John Kenneth Muir.
By Dr. Howard Margolin, and Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction
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By Dr. Howard Margolin
Margolin: Good evening and welcome to Destinies. I'm Howard Margolin, and tonight the voice of science fiction is coming to you live for a post-Halloween horror special. Joining us via telephone from his home in North Carolina is John Kenneth Muir, author of Terror Television, American Series, 1970-1999. who is making his second appearance on our show...
At 675 oversized pages, Terror Television is a massive book. More so in the format of a college textbook than even your previous books. I've been reading it in my spare time for over a month, and I still have to get from 1996 to 1999, or from Poltergeist the Legacy to Angel. How long did it take you to write this book?
Muir: It took me the longest to write this book of any of I've done so far, and this was the seventh I had written. It took me the better part of a year to write the book, and literally, around the clock, I watched horror TV shows for many, many months.
Muir: I wish I were that organized. What I did was, when I knew I would be preparing the book, I would see what series I could get off the air. I was very lucky at that time that the Sci-Fi Channel was running Night Gallery, The Sixth Sense, Monsters and some of those other series. I believe Night Gallery is the first series in the book, and I did, oddly enough, do that first, but after that, it was whatever [series] I could then get the most of. I'm a real X-Files fan and over the years I've taped all of the X-Files episode, so I was able to, early on, look at the X-Files. It may have been better to go chronologically, but I was very good about keeping notes and keeping things together, and trying to pick up connections where I could between shows.
Margolin: How did you come across copies of some of the shows which haven't been in syndication or Sci-Fi Channel reruns, if ever?
Muir: That was the trick! I was very lucky. The Internet is an incredible tool and I feel very fortunate that I'm working in the field at this time, when the Internet is here, because I was able to hook up with videotape traders who had copies of these old shows. I couldn't believe when I was able to get copies of several episodes of Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected, from 1977. And the web-director of a Dracula: The Series site - which was a series I had never heard of that aired in 1990, so I didn't know where I was going to find it, she was nice enough to make me dubs of her collection, and I was able to see all thirty or so episodes of that series. It was a tricky gambit. But some shows like Twin Peaks have been released on video, so I could rent them from say Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. And then I just tried to keep abreast of the shows that were on, like Buffy, Millennium or Brimstone, but it was tricky.
Margolin: You use Rod Serling's Night Gallery from 1970 as the starting point for the modern era of Terror Television. Why does this show mark the beginning of a new age?
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But The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits also had a good amount of fantasy and science fiction, and Thriller alternated its horror stories sometimes with crime oriented stories. So I wanted to look at Night Gallery as the first show that was in color, one - and that way you can see the great color of blood, which is important for a horror TV show, and also it was the first one devoted only to horror. There were no mitigating factors in there. It was all terrifying.
Margolin: Up until 1990, the majority of horror series were anthologies. Why was this format so popular for so long, and what made it disappear after the early 1990s?
The X-Files was a TV series that was shot so much like feature films and done so well on a weekly basis that there was no reason to go to the movies, because you could get your great horror entertainment on TV for one thing, every week. But the creator of The X-Files, Chris Carter was able to make the show almost an anthology. You had Scully and Mulder every week, - so it wasn't an anthology, but you had a different monster every week. One week it was the Fluke Man, another week it was the Jersey Devil. It was an anthology of monsters, featuring regular characters.
Then what Chris Carter added to that was the serialization, which was that stories would expand and continue, and we would see how subplots would play over weeks and months and years, and I think fans really began to want to see that. They wanted to see the continuing universe, which an anthology can't provide. An anthology - if there's a story you really like, well it's over in a half-hour, and what's going to bring you back next week? That's my philosophy. The X-Files, I think really changed horror television a lot, and it's probably the reason why anthologies are no longer as successful.
Margolin: Could it also have had something to do with the over-exposure of the anthology? In the mid-80s, pretty much every show on was an anthology: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Amazing Stories, The (new) Twilight Zone, Freddy's Nightmares.
Friday the Thirteenth: The Series was a continuing story, but again, much like The Night Stalker, and even what you mentioned about X-Files, it was pretty much monster-of-the-week. You had your continuing characters, but the same format.
