Friday, May 16, 2008
"We control the vertical. We control the horizontal." The creepiest series in TV history combined existential inquiry with a memorable monster menagerie.
Apr 8, 2002 | Not many television series consistently challenge their viewers, let alone risk alienating them by issuing ominous threats seconds into the broadcast. Yet by prefacing each of its episodes with the blithely unsettling incantation "There is nothing wrong with your television set," ABC-TV's early '60s sci-fi sucker punch, "The Outer Limits," did both.
This provocative opening statement, delivered in the gently metallic tones of the Control Voice (the show's omniscient, disembodied "host"), was only a harbinger of the aesthetic bravado and existential dread to come. For an hour each week between September 1963 and January 1965, "The Outer Limits" confronted audiences with edgy inquiries into the human predicament supercharged with expressionistic visuals, eye-popping (and frequently pop-eyed) monsters and resolutely adult themes. Its vivid mix of art and spectacle, humanism and pessimism and science and superstition was genuinely groundbreaking, and over the years it has proven both deceptively influential and virtually impossible to duplicate.
The series' pedigree was filled with the sort of disregard for convention its content implied. Independent producer and Wellesian whiz kid Leslie Stevens, who created the show as a forum for his oddball notions about science and technology, was variously a Broadway playwright, screenwriter, film director and New Age mystic. Stevens' dilettantish stamina resulted in so many projects before, during and after "The Outer Limits" -- including a film spoken entirely in Esperanto and a handbook for something called "electronic-social transformation" -- that he gave the term "line producer" a new meaning.
Charged with crafting his sci-fi anthology series for ABC, Stevens directed a pilot for "The Outer Limits" in late 1962 using a handpicked team of maverick artists, technicians and craftsmen, including composer Dominic Frontiere and future Oscar-winning cinematographer Conrad Hall (whose later credits range from "Cool Hand Luke" to "American Beauty.") The film, shot from Stevens' screenplay "Please Stand By" and later broadcast as "The Galaxy Being," introduced many of the elements that were to become earmarks of the show: a flawed outsider hero, a menacing but ultimately benevolent extraterrestrial who brings out the best and/or worst in the humans with whom it comes in contact, and a poignant, ambivalent finale.
Once ABC bought the pilot, Stevens turned over the day-to-day production duties and much of the writing to iconoclastic screenwriter and erstwhile tunesmith Joseph Stefano. Best known for transforming Robert Bloch's pedestrian pulp novel "Psycho" into a jubilantly perverse Freudian fever-dream for Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, Stefano -- who was anything but a science-fiction buff -- promptly molded the show's format to his own moody ends. (Stevens continued to run interference with the network and wrote and directed three more episodes.)
With a free-flowing id and the assistance of old-school, no-nonsense directors like Gerd Oswald and Byron Haskin, Stefano established "The Outer Limits'" uneasy tone and celebratedly gothic atmosphere in the stellar episodes he wrote. Among these were "Don't Open Till Doomsday," a deliciously unctuous take on frustrated desire featuring a belligerent phallo-vaginal blob, coitus interruptus on a cosmic scale and several Stefano-penned songs; "The Bellero Shield," a spin on "Macbeth" with a shimmering space creature as inadvertent Player King; "The Invisibles," in which crablike aliens botch a takeover of the human race by commandeering its most marginalized members; and "Nightmare," a prescient look at the internal and external bonds that disintegrate during wartime. Some of his other efforts, such as "A Feasibility Study," "The Mice" and "The Zanti Misfits" (which features the series' best-remembered monsters, a race of fist-sized ants with leering human faces), were less cohesive but no less distinctive.
Stefano was by no means the only "Outer Limits" writer, but his stamp is on every episode he produced. Standout entries like Anthony Lawrence's tender slice of time-travel fatalism, "The Man Who Was Never Born" (the negation in the title is wrenchingly literal by hour's end), and Meyer Dolinsky's troubling "The Architects of Fear," in which a group of misguided government scientists turn one of their own into a shambling, would-be space monster in order to establish world peace, are less overtly symbolic and psychoanalytic than Stefano's stories, but each trades in the same murky ethical dilemmas and nightmarish motifs that characterized his involvement in the show. Even such lesser works as William Bast's turgid galactic soap opera "Moonstone" and future "Chinatown" screenwriter Robert Towne's woefully underfunded "The Chameleon" benefited from his guidance. If Leslie Stevens can be said to have fathered the series, then Joe Stefano lovingly reared it.
The heady synthesis of Stefano's dark vision and Stevens' ethereal ambition made "The Outer Limits" a far richer experience than the other science-fiction and fantasy series of the era. While justifiably adored, shows like Rod Serling's jazzy, pedagogical masterwork "The Twilight Zone" and Gene Roddenberry's insta-kitsch classic, "Star Trek," persist largely because they never stray far from the rationalism that drives most American entertainment. Their human characters are fallible, impulsive creatures uniquely adept at screwing up, but every emotion, relationship and deeply held conviction they display remains in place at the end of virtually every episode. However comforting this may have been, it tended to refute the everyday experience of the viewing audience.
"The Outer Limits" wouldn't, or couldn't, cater to such needs. Stevens and Stefano had something much less conciliatory in mind for their show, and thus set it squarely in a universe ruled by labyrinthine pressures and transient pleasures, where meaning and morality were in constant flux and human beings fought desperately -- sometimes heroically -- to keep pace. This starkly recognizable yet distinctly off-kilter milieu made "The Outer Limits" television's most unabashedly modernist work.
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