Anthology TV shows

Dom

White Lodge
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I recently ripped my DVDs to HEVC mp4 files, which I've put on to a hard drive plugged into my TV, so I can have permanent access to my collection, which I'd put away in binders a decade ago. I simply didn't have space for 400 DVD movies and another 400 discs of TV shows. I have hundreds of Blu-rays too, which are in cases on my shelves.

Among the DVDs in the binder was a the first season of an anthology series called The Hunger, which I hadn't watched in 20 years. It was overseen by Ridley Scott and Tony Scott (or at least their company, Scott Free!) It's not particularly related to the Tony Scott film, although David Bowie singe the end title song and does the intros and outros for season two (Terrance Stamp in season one.) The 'hunger' of the title is generally a greed for sex, money, power and so on. The series has episodes about 25 minutes long with the host making a few quirky comments before and after the story. So pretty much the old-school formula. Some episodes are pretty decent, as it turns out. The series does that naughty trick of giving us two episodes shot on a decent budget in the UK - the first by Tony Scott and the second by Jake Scott (Ridley's son) with 'name' and up-and-coming actors such as Balthazar Getty, Timothy Spall, Karen Black, Amanda Ryan and Daniel Craig. The rest of the season is shot in Canada, with increasingly lesser-known actors on a lesser budget. The basic formula is: a set up creating some unease, some nudity and extremely softcore sex, then a nasty, twisty climax. Stories can veer from very good to dull, like most anthologies.

I really enjoy the single episode anthology model, which has somewhat fallen out of fashion these days in favour of season-long stories. I obviously love the 1950s-60s version of The Twilight Zone and the 1960s version of The Outer Limits. I used to like the 1980s Twilight Zone series. ITV regional stations often showed the 80s series as 'schedule filler' after the late night news - at about 10.40-11pm. They broke up the 45-minute multi-story episodes into the individual stories, so some episodes would be as little as 10 minutes long (these weren't the dreaded syndication edits seen in the USA.) I keep meaning to buy the 80s series, as I'm very fond of it. It's a shame it was one of the first series shot on 35mm film, telecined and edited and mastered to videotape, which has created such a 'black hole' in our media history in the HD era. The 35mm film was discarded at the time, so no HD version is possible. I watched a few Freddy's Nightmares back in the day too. They were often ridiculous, but I'd happily watch them again! I was aware of Amazing Stories as a youngster, but found them a bit anodyne. I watched a couple of episodes of the Apple TV series, but found them just as dull. There was a US horror series called The Hitchhiker on late night ITV, too. That appealed to my early-to-mid-teen sensibilities! The Red Shoe Diaries got some edited showings in the UK, but I found it a bit dull, for all I like that 80s steamy, soft-focus, slightly noir-ish erotica. In terms of crime and slightly macabre material, the UK had Tales of the Unexpected, which was originally adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories (and initially introduced by him) and versions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents made it over here.

So what anthology series have people liked here? Do you like the format or prefer the season long version? I know a lot of science fiction, fantasy and horror fans were particularly inspired by these series back in the day. The Paramount+ Twilight Zone failed, but I find myself hoping for a resurgence in episodic anthology series. There's a Creepshow series I'd like to check out (George Romero couldn't get the rights for the use of the title on TV, so he used Tales from the Dark Side.)
 
Black Mirror is probably the most noteworthy example from the “modern” era. I feel there’s been a steady decline in quality since the show moved to Netflix, but I can generally find at least an episode or two each season that really impress me. In the most recent season, I found “Loch Henry” to be a great moody little horror piece, and the Aaron Paul/Josh Hartnett episode was a good character study although it went on too long. I generally prefer the episodes that are set in the UK. Maybe I’m a purist.

Also from your homeland, Inside No. 9 is really great. It’s categorized as a black comedy I guess, but every episode has kind of a different tone and genre, often going to some pretty dark places.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents had an episode called “Man from the South” (starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre, and based on a Roald Dahl story) which was remade by Tarantino in Four Rooms.

