it with "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year". Even as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22, but its initial numbers were much worse. The series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating. Still, the show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, after which it finally surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and persuaded its sponsors (General Foods and Kimberly-Clark) to stay on until the end of the season. With one exception ("The Chaser"), the first season featured scripts written only by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson. These three were responsible for 127 of the 156 episodes in the series. Additionally, with one exception ("A World of His Own"), Serling never appeared on camera during any first-season episode (as he would in future seasons) and was present only as a voice-over narrator. Serling did appear on screen in Twilight Zone promotional spots plugging the following week's episode – just not in the episodes themselves. These promo spots were unseen for several decades after their initial airings; while many have been released in the DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Twilight Zone, a few are lost completely and some survive only as audio tracks. Most are available through Paramount+ when watching the full episodes. Many of the season's episodes proved to be among the series' most celebrated, including "Time Enough at Last", "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Walking Distance", and "The After Hours". The first season won Serling an unprecedented fourth Emmy Award for dramatic writing, a Producers Guild Award for Serling's creative partner Buck Houghton, a Directors Guild Award for John Brahm and the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. Bernard Herrmann's original opening theme music lasted throughout the first season. For the final five episodes of the season, the show's original surrealist "pit and summit" opening montage and narration was replaced by a piece featuring an eye that closed (revealing the setting sun) and shorter narration, and a truncated version of Herrmann's theme. Some first-season episodes were available for decades only