The Most Sneakily Influential Sci-Fi Series Ever Ended With A Whimper

Sixty years ago today, ABC broadcast the final episode in the short, glorious run of The Outer Limits, a science fiction anthology series unlike any that’s aired before or since. Combining sci-fi and horror in episodes steeped in the visual style of noir and German Expressionism, The Outer Limits has proven, in its own, less zeitgeisty way, to be just as influential as its iconic cousin, The Twilight Zone. Its alien invaders and bizarre monsters were often not what they seemed, and its stories offered sobering examinations of humanity's penchant for bloodshed, greed, and fear. The Outer Limits was ahead of its time — and misunderstood accordingly.

By the time it went off the air, however, the show was a shadow of its former self. Its season-and-a-half, 49-episode run (can you imagine a modern genre show producing nearly 50 episodes in less than two years?) came to a close with “The Probe.” Directed by Felix Feist, who helmed the 1953 sci-fi B-movie classic Donovan’s Brain, the story concerned three men and a woman who survive a plane crash, only to find themselves aboard an automated alien laboratory.

The series had already been canceled, and writers and crewmembers were literally walking out the door as “The Probe” went into production. The episode reflected that with wooden acting, cheap-looking sets and effects, and an exposition-heavy plot, all sad aspects of the truncated second season that drag it dangerously close to Ed Wood levels of amateurishness. Even the episode’s monster, a microbe that grows to an alarming size, was a large, silvery blob of rubber pulled over a man who crawled around on the floor (the stuntman inside the costume, Janos Prohaska, pulled off a much more successful version of the same idea two years later as the Horta in the classic Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark”).

But The Outer Limits — known for its opening narration of “There is nothing wrong with your television set; we are controlling transmission” — had already reached its creative limits months before “The Probe” limped onto ABC’s airwaves. The show, which premiered in September 1963, was the brainchild of producer Leslie Stevens, who was interested in what were (for network TV) hard sci-fi concepts like quantum physics and alternate dimensions. Stevens, in turn, brought in as showrunner Joseph Stefano, a screenwriter best known for adapting Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho into the landmark Alfred Hitchcock film.

Stefano’s interest in psychological horror and Gothic aesthetics, married to Stevens’ original science-based concept, yielded a series like no other, one that, at its best, hit that much-sought sweet spot between sci-fi and horror. Episodes like “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork,” “Corpus Earthling,” and “Don’t Open Till Doomsday” combined brooding characters, shadowy lighting, ominously jagged sets, and thoroughly weird monsters (respectively, a ball of dust that grows into an energy creature, a pair of alien-controlled rocks, and a Lovecraftian glob in a pocket universe) into surreal nightmares that transcended their limited budgets and now-dated visuals.

While the show was reasonably popular, particularly with younger audiences, the first season’s overall ratings made it hard to justify its renewal. ABC did order a second season, but also banished the show to a Saturday night time slot that all but doomed its chances. Stevens and Stefano were given the boot, with the network putting in one of its own executives, Ben Brady. Brady was an experienced producer on programs like the courtroom drama Perry Mason, but his cost-conscious approach drastically reduced the series’ production and story values, even as the network insisted on putting more and increasingly drab-looking monsters into the program.

The second season did yield some classic episodes — including what may be its finest hour, Harlan Ellison’s award-winning “Demon with a Glass Hand” — but paled in comparison to the first year, which featured standouts like “Fun and Games,” a precursor to better-known gladiatorial Star Trek episodes like “Arena” and “The Savage Curtain.” A late ‘90s Canadian revival, which ran for seven seasons on Showtime and Syfy, managed to tell some intriguing stories (and include a lot more titillation, as per cable TV mandates) but largely discarded the original show’s style in favor of more conventional TV production values.

While the ‘60s Outer Limits certainly shows its age, its then-unique look and themes have maintained a foothold in everything from Star Trek to Alien to more recent series like Black Mirror. Although the show’s run ended rather ignominiously (as series often did back then), there’s a reason why Stephen King once called The Outer Limits “the best program of its type ever to run on network TV.” Modern sci-fi would be worse off without its strange transmissions.