Oh, and you didn’t mention Night Gallery, Rod Serling’s other anthology series. He was ultimately unhappy with executive interference, but the show still produced some very good episodes.
 
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One of my favorite Twilight Zones is “A Stop at Willoughby.” “The Howling Man” and “Long Distance Call” are great horror episodes that I may revisit as Halloween approaches. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is also a personal favorite.
 
Black Mirror is probably the most noteworthy example from the “modern” era. I feel there’s been a steady decline in quality since the show moved to Netflix, but I can generally find at least an episode or two each season that really impress me. In the most recent season, I found “Loch Henry” to be a great moody little horror piece, and the Aaron Paul/Josh Hartnett episode was a good character study although it went on too long. I generally prefer the episodes that are set in the UK. Maybe I’m a purist.

Also from your homeland, Inside No. 9 is really great. It’s categorized as a black comedy I guess, but every episode has kind of a different tone and genre, often going to some pretty dark places.
Yeah it's a funny thing: I went off British TV a long time ago. I've watch almost entirely American TV, with a healthy dose of stuff coming out of Asia, for the last 25 years. I literally have no idea who most British celebrities, TV actors and film actors are anymore unless they turn up in American TV shows. I never watch broadcast TV. It means I probably miss some good stuff, but I've been perfectly happy - and bordering on overwhelmed - with all the modern American and Asian stuff, along with a healthy dose of archive British TV.

One old British series I enjoyed very much came from the 1970s was The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. It was put together by Hugh Greene and Graham Greene (yes, that one!) They'd released some books collecting late 19th century and early 20th century detective stories that were being written at the same time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures. The cast was terrific with the likes of John Neville as Dr John Thorndyke, an early forensic scientist, Peter Vaughan as Horace Dorrington, a ruthless, crooked, blackmailing, double-crossing detective, Donald Pleasance as Thomas Carnacki, a paranormal investigator (great stories!!) and Douglas Wilmer (who played Sherlock Holmes in the early 1960s) as Professor Van Dusen, who is known as a 'Thinking Machine.' They're a mix of three-camera studio video and location film recording and are a delight.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents had an episode called “Man from the South” (starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre, and based on a Roald Dahl story) which was remade by Tarantino in Four Rooms.
Showing the different era and different country, when my friends and I watched Four Rooms, we all said 'They nicked that from Tales of the Unexpected!!' It was the first episode of the series. I own the complete Roald Dahl short stories in book form Love 'em!

Oh, and you didn’t mention Night Gallery, Rod Serling’s other anthology series. He was ultimately unhappy with executive interference, but the show still produced some very good episodes.
Yes, I overlooked that one. I imported the lot from the USA. Unfortunately, disc one arrived damaged and it was too much hassle to send it back. The damage wasn't severe enough to make it completely unwatchable at the time, but the disc has become a drinks mat now. I've held off looking for a secondhand UK set because Kino put out a Blu-ray version in the US. They released The Outer Limits a few years ago and it eventually turned up in the UK, so I'll probably wait until it shows up here. I found Night Gallery... uneven, I guess. The first season had some greats. They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar is probably my favourite episode of the whole series. I also love Silent Snow, Secret Snow. For me, the films lacked a closing monologue from Serling, which I really liked in The Twilight Zone.
 
One of my favorite Twilight Zones is “A Stop at Willoughby.” “The Howling Man” and “Long Distance Call” are great horror episodes that I may revisit as Halloween approaches. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is also a personal favorite.
I don't even know where to begin describing how much I loved The Twilight Zone. It was brain food. Every episode made me feel more intelligent than before I started to watch it. I've got all five seasons on Blu-ray and I'm due a rewatch. The Blu-ray sets are fantastic too. I haven't even started on the included radio plays! I even like Mr Beavis when no one else seems to! :D That series got me through some rough times down the years.

