U.S. television science fiction is a popular genre of television in the United States that has produced many of the best-known and most popular science fiction shows in the world. Most famous of all, and one of the most influential science-fiction series in history, is the iconic Star Trek and its various spin-off shows, which comprise the Star Trek franchise. Other hugely influential programs have included the 1960s anthology series The Twilight Zone, the internationally successful The X-Files, and a wide variety of television movies and continuing series for more than half a century.
History
20th century
1940s through the mid-1960s
The adventure serials The first popular science-fiction program on American television was the DuMont Television Network children's adventure serial Captain Video and His Video Rangers, which ran from June 1949 to April 1955. Within eight months of Captain Video's debut, two other landmark series were launched - Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (August 1950 - June 1955) and Space Patrol (March 1950 - February 1955). ABC attempted to cash in on the burgeoning television science fiction market with a small screen version of Buck Rogers in 1950, but failed within months. Another series of the 1950s, Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers broadcast live Saturdays from April 18, 1953, to May 29, 1954. The show was eventually cancelled due to a copyright infringement lawsuit based on the show's conceptual similarity to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Although Captain Video was not a very sophisticated program by later standards, this series took advantage of many newly developed technologies, such as luminance key effects to create superimposition, although it also fell back on such older techniques as using stock footage from film libraries to cover scene breaks. Its reported budget for new props was just $25 per episode.
Nevertheless, Captain Video proved to be very popular, drawing audiences of 3.5 million at its peak, a more than respectable number for television at that time. It fired the imaginations of many of its young viewers, who had never before seen science fiction outside of cinemas, and had never been able to follow the same characters in a science-fiction setting over a prolonged period of time. The financial crisis of the DuMont Network eventually led to the cancellation of Captain Video, and soon the collapse of the entire network itself. However, the program had made its mark, and other science-fiction shows followed during the 1950s.
Within eight months of the debut of Captain Video, two other series would come to eclipse the program in popular memory. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–55) and Space Patrol (1950–55) were a fast-turnaround second generation of TV sci-fi, telling more compelling stories on larger budgets. Thanks to a stronger connection to their sponsors, both shows offered a shower of mail-in premiums that solidified their brand names, leading to the first TV tie-in toys on store shelves. Both offered daily radio programs featuring the television casts to augment their television adventures, and the actors were pressed into service for public appearances on a weekly basis. The schedule was grueling, but the resulting media blitz resulted in a large and loyal fan base for both programs. Both of these shows offered something Captain Video could not - due to the poor budget of the series, Captain Video was earthbound. The space adventures of Tom Corbett and Space Patrol forced Captain Video to eventually take to the stars to compete.
(A sidenote: most modern television viewers are aware of Captain Video only by his mention by Art Carney on The Honeymooners; by the time the episode was aired, the show had already been cancelled, and the space helmet Carney wore was a commercially available toy marketed from Space Patrol.)
ABC’s attempt to cash in on the success of this genre was a small screen version of Buck Rogers, which had already proved to be a huge success as a film serial in the 1930s. Running for a single season, 1950–1951, ABC's Buck Rogers starred Kem Dibbs and later Robert Pastene in the lead role. Like Captain Video, it was the victim of a very small budget, which restricted most of its action to a single laboratory set, hardly the most thrilling of situations for its young target audience.
Another 1930s serial was also resurrected for the small screen: Flash Gordon, starring Steve Holland in the title role. Episode credits indicate that it was filmed in Germany and France and syndicated in the U.S. It ran for a single season of 39 episodes, from 1953 to 1954. Another film hero, an alien living on Earth, transitioned to television in the Adventures of Superman which ran from 1952 to 1958.
Other series existed, but mostly in independent syndication. Captain Z-Ro was initially broadcast locally in San Francisco beginning in 1951, but moved to national syndication during its final two years of production beginning in 1954. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger was syndicated nationally for its two-year run from 1954 to 1955. Generally a superior program to most of the sci-fi series of the time, Rocky Jones was a victim of timing; by 1954, public interest was returning to the western genre. By the end of 1955, all of the episodic science fiction adventure series were gone from the airwaves.
The anthology series Gradually, television producers realized that there was an adult audience as well as a young audience for science fiction. Television began to cater to a more cerebral brand of science fiction viewer, possibly inspired by the contemporary boom in literary science fiction by the likes of Isaac Asimov, or by the popularity of the allegorical science-fiction movies that were produced during the decade, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still.
