"A Town Has Turned To Dust" was a television play written in the 1950s, the heyday of live television drama (I can't recall if this was a Playhouse 90 offering). Serling's original script focused on a real-life case involving the lynching of an African-American man, with the complicity of local law enforcement officials. The network feared that this was too inflamatory and controversial to be produced in Serling's original form, so it was rewritten extensively. The version that *was* produced and aired in the 1950s changed the setting to New Mexico in the late 1800s, and changed the victim's character from African-American to Mexican immigrant. Rod Steiger played the local sheriff.
Rod Serling was extremely upset about these alterations, and felt that they had gutted his story, putting too much distance between audience and subject. The "old West" setting, in his opinion, dulled the impact and relevance that his play was intended to have. The play, as written, was not "allegory" at all -- it was a somewhat fictionalized retelling of recent (or current) events, whose impact came from its *contemporary* relevance.
I can't help wondering what Serling would have thought of this recent version, which now has two thick layers of reworking. It is no longer a "1950s lynching placed in a Western setting", it is now a "1950s lynching placed in a Western setting and moved to a Science Fiction setting." The setting -- and the relevance -- of Serling's original have been distanced even further from his original intention. In drawing the play further and further from its intended context, Serling's voice is increasingly muted.