I've read some of the novelisations Serling wrote too. I love the twist he adds to the end of Where Is Everybody? When Ferris is being carried out of the testing facility, he discovers he still has a cinema ticket in his pocket.
 
I don't even know where to begin describing how much I loved The Twilight Zone. It was brain food. Every episode made me feel more intelligent than before I started to watch it. I've got all five seasons on Blu-ray and I'm due a rewatch. The Blu-ray sets are fantastic too. I haven't even started on the included radio plays! I even like Mr Beavis when no one else seems to! :D That series got me through some rough times down the years.

I've read some of the novelisations Serling wrote too. I love the twist he adds to the end of Where Is Everybody? When Ferris is being carried out of the testing facility, he discovers he still has a cinema ticket in his pocket.
The Richard Matheson short stories are well worth tracking down as well!
 
The Richard Matheson short stories are well worth tracking down as well!
Yeah, I've got two Penguin Classics books - The Best of Richard Matheson and Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories, by Charles Beaumont - on Kindle, but I've put the paperbacks on my Christmas list! Between mid-October and February, my reading generally switches from thrillers and pulp crime to fantasy and the supernatural.

I watched an episode of The Hunger last night called The Face of Helene Bournow, which credited the writing to 'Cordwainer Bird', so that was a handy warning that this wouldn't be one of the better ones! The DVD episodes are in a radically different order from when they were broadcast. This late-season episode, which is on disc one of this set, was where the series had already clearly become a cheaper, Canadian production. The direction was flaccid and the synth music score made things seem even cheaper. The acting was average at best. The supernatural, mysterious, seductive, demonic Helene's fleetingly-seen breasts appeared to have that very 'pumped up' style of 1990s Baywatch boob job, so that was a bad casting choice. I could almost hear Harlan Ellison yelling 'This is bullshit!'! Still, at 25 minutes, it doesn't outstay its welcome.

That said, the previous episode, adapted from a Brian Lumley story and directed by Highlander's Russell Mulcahey, was weird, disturbing and erotic, so if the discs are in production order, maybe it was a case of the series finding its feet and a duff episode being shoved to later in the run.
 
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Watching The Hunger last night - a couple of episodes - I find myself wondering how these things were shot and on what schedule. I can't help but feel they rushed out the teleplays and shot the first and last scenes at the beginning of filming, then tried to shoot as much of the rest of the script as they could in the allotted time. Any discrepancies would be covered up with fancy 1990s 'MTV-esque' editing.

Spoilers, but it's not worth ispoiler tagging the below.

But At My Back I Always Hear is a prime example of this. Adapted from a 1983 short story by David Morrell (First Blood) that appeared in his collection Black Evening, and referencing a poem by Andrew Marvell, this story has a professor of English on the run from a phantom caller. 3am, wherever he is, the telephone rings. We flash back to university where the professor found himself being stalked by a peculiar, pretty young female student. After a first conversation with her where she acts like they should be having an affair, she storms out. A fellow professor remarks that she's a nutjob. That night, our professor has an erotic dream about his student. At 3am, she calls his house on the landline and says she heard him calling for her. The professor, married with a baby, is freaked out. His wife and the police kneejerk assume he had an affair with the student. The calls continue even after the student has left town. Then the professor is informed that the student has killed herself. But the calls continues so he goes on the run. All fine. But then we get a brief montage of him on the run, then cut to his house, which is empty, in VO he says he's figured everything out and that there have been no calls for three days. Then the phone rings. THE END! WTF??

It's like there was something more complex going on here and they simply didn't get around to filming it. It's frustrating, because it's well shot and the acting is pretty reasonable, but it feels like I'm watching disjointed scenes from a longer story. The sex is relatively mild, but quite erotic - mostly the professor squeezing his student's bare breasts in a dream sequence - and demonstrates an understanding by the episode director, Canadian 'New Wave' film director Patricia Rozema that less is more. But the episode needed a better screenplay that could fit a coherent storyline into a 20-ish minute timeslot.

