"Elegy" is the twentieth episode of The Twilight Zone, and was first broadcast in February of 1960. It stars Kevin Hagen, Don Dubbins and Jeff Morrow as a trio of astronauts, and Cecil Kellaway as a kindly but mysterious old man.
The series takes place in a near future science-fiction setting, where three astronauts, in an injured craft, make an emergency landing on another planet. They find, to their surprise, that the planet looks exactly like earth, and more specifically of the United States of the mid-20th century. Except that everyone is frozen in place: they wander through idyllic small town scenes where everyone is frozen totally still. The mystery is explained to them (and to the audience) by the appearance of a Mr. Wickwire, who explains exactly where they are, and then in a second climax, reveals an even more unexpected twist.
Although television audiences and writers were much less sophisticated in 1960 than they are today, I wonder if at some point the writers and creators of the Twilight Zone intentionally decided to play with their just-established tropes. This episode features an idyllic view of mid-century small town America, which we have seen in "Walking Distance" and "Where is Everybody?", a tale of a spaceship crash landed, which we have seen in "I Shot An Arrow in the Air", and a kindly mysterious old man, which we have seen in "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" and "What You Need". Having spent some time studying the Twilight Zone, I saw all of these tropes presented in this episode, but the way they were played still comes as a surprise.