The Twilight Zone Review: Cavender is Coming

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By William Kozy

Among the 156 original “Twilight Zone” episodes, you can count on “Cavender is Coming” being consistently mentioned as one of the least favorite. In my ongoing survey of writers and Twilight Zone Facebook fan members, “Cavender is Coming” received only two votes from the 3,000+ respondents. Comedies were not “Twilight Zone’s” forte; thankfully the producers only attempted roughly a dozen. It’s no coincidence that of the bottom 7 episodes on my survey, 5 of them are comedies.

“Cavender is Coming” has a beloved comedic actress in the lead, but alas Carol Burnett hadn’t yet mastered the subtlety of her skills, and pulls a lot of hammy faces. It will take several years before she becomes a comedic marvel as well as a fine dramatic actress. She has some wonderful moments, but they’re spotty. She’s particularly good in the climax when she tells her guardian angel that she’s just not happy with the way his miracle-making turned out—her huge pleading doe eyes are irresistible. So mostly, the blame on this episode falls squarely on the shoulders of the writing and directing. Too many damn things just don’t make any damn sense.

The opening scene features Ms. Burnett as Agnes Grebb, already proving her clumsiness at her job as an usherette at Plotzky’s Bijou of Famous Hollywood Hits. Then we cut to a small group of angels up in the “Celestial Division”, led by Polk. He summons the angel Cavender (Jesse White who would achieve household name status as The Maytag repairman in countless commercials.) Cavender is the only apprentice angel who has not yet earned his wings. Sounds familiar? That’s because not only did “It’s a Wonderful Life” feature it 16 years earlier, but another show also used it two years earlier…oh what show was it…um…oh yeah, THE TWILIGHT ZONE! The episode was “Mr. Bevis” and that one turned out so poorly that the producers made the obvious decision to try it again. Both these episodes were intended as TV pilots, and “Cavender” even had a laugh track imposed on it to help ease folks into seeing its series potential, but that track has since been eliminated from syndicated airings of the episode, thank goodness.

Polk explains to Harmon Cavender that his last chance to get his wings is to become Agnes Grebb’s guardian angel and improving her lot in life by “supplying her aid, assistance and advice” for 24 hours. Odd that they would pick Agnes as needing help when all they’ve observed so far is her falling down on the job. Isn’t anyone else on Earth more in need of help? The 1962 flood victims in Hamburg, Germany? Or in France and Slovenia? Earthquake victims in 1962 Iran? 1962 tornado strikes in Florida? But no, this gainfully employed lady with lots of friends—she’s the one who gets a guardian angel.

So back on Earth in the theatre lobby Agnes is trying to work out the idiosyncrasies of her job. The whole scene was borrowed from Carol Burnett’s real life experience as an usherette in which her boss communicated with the staff via silent hand signals. Agnes is flummoxed by it all, while Mr. Stout calls out various women to take their positions: “Rapaport, Betton, Burnett…” How cute. He called out Burnett. Needless to say Agnes makes a mess of things in the most absurdly unbelievable way—with a handful of ticket stubs she runs toward the boss’s office and crashes headlong into a huge glass mirror. Not a window, which you can understand someone not seeing, but no—a mirror. Is she a vampire casting no reflection, cuz this episode is sure sucking the life out of me.

After work, Cavender materializes out of thin air in the bus seat right next to Agnes but she is strangely unalarmed. Cavender explains why he’s there, but she patronizingly pats his cheek telling him “don’t you worry about it, I daydream a lot also.” To prove it, he turns the bus into a horse drawn carriage and then into a convertible limo. The driver notices this craziness, but Agnes takes it all in stride. Cavender turns it back into a bus, and the next comedic bit actually did make me laugh out loud. The driver stops the bus, calmly gets up out of his seat and addresses the passengers: “When the supervisor comes to claim the bus, tell him I’ve resigned.” He takes off his hat and dives straight through the window. The absurdity of it got to me. That bit moves this episode up a rung from another TZ comedy about an Agnes: “From Agnes-With Love” which I wrote about last week. No laughs. Maybe the trick is not to write about characters named Agnes. As Agnes gets up to leave, Cavender writes “Guardian Angel” in midair, and at THIS, Agnes has saved her shocked expression. Not buses turning into carriages, but this.

Arriving home, she encounters all sorts of loving neighbors as she heads up the stairs to her apartment: she has candy for the children, a potato pancake recipe tweak for one neighbor, a nice fella named Irv who asks how the job went and when she says she was fired, another woman consoles her. And when a boy cries about a “busted cookie” Agnes has another one at the ready from her purse. She’s like a guardian angel herself.