Footsteps is another 'Cordwainer Bird' adaptation. It's difficult with Harlan Ellison, because he was such a cantankerous, irascible old sod that replacing his name with 'Cordwainer Bird' when he hates an adaptation could either simply mean he was in a bad mood that day or that he was genuinely pissed off at the adaptation.

A woman is hunted through the streets by some men. We're not sure why. She flees to Paris (cue some poor quality, filmised video stock footage) where she starts seducing men. We see a yellow flash on the screen when she identifies a 'victim'. She seduces a man, takes him into a back alley, gets her boobs out and proceeds drop below the picture frame for you-know-what. Suddenly a giant claw comes into shot and the man screams. The woman does this a few times with different men (and almost one woman): yellow flash, flutter eyelashes, out-of-the-way location, boobs out, giant hairy claw. As time goes by, she starts to hear footsteps wherever she goes. It's never clear what this woman really is: is she a vampire or is she eating the men? Possibly it's the latter. One night, when she's doing some sexy dancing in a nightclub with a woman, a man intervenes and she goes home with him. It turns out he's the same type of creature she is, but has a vegetarian diet he's developed that has great taste and the texture of flesh. At some point in the future, not clear when, she is still living with the man, but then finds herself tempted to eat a cat...

I can see why this series never got past two seasons. The 'hit-to-miss' ratio is already well biased towards 'miss.' It's a consequence of a typical pilot episode trick I've seen many times in my own career. In essence, a company spends a load of money on the first couple of episodes, pulling out all the stops on good directors and good actors, paying for commercial music (in the case of Tony Scott's Swords, reusing Hans Zimmer's score from Scott's True Romance) and getting the best editors to cut the episodes. There's a guy I used to know who was a very good editor. The company he worked for would get him to edit all their pilots and first episodes, but the rest would be edited by whatever youngster was around. After that budget-busting first couple of episodes, everything else is made on the cheap. In the case of The Hunger, filming moved from London to Montréal after episode two. The actors and directors are nearly all mostly unknown Canadians. The establishing shots are all filmised stock video footage. Montréal, or thereabouts ('there-a-boots') stands in for most locations, unconvincingly. Music is cheap synth material. Initially, music was credited to soundhouse called 'Amber', but now is one guy with a synthesiser.

What I am finding is I want to check out some of the stories the episodes are based on. The Face of Helene Bournow is from Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories, one of his most highly regarded story collections. I found a secondhand copy for under £15. In the UK, Harlan Ellison is not in print and his books are only to be found secondhand and are generally very expensive, so £13 for Deathbird Stories is a bargain. The only other collections of his own stories I have is Strange Wine. I imported it from the USA. The previous owner had left a card in it from 1980, promoting Time Magazine's coverage of the Reagan-Carter election, as a bookmark!

I'd like to check out the Morrell story too. So, in terms of making me read new authors, perhaps there is an upside to this series! ;)
 
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Aaand... to show how things turn around, the next two Hunger episodes were decent. Red Light was written by David J Schow, who has a long history of writing teleplays, screenplays, novels and non-fiction. I won't go through his CV here, but there's a lot to like!

A supermodel, Natasha, played by Liliana Kamorowska (this was the 1990s and the era of Helena, Naomi, Cindy C, Elle and Linda) suddenly quits mid-fashion show. She flees to her ex-boyfriend, RIck (Tomas Arana, one of those character actors you've seen in dozens of movies down the years) who was the fashion photographer that made her name years earlier, before she abandoned him, which wrecked his confidence and reduced him to wedding photography to get by.