One of the stalwarts of science fiction television programming in its early decades was the anthology series, in which a completely new story would be presented in each episode, with new actors, settings, and situations. The only continuing link was the producers, the genre, and the series title. The first series of this kind was Tales of Tomorrow running for 85 episodes, between 1951 and 1953, it was meant to be the first science fiction show for adults.The Billboard (magazine), May 19, 1951, page 11 The next popular series was Science Fiction Theatre, a syndicated series that ran for 78 episodes between 1955 and 1957.
Two years after its run finished, a much more popular and influential program in the same vein debuted on the CBS Network: The Twilight Zone, hosted by Rod Serling. The Twilight Zone began life as a one-off pilot, commissioned after the success of a science-fiction episode of the general drama anthology series Westinghouse-Desilu Playhouse. In its original form, the series ran for five years, from September 1959 until September 1964, with 156 episodes aired during that time. Presenting a vast array of science-fiction and horror concepts, its run included many memorable episodes whose imagery still lingers in American popular consciousness. One of its most enduring motifs has been its theme music, which is now recognized internationally.
The Twilight Zone was the bedrock of the more grown-up science fiction that would be produced during the 1960s. It was shot on film (as was now standard for much American non-live television programs), well-produced, and featured imaginative writing. One of the best-known episodes was the 1963 installment "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which starred a young William Shatner (later cast as Star Trek's Captain Kirk) as a man convinced that a hideous monster is lurking on the wing of the airplane in which he is traveling, even though nobody else can see it. That episode helped launch the career of Shatner, as well as a film version and a revival series during the 1980s.
ABC twice attempted their own science fiction anthologies, first with 1959's One Step Beyond, then with 1963's The Outer Limits. (ABC briefly tried to hire Serling after The Twilight Zone ended, but Serling noted that ABC's proposal was more horror-oriented in that it "booked (him) into a graveyard every week" and turned the network down.) Although The Outer Limits had a much shorter run, finishing in 1965, it proved to be famous and influential as well. Like its CBS contemporary, it spawned an only moderately successful revival decades later. One Step Beyond survived in frequent reruns because its owner, Alcoa, abandoned the copyright.
Return of the adventure series Irwin Allen, who later went on to produce famous 1970s disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, produced a whole range of popular science fiction series shows on American television during the 1960s. These included Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–1968), The Time Tunnel (1966–1967), and Land of the Giants (1968–1970). All involved futuristic, scientific concepts played out as the background to glossily produced action/adventure shows. Critics of Allen’s output often argue that it is all rather soulless and shallow, but as mass-produced entertainment it proved popular with American and international audiences. A popular non-Allen production was The Wild Wild West (1965 to 1969) which incorporated classic Western elements, espionage thriller and science fiction/alternate history concepts (in a similar vein to what would later be called steampunk).
The mid 1960s would prove to be an important period in the history of US television science fiction. It saw the creation of two brand new "space opera"-based science fiction shows, both featuring broad galactic exploration themes, with each show dealing with them in very different manners. The first of these was Irwin Allen's CBS show Lost in Space, which ran for three seasons from 1965 to 1968, and the other series, which premiered on NBC in 1966, was Star Trek.
Star Trek and its influence
The series Star Trek (later retronymically known as Star Trek: The Original Series) began as an unscreened pilot made in 1964 before the series began in 1966. The show was conceived by screenwriter and producer Gene Roddenberry, depicting a future of galactic exploration and struggle, with all creeds and colors of humanity working together to explore the stars in a similar manner to the pioneers of the old West in America. Produced by Paramount for the NBC Network, Roddenberry’s original 1964 pilot for Star Trek, called "The Cage" and starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, was regarded as being too intellectual and slow-moving by the network: however, they had sufficient faith in the ideas behind the program to commission a second pilot, which replaced the character of Pike and all but one of the rest (Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, was the only character carried over from the original 1964 pilot) with a new crew commanded by Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner. The show used a few established science fiction authors. Harlan Ellison wrote “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Richard Matheson wrote "The Enemy Within," and Theodore Sturgeon wrote “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time”.
Star Trek and social commentary Star Trek was also known for its social commentary. The background for this commentary was a set of alien cultures that roughly paralleled the Earth of today. The United Federation of Planets was analogous to America, Starfleet to NATO, the Klingons to the Soviet Union, and the Romulans to China.