Muir: You bring up an excellent point. I think the anthologies were over-exposed, and a lot of them in the late 1980s were things that were, let's say, your mother and father wouldn't watch, shows like Monsters and Tales from the Darkside.
Although they had some good stories, and some witty moments, and some fine writers working on them, they looked like they were made for about $1.98. Just turning it on and watching it, they looked very cheap. They were done on two sets, with three or four actors, and it just looked very cheesy. Probably the American mainstream - our parents, the older generation, wouldn't turn on and stay with a Tales from the Darkside or a Freddy's Nightmares - which looked like it was shot on home video, frankly, or Monsters.
These shows seemed cheesy and immature if you didn't sit and actually watch through them all and see what stories they had to offer. I don't think they had "curb appeal" for television, let me say that. I think a lot of those anthologies were done on the cheap, they looked cheap, and they just didn't bring in the American mainstream.
Margolin: The proliferation of syndicated horror shows and syndicated science fiction shows in the late eighties, I suppose, was predicated by the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Muir: Absolutely. Star Trek: The Next Generation showed that you could have a success outside the networks, which was very important especially for genre, science fiction or horror.
But the thing that War of the Worlds or the syndicated Untouchables, Freddy's Nightmares, and Friday the 13th - what all those shows soon learned was that Star Trek: The Next Generation looked so good because it was so expensive. Each episode cost more than a million dollars, and the ratings could justify that for Star Trek. It had a brand name.
The other shows didn't last as long because they didn't have those high-budgets. They couldn't compete with that look. They looked cheap, and they couldn't afford the same calibre of actor or special effects, whathaveyou, and also the market became tighter after the Next Generation. You suddenly had all these shows competing with each other. Friday night, you had to choose: do I want to watch Monsters, or would I rather watch Freddy's Nightmares, or Star Trek: the Next Generation? There became more product, and the producers [of these horror programs] realized that Star Trek was a very expensive series and they simply didn't have the money to carry off those kind of values that made Star Trek popular.
Margolin: You also point out in the book how the advent of cable and especially premium cable changed the face of horror with the introduction of The Hitchhiker on HBO, because suddenly they could do so-called "mature themes," which, as you point out, was mostly an excuse for sex.
Muir: The Hitchhiker was sort of like "Twilight Zone T&A Theater." Every week, they would have some prominent and lovely actress take her clothes off at least once during the half hour. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it didn't amount to the most high-quality show. And later on, Tales from the Crypt, which was [also] on HBO - it went in a different direction for horror. It went over-the-top with gore instead of sex. It was a very gory, graphic show, but one of light humor.
Margolin: Interesting how many of these programs went from the premium cable networks to the USA network after a couple of seasons, where they were padded with extra episodes so that they could have a nice healthy syndication package. And then you point out the difference in quality between the premium shows on HBO or Showtime and the USA versions.
Muir: Exactly. The NBC version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was done pretty well, perhaps not as well as the original back in the 1960s, but it was done with high-quality directors and top-flight casts and such. Then suddenly, the USA ones were these really appalling, cheap, poorly-acted, poorly-written stories. There would be a hundred of those, and 25 from NBC, so you'd really have to hit it at the right time to see a good one. USA did that with a bunch of shows. They actually took Airwolf - a non horror show, at one point and padded that series for syndication with an extra season. They did it for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. They did it for The Hitchhhiker, which was ridiculous, because the HBO Hitchhiker was all of the T & A, as we mentioned, and you couldn't have any of that, you couldn't even say off-color words, on the USA network, so it went from one extreme to the other. You often didn't know which show you were watching because the episodes were so inconsistent.
Margolin: You cover 40 series in great detail in Terror Television, and give briefer coverage to another 16 shows, but since we don't have that much time tonight, let's concentrate on what you consider the best and worst series of the last thirty years. Which translates out to the appendix section of your book, especially Appendix C: "The Ten Best Terror Television Programs from 1970 - 1999." Should we do a David Letterman-style ten to one countdown?