She's convinced that the more she's photographed, the more she's diminished: that the act of taking a photograph of her is stealing her soul. There's constant reference to a picture Rick once took of a Red Indian lady from New Mexico, her hands trying to block the camera lens for that same reason. (I use the term 'Indian' rather than now-preferred 'Native American' here, because that's the term they use in this episode.) Schow, unlike most previous writers, has managed to get the pacing right for the timeslot. The episode doesn't feel rushed and there's room for some decent character drama. Both the protagonists are excellently played and there's an obvious chemistry there between the actors. The story doesn't feel rushed. The ending goes slightly iffy: when the press photographers, hunting the world-famous model, descend on Rick's apartment, all snapping photographs, and Natasha literally disappears, we should have had Rick return to his apartment to discover that the picture of the old 'Indian' lady has been replaced by an image of a terrified Natasha trying to block the lens. Nevertheless, this is the best episode since the original London-produced episodes. I see, of the two reviews on IMDB, one likes it and the other thinks it's boring. I think it's simply more grown up, more steadily paced, and the obligatory sex scenes are superfluous.

Similarly, Room 17 is (in)decent. Played as a black comedy, this episode introduces Curtis Armstong (Bert Viola in Moonlighting) as Bart, a loser travelling salesman. I'm not sure how much these guys, who seem like subpar 'Willy Lomans', are real or are merely part of modern American urban 'mythology.' Bart is henpecked by his unappreciative wife who treats him as a lowlife. Booking himself into a fleapit motel - the sort that has siesta rates (again, I don't know how real these places are or if they're urban American mythology) - he... ahem... turns on an adult entertainment channel to 'occupy' himself. The rather stunning woman, Carla (Kim Feeney) who appears on the TV, actually talks to Bart directly. Bart is initially convinced he's being played and that there are cameras in the room. However, Carla gives Bart a hint that makes him some money. Then Carla climbs out of the TV in a manner reminiscent of Sadako a couple of years later in the Ring films, and gives Bart the night of his life. But Carla's subsequent demands became more scary...

For all that the episode has some nastiness, it's generally soufflé light. Armstrong does a decent job, Feeney is excellent as demonic Carla, and Penny Mancuso channels many of Laurel and Hardy's onscreen harridan spouses as Bart's obnoxious wife.

It's the nature of these long, 22-episode seasons that some stories are much better than others. The running order when I watched these on UK Bravo in the late 1990s was different. Room 17 was shown at roughly the same point in the run and Red Light about half way through, possibly because it's a better story. I'm not sure if the DVDs reflect the production order or if they're randomly placed on the discs.

Some of the music was very cheesy, particularly in Red Light. Given some of the cheesy synth music was supposed to be diegetic, I'm wondering if it's actually a dreaded music substitution, because the company releasing the episode on DVD wouldn't pay for the rights. Having had to make music substitutions on international versions of TV shows before, I can attest to how depressing a job it is. In the present day, library music has vastly improved and being able to search for and download the tracks online means no more wading through binders full of CDs, which is soul-destroying and incredibly time-consuming.

Watching these episodes reminds me of how much I miss 30-minute anthology series. They were part of my life, growing up. Series such as The Hunger and The Red Show Diaries were the ones where you permanently kept your thumb on the remote control in case your parents walked in at the wrong moment! :D They introduced me to the work of a lot of writers that I would later read. I'd like to buy more. Amazon has been selling the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents for years, but the price has jumped all over the place. Currently the seven seasons are going for almost £100. They've often gone for half that or less. I'd like to get The Hitchhiker, but that's not had a proper release any more than The Red Shoe Diaries has.
 
I enjoyed the first season of The Hunger enough - in spite of a number of stinkers - that I looked around and found a decent quality secondhand copy of season two. The packaging was a bit battered, but the 20-year-old discs were fine. I immediately ripped them to a hard drive just in case. Season two is interesting so far. Once again, Tony Scott directs the opening episode. There's no introduction by Terence Stamp. Instead we have a bizarre tale about a controversial artist played by David Bowie, who lives in a giant converted prison. One day, an injured young man, played by Giovanni Ribisi bangs on the door and begs to be let in. Weirdness ensues. It's a really messed up, gory episode, typical of what became Tony Scott's later hyperactive, hyperkinetic style seen in films such as Domino. There must be ten times the number of edits seen in an average TV episode. At the end Bowie's... ghost? I don't know exactly... whatever... Bowie sort of steps out of his own story and becomes the programme's host, taking the place of Terence Stamp.

