It’s a New Year’s Eve tradition that has outlasted Dick Clark, and like the ball dropping in Times Square, as eagerly anticipated…by Twilight Zone fans, that is!

The New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone Marathon on Syfy (where it has been running the past couple of years after several decades on regional syndicated stations), kicks off on December 31st and runs until January 2nd at 3:30 am. If you’re looking for favorite episodes, the full schedule can be found here.

Twilight Zone fans tend to break down the series’ 156 episodes into “good ones” and “bad ones,” the inevitable wheat/chaff ratio resulting from churning out any weekly television series (and an anthology one at that), a format Serling honed during the 1950’s “Golden Age” of live, 90-minute TV drama, and then perfected with the filmed, half-hour Twilight Zone episodes. But eventually the pressure to create original, quality half-hour anthology drama burned Serling out, and Twilight Zone started showing cracks in its Emmy Award-winning (two for Serling and his writers, one for George Clemens, TZ’s cinematographer, the Gregg Toland to Serling’s Orson Welles) patina, and fairly early on (Serling’s 1960 second-season opener, “King Nine Will Not Return,” is essentially a rewrite of his own pilot episode of a year before, maybe the best pilot episode in television history, “Where is Everybody?”).

By the last season (Fall ’63), the series was repeating itself with alarming regularity (writer and future creator of The Waltons Earl Hamner’s “Stopover in a Quiet Town” is his own take on “Where…”), and the TZ gimmick of surprising, ironic twist endings and O. Henry-like comeuppances had worn thin and predictable (the anthology series, at least in its weekly, half-hour form, didn’t survive beyond The Twilight Zone either).