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Treated like the redheaded stepchild of TV
genres for years, dismissed as little more than Saturday morning serials
and laser gun Westerns, science fiction TV in the past decade has finally
gotten the respect it deserves. Not from the networks perhaps, but from
the creators, who have turned to cable and traded big budgets for creative
opportunities.
Yes, the " Star Trek" juggernaut went into dry-dock for the first
time since its 1987 rebirth with the cancellation of " Enterprise," but that's franchise fatigue. In the
creative culture that gave us " Babylon 5" and " Farscape," the old warhorse looks tired, safe,
familiar. Meanwhile, the Sci-Fi Channel's reinvention of the clanky old
" Star Wars" knock-off " Battlestar Galactica" is improbably sly and
smart. Here's a highly subjective look back at the
soaring successes and abortive flights of small-screen sci-fi. You'll find
no " Twilight Zone" here (with a few exceptions, these were
morality tales and social commentaries wrapped in tales of the fantastic
more than science fiction); no "Dr. Who" (the goofy appeal of the British
space- and time-travel serial is beyond this SF geek); no " X-Files," and none of the series of the supernatural.
This is dedicated to good, old-fashioned TV sci-fi that at least attempts
to grapple with technology, philosophy and speculative science. Or,
failing that, really cool spaceships and blasting ray guns. |
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The Best
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"Tales of Tomorrow" (1951)
The
cathode-ray journey to the far side of the imagination was born more
than 50 years ago with this half-hour sci-fi anthology
series. Battling the constraints of live TV and primitive video
technology, it tackled the works of authors from Jules Verne, H.G.
Wells and Mary Shelley to Theodore Sturgeon, Philip Wylie, Frederic
Brown and Arthur C. Clarke. The results were admittedly spotty --
not every script had such a fine pedigree -- but at its best, the
combination of literate scripts, fine actors (Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, Thomas Mitchell, Lee J. Cobb, and a young
Paul Newman among them),
and the crackle of live TV gave this creation life.
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"The Outer Limits" (1963-65)
Do
not attempt to adjust the picture. For an hour every week,
this
show had control of your TV set. Always in the shadow of
its more
literate cousin "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits"
didn't
always have a twist ending, but it did delve into the
dark side
of humanity in episodes tragic, poignant and comic.
And it never
failed to deliver the "bear" (the network code
name for the
weekly creature). Though woefully underfunded, this series had a
wicked creative undercurrent and featured two landmark episodes by
Harlan Ellison, including the surreal existential thriller "Demon With A Glass Hand." Stephen King called it
"the best program of its type to ever run on network TV."
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"Star Trek" (1966-69)
"Space.
The final frontier." The original voyage of the Starship Enterprise
was pitched to the network as "Wagon Train to the Stars," a Western
with starships instead of horses. It was headlined by the
histrionic stylings of William Shatner as the
manly Captain Kirk and the odd-couple sparring of deadpan Leonard Nimoy (as
unfailingly loyal Vulcan science officer Mr. Spock) and emotionally
unhinged DeForest Kelley (as
country-doctor-in-space McCoy). But it created the most
idealistic portrait of the potential of mankind ever broadcast.
That, and it had way-cool phasers. It only lasted three seasons, but
it spawned four spin-off shows, a long-running movie franchise,
scads of shamelessly devoted fans, and a generation of sci-fi TV
lovers. Beam me up, Scotty. | |
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