I've seen several more episodes now and I'm enjoying this season a lot. Tony's desire for this to be an 'MTV-influenced' series is more obvious this time. The first season would open rather frenetically with Terence Stamp's 'host' scenes, but the main story would then be fairly straightforwardly directed. This time, the lighting and colour grading is more extreme. We have some new source writers including Tanith Lee, Poppy Z Brite and Kim Newman.

Music this time is mostly by FM Le Sieur (with Harry Gregson-Williams providing the first episode's score.) It's markedly better than season one, which tended towards 'synth orchestra', this time leaning in more to an actual electronic soundscape. From Bowie's intros (I'm not sure if he's meant to be the character from the first episode or just a host) to the overall tone of the stories, this season feels darker. Where season one often felt like it could be a normal drama series with a supernatural twist, this season embraces a dark, erotic world, with strange lighting and consciously jarring edits.

The most recent episode, a supernatural slasher, Wrath of God, is directed by returning director Highlander's Russell Mulcahy. It kind of reminds me of Dario Argento's Inferno at times. Notably, the sexual content has changed. Where the sex in the previous season was an almost obligatory feature, shot in a low key 1990s Zalman King softcore style, this season doesn't use sex if it delays the plotline. There are still boobs in every episode (no complaints there!) and occasional full-frontal nudity, but the sex often has a purpose in the story, disturbingly so in the Luke Scott-directed Skin Deep.

All-in-all, The Hunger is a pleasant surprise: it's aged well, in spite of being 4:3. Terence Stamp is fun and quirky as the first host and David Bowie moody and somewhat disquieting as the second. They say that all anthologies are ultimately only as good as their worst story, but at 25 minutes, The Hunger has proven an enjoyable late night watch! I'd love to see something more done along these lines.
 
Yesterday, one of my Christmas presents was the DVD set of the complete 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. As I said before, I have fond memories of some of the stories, hacked into individual episodes for schedule filler by ITV. Literally, if they had ten minutes to fill late night, they'd squeeze an eight-minute story culled from the 50-minute season one and two episodes into that slot. But the 1980s Twilight Zone was my introduction to The Twilight Zone and grown up anthology series.

The 1950s-60s version is a series I own on Blu-ray and adore. Seeing these on Blu-ray after more than 30 years (when the local ITV franchise holder changed at the end of 1992, they ceased to be shown) will be really interesting.

I have this weird fixation in my life that a casually call 'integration.' My view is that I'm my most complete self when I have aspects of all eras of my life around me. I still have my childhood teddy bears, I have many of the books I grew up reading (Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl) TV shows I watched on DVD and Blu-ray and movies in DVD, Blu-ray and 4K formats. I'm 50 in 11 days. Seeing a series that had quite an influence on me over 40 years ago after so long feels like another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of my life...
 
Me and my wife started watching Freddy's Nightmares, our plan to spend October going through it, but we only made it to three episodes. We actually did like it but it's just not compelling us to keep going. It may be the very poor quality of either the files I have, or the filming, or transfer or what. I want to see it all though.
 
Me and my wife started watching Freddy's Nightmares, our plan to spend October going through it, but we only made it to three episodes. We actually did like it but it's just not compelling us to keep going. It may be the very poor quality of either the files I have, or the filming, or transfer or what. I want to see it all though.
Yeah, the disastrous decision to shoot on film, telecine the rushes to analogue video, then edit and master on analogue video is particularly unkind to mid-1980s to mid-1990s productions. Once mastering moved to digital tapes, the quality improved, along with the longevity. Analogue tapes fade badly. I used to boost the colour and crush the blacks on analogue tapes routinely in one job in the early 2000s to compensate for the fading image.