Once inside her apartment, Cavender pops up on her couch, assessing her basic problem as this: Agnes can’t hold down a job. So, he fixes it so that she’s independently wealthy. He also arranges a new residence for her—the Morgan Mansion on Sutton Place, “the last one of its kind in New York City.” He has even upped her bank account to $23,367.19, which would be about $200,373.09 today.

Cavender scoffs at Agnes’s Tuesday night bowling ritual. She’s “real society” now after all. So he does his version of Samantha Stevens’ nose twitch or Jeannie’s arms folded head nod, and he transports the two of them to the mansion, dressed in posh clothes where Agness is host of a party attended by upper crust posers. His gesture by the way is to hold out his palm while closing his eyes and licking the thumb of his other hand and then pressing that thumb down hard on the open palm and then making a fist and slamming it down on the palm. It’s like they were straining too hard to find some sort of uniquely funny magical gesture for him to make, only they forgot to make it funny.

Hey here’s a fun thing to do: can you spot “The Beverly Hillbillies” blonde beauty Donna Douglas in her second TZ appearance at this party? (The first of course was “Eye of the Beholder”). It’s easy, and actually she has more lines in this then she did in “Beholder”!
This party scene becomes a mélange of montages showing how out of place Agnes feels. When a Frenchman comes up to her and greets her laying kisses all the way up her arm a la Pepe Le Pew, Agnes screams a bourgeois, “Unravel the flesh will ya!”

Close-ups of Agnes superimposed over images of chattering guests and handing picking hors d’oeuvres follows, but the most telling scene is when a movie star is lounging on a couch surrounded by male admirers. Agnes gushes that she’s a big fan and has seen all of her “movies at least 60 or 70 times—I think you’re wonderful.” But in return the bored actress ignores Agnes and turns to one of the men. That snub hits the point home hard. Guests become increasingly more drunk. “Ravishing party darling, ravishing”, are the last words we hear before dissolving to the next morning. Cavender rises sleepily and gets concerned when he doesn’t see Agnes. He transports to her former apartment building.

He meets her coming down the stairs, and Agnes laments that no one recognized her. Cavender tells her that, “The whole philosophy of living is a kind of a give and take thing. And after all, when, well, what did you expect?”

And her answer comes. She’s looking down at first, perhaps ashamed at the normality of what she will tell him, but then with simple honesty she looks up and tells him. “Friends maybe.” And this gets to Cavender, who has no response. He offers his hand as they leave the apartment she is no longer a part of.

Very gently, Agnes refuses the limo ride back to the mansion, but he balks “Twenty four hours of miracles and I leave you the way I found you? Come on! I’d never get my wings.” And then it’s his turn for the emotional close-up: “Miss Grep, didn’t we have a wonderful time? Don’t you have everything you always wanted now?” Cavender doesn’t even address the point she made about her friends, so she tells him he doesn’t understand her, that she WAS happy and that she “wants it the way it was.”

Another odd thing I noticed throughout this episode is the very disjointed editing between when it cuts from a close-up to a wider shot and then back in close again. Now, of course it’s never perfect in any show, because it’s hard to replicate one’s actions and position and gestures exactly the same way for each take. But between film savvy actors who can closely repeat the physical action, and the choice of angles that a director and camera operator choose, you can achieve a more seamless feel when cutting from shot to shot. But this episode loses its grip in that department.

After Cavender grants Agnes her wish, she bounds happily up the steps greeting all the kids and neighbors. Cavender admits that Agnes is “the richest woman” he knows. “You have an abundance of wealth. And it seems that I’ve had to travel a very long distance to find out that cash and contentment aren’t necessarily synonymous.”

A thunder clap indicates Cavender has been summoned back to see the chief, who then proceeds to read off a litany of Cavender’s transgressions. But then something catches the chief’s eye as he glances down upon Earth, noticing that “she’s happy”! This whole scene is so darned awkward because it’s being played out by the two actors looking downward at Earth, but we never cut away to see Agnes. The stilted dialogue tries to make up for what we can’t see.

The chief decides that there are many other deserving subjects down there on Earth who could use a guardian angel, so off Cavender goes, out the door, ready to take on his assignments for the TV series that never came to be. Except perhaps….in the Twilight Zone?

I rate this episode a 1.8

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