. She’s just presented as a kindhearted misfit trying to make her way in the world, despite careless, clumsy, often absent minded characteristics that cause her a lot of grief. Stumbling over her words and forgetting the procedures taught to her in the job of a hostess is shown as such an example. A guardian angel in dire need of his wings, under probation, named Cavender (Jesse White) is sent down to earth by his “boss” (Howard “PUSH, PUSH, PUSH” Smith) to try and “correct” Agnes Grep’s (Burnett) mess of a life…a mess of a life she prefers ultimately, compared to the gloss and glam of an affluent change Cavender provides her. Using her sculpting art as the means to give her success, wealth, and social standing, Cavender gives Grep the bubbly, fine dining, art museum, high life. She just doesn’t want it. When she returns to the home she truly enjoys when Cavender gets so inebriated he falls asleep (!), Grep realizes that old life has moved on without her. Her apartment is leased to someone else and her neighbors disregard her. Grep rejects the supposed “good life” in favor of her old one while Cavender decides it would be better for her to be happy even if it costs him his wings. John Fiedler has a minor role as another angel trying to encourage Cavender to break out of his rut if he wants to wear those wings proudly. I don’t think White is really all that bad here, truth be told, it is just the material that fails him. This just isn’t funny. A bus driver jumps out of his window for heaven’s sake and the hobnobbing failures of Burnett among the rich snobs during the museum drinking montage (working the fish out of water theme) makes sense but it seems meant as a tickle-the-funny-bone segment begging for laughs, reeking of desperation. Perhaps I’m not the audience for this, though. The debonair rich lady Lothario kissing up Burnett’s arm, her misfortune as a hostess, Cavender enjoying the liqueur, and the cheap set mockup of an outrageous Heaven (to be honest, A Game of Pool had a similar stylized Heaven with the clouds and use of Earth items such as a pool table where Smith has a desk) didn’t generate much from me. Maybe in its day, this was a lot of fun. Burnett just wanting to go through life a failure because it is left to her to decide does speak to each of us determining what we want as opposed to what others feels we should be, and the neighbors she loves rings true. So it isn’t a total trashfire. I have to admit that I went through it feeling absolutely nothing but ambivalence. Definitely belongs, in my opinion, at the bottom when compared to all the great episodes that came before it and would follow after it.