Freddy's Nightmares, like the 1980s Twilight Zone, is analogue and likely hasn't had the care and attention it really needs for a modern release. First thing I do with old DVDs now is rip them and re-encode them. Trouble is, when many people rip DVDs with interlaced material, they encode the rips at 29.97 (for NTSC) or 25 frames per second (for PAL) forgetting they're interlaced, thus halving the vertical resolution. This is particularly a problem with old material, where there was either no progressive encoding for the film material or the source was video. Realistically, to ensure you get full vertical resolution, you should encode at 59.94 or 50fps. I even do this with alleged progressive encodes to get every bit of image data. Generally my videos look much better on a flat screen TV than the DVD source, as a result. My 1980s Twilight Zones are showing up as either 23.98 (NTSC for filmed material) or 29.97fps, so I'm encoding all of them at 59.94 for safety.

There was a US DVD release of Freddy's Nightmares, IIRC, but the UK only got one of those annoying 'Volume 1' releases, where they put on a few episodes, then there were no more, because of 'poor sales.' Trouble is, people don't like buying old TV shows in dribs and drabs: they want to buy the lot either in season sets or complete series sets. I've not seen much of Freddy's Nightmares, but I'd like to. There was a German release a while ago, but it was notable for its awful video quality, likely for the reasons I put above. Short of locating the negatives and rebuilding the series from scratch, there is 15 years' worth of relatively recent TV that just looks like crap and only exists on videotape. If's sad, because we have amazing some HD restorations of 1950s to mid-1980s TV from film negatives, then the move to telecine-ing for editing and - worse - shooting and mastering on 1-inch tape instead of 2-inch traps the rest in the format of the era.

The Twilight Zone (1980s) on DVD barely looks better than VHS, which is frustrating. According to the producer, they were binning the 35mm negatives as soon as they were being telecine-ed, so there's nothing left of the high quality source material: we're stuck with what are likely digital dubs of old analogue masters. When I was editing promos for a channel that was going to start showing Star Trek: TNG a mere 12 years ago, I was astonished to find that the pilot, Encounter at Farpoint, was provided on a Beta SP analogue tape. Worse, it was using pulldown, so it was likely an original tape from the 1980s. From season three of TNG onwards, the 23.98 US tapes were sped up to 25fps and copied to European PAL tapes. This drastically improved the picture, but the speed-up meant that the sound was often slightly higher pitched, unless the sound was separately pitch-shifted back to normal.

I wonder whether any of the PAL masters survive in UK archives and are any better than the NTSC ones on DVD...
 
Me and my wife started watching Freddy's Nightmares, our plan to spend October going through it, but we only made it to three episodes. We actually did like it but it's just not compelling us to keep going. It may be the very poor quality of either the files I have, or the filming, or transfer or what. I want to see it all though.
Freddys Nightmares has some interesting concepts and stories, but it looks distractingly cheap. I got to watch most of the eps on the old El Rey Network about a decade or so back, and I mostly enjoyed them once I got past the horrible picture quality.
 
Freddys Nightmares has some interesting concepts and stories, but it looks distractingly cheap. I got to watch most of the eps on the old El Rey Network about a decade or so back, and I mostly enjoyed them once I got past the horrible picture quality.
I just look at that era and think... 'What a mess!' We've got 15 years of TV that's basically impossible to put on modern TV stations and, at best, will be pushed out on sale basket DVDs. The Hunger looks pretty decent, because almost certainly, it was mastered to DigiBeta tapes. Unlike with analogue Beta SP, the degradation is far less of an issue. Uprezzed, DigiBeta can look pretty decent on Blu-ray, giving you the full quality of a studio tape.

The company I started my career with had just moved to mastering on DigiBeta when I began working for them in around 1995. The source shooting tapes were Beta SP, though. But when I've worked on archive TV shows from that era, I've often found myself dealing with Beta SP. The fading was appalling back around 2010-2012. Now, I dread to think what condition the tapes are in.

