The Twilight Zone
In the original pilot for The Twilight Zone, writer Rod Serling came up with an interesting idea. What if a man from 1958 kept waking up in Hawaii on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor? What if he tried to warn everybody of the coming disaster? And what if nobody listened?
"The Time Element" was written when Serling was still just in college, but it included many of the elements that later episodes of The Twilight Zone would come to exemplify. Mind-bending twists, lonely or confused characters in unfamiliar surroundings, and maybe most importantly, internal commentary on the way these characters deal with the strange situations in which they find themselves.