They might have the source materials for Freddy's Nightmares in a vault somewhere, but I doubt anyone would be interested in going to the considerable expense of datacine-ing the film stock and rebuilding the episodes. Nevertheless, with the complete 4K set of the original films due out in Q3 next year (that's something I'll be saving for!) it would be nice if even a DVD release of the TV series could come out, along with reissues of the books and comics.
 
I started the 'new' Twilight Zone from the 1980s this morning. I haven't quite finished The Hunger, but that's not the sort of show you can casually watch in the daytime due to the content!!

The first episode, from 1985 has two stories. First is Shatterday, based on a Harlan Ellison short story and the second A Little Peace and Quiet by James Crocker. Both are directed by Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street.)

The first thing that strikes me is the title sequence. It's long been a favourite. It demonstrates something that the subsequent two revivals of the show didn't understand: The Twilight Zone reflects the era in which it's made. From genetic manipulation to the final gasp of the Soviet-US arms race, the fears are rooted in the 1980s. That's great. Both the other revivals explicitly call back to the Rod Serling series into in their opening, while the 1985 opening titles is a brilliant, eerie montage of images with a creepy theme tune that has faint echoes of the Marius Constant theme.



Shatterday gives us Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis as a typical 1980s yuppie, aggressive, arrogant, hard drinking, who accidentally calls his home phone number only to discover a nicer, kinder version of him is living there. The story delves into the Jungian idea of the shadow self (familiar to Twin Peaks fans.) Only the shadow self here is the good guy. He's had enough of his main persona and steps in to fix the main persona's mistakes. It's a well-made, well-acted story. Bruce is terrific and it reminds me both how much he's missed in his tragic current state of aphasia and how much I miss Bruce before he became almost a self parody! I was a huge Moonlighting fan as a teenager and Bruce was The Man in that era! Another thing is that the story is based on a work by Harlan Ellison. The post-Dangerous Visions era was loaded with New Wave storytellers, whose tales deserved adaptation. The return of The Twilight Zone was justified in the aftermath of this movement. The lack of on-screen host doesn't bother me either - the first season of the original series doesn't have Rod Serling on screen either. I like Charles Aidman's voiceovers: they're subtle and set the scene perfectly.

A Little Peace and Quiet is very '1980s.' I can relate to this one. After spending much of the first 20 years of this century in London, I'm seriously averse to noise. I lived in an apartment block on the Heathrow flight path. It was notorious for how noisy it was. If I mentioned the aeroplane noise to anyone, they'd immediately identify the building. I slept badly for over half a decade. The planes would fly over from about 4.30am to about 1am every day. Now, I never put on the TV unless I want to watch something and if my parents put on the radio, I close the door. I even struggle with noisy restaurants. The episode features a housewife played by Melinda Dillon who is being driven mad by her family and the world at large. She digs up a mysterious necklace that stops time when she shouts 'Shut up!' To begin with, she enjoys the peace and quiet. She can enjoy breakfast, then restart time. However there's nuclear war on the brink in the background and ultimately, she faces making a frightening decision. There's no outro on this episode, lending the drama a greater weight.

The revival of the series suffered from being intended as a 10pm show, only to be scheduled at 8pm, meaning these early offerings are considered to be among the best, before compromises began to be made. It's great to see these stories again. This was the Twilight Zone I grew up with. Rod Serling's is the best, but I can't fault the 1980s show as my gateway to some terrific writing and storytelling. Sadly the picture quality is horrible due to the disastrous decision in the 1980s to switch the workflow of filmed TV shows to video. Still, I re-encoded the DVDs as 59.94fps HEVC files, which work much better on a flat panel TV screen. I've watched worse from old DVDs. Sadly the filmed materials have been lost going right back to when the episodes were made - the celluloid was binned as soon as it was telecine-ed - so there's no chance of anything much more being done with these episodes.

I hope the series from the early 2000s will be re-released at some point. It's not great, but I'd happily add it to my collection.
 
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