Muir: Let's follow David Letterman's style. At number ten is Kindred: The Embraced. That was a Fox series about vampires integrating themselves into human society. It lasted a very brief time and the first episode was not very good, but follow-up episodes were good and took you into this secret society. It was a more soap-opera oriented show, with a beautiful cast and interesting stories about vampire-human relationships, like interracial romances. There was an element of The Godfather in it, because the vampires were like mobsters. It had some real interesting qualities - there was even a Romeo and Juliet subplot between warring vampire clans. I found it a very glitzy, entertaining show, perhaps not as deep as others, but a nice package overall.
Margolin: I can't really comment on Kindred because I never saw it. Some of the others I did watch, including the next one, number nine, American Gothic...
Muir: I thought that show was great. It was exactly what the title said it was. It was an old-fashioned Gothic story with a ghost in a white gown trying to help her brother, but transplanted to the American South, South Carolina. You had this demonic and charming character - and that's a quality of a Gothic story, and that was the Sheriff played by Gary Cole, who people will recognize from The Brady Bunch films, but here he was a much darker personality than Mike Brady! Sam Raimi was involved in the creation of the show, as was Shaun Cassidy, and the stories were good. Mostly, it was the setting that really seemed to matter - the American South, a post-Civil War South, a period when the South was changing. The Old South was represented by this monstrous Sheriff. Then the New South - these newcomers from the North, a newspaper reporter and such, had come down and were trying to uncover the secrets of the past. It was a fascinating a show, though at the time many people said it was a rip-off of The X-Files...I don't get that.
Margolin: I don't see any similarity to X-Files. We should point out that American Gothic was literally butchered during its run by CBS, because they showed episodes out of sequence. They didn't air episodes that were critical to the ongoing storyline. Like Kindred: The Embraced, American Gothic was a soap-opera-ish show and you had to watch the episodes in order because of things that were revealed in a certain episode, as they were in the Sci-Fi run, in the proper order.
Muir: It was a serial, and each week built on the developments of the previous installments. Characters changed and their motives changed, and their alliances and allegiances changed as the series developed. You take any piece out of that puzzle and suddenly it no longer makes sense. This is one of those occasions where a network was really not behind a series, and it really damaged that show. I applaud the Sci-Fi Channel for airing it in the original order - and all of the episodes, because it's a fine bit of work. I'd like to see the whole series on a DVD collector's set. That would make a great addition to the genre.
Margolin: Yeah. It was a good show. Unfortunately, it left many questions unanswered at the end...
Muir: It did. It had to end on a terrible cliffhanger, so we never got answers...
Margolin. Moving on...G vs. E?
Muir: Howard, I know you didn't like G vs E.
Margolin: I watched the pilot of G vs E and I was disappointed with it, incredibly disappointed with it, because it reminded me too much of Brimstone, which we'll be talking about in a little while, and yet it didn't have the things that I liked about Brimstone. The protagonists were not likeable. It was more inspired by a Pulp Fiction thing where you have two rough, gritty characters, who aren't necessarily people that the audience would like to relate to. It didn't have the super-human aspects of Brimstone, and it just didn't appeal to me to watch beyond the pilot episode. Apparently, you must have liked it because you put in on your list at number 8.
Muir: I did. This is one I debated heavily, because only eight or so episodes had aired when I wrote the book, and eventually I decided to put it in there. The reason I did was that it overdosed on style; it was the Pulp Fiction of the TV horror set. I liked how it used style for funny purposes. There was one episode that began with the heroes in an elevator falling. It was called "Evilator." They kept flashing back from the elevator falling to how they got into the elevator that was falling from the top of the skyscraper down to the bottom. I liked that the show played with structure, that it did unexpected things that it moved backward and forward in time. It had a wacky sense of humor.
I remember in the pilot there was this long interrogation scene of the hero by these two angels who were fighting for good. At first I thought 'What is this scene about, why is it here?' And then I realized the whole thing was a parody of the endless interview scenes on NYPD Blue where you have Sipowicz and his partner-of-the-week - whoever it was at that time, grilling this person - and it's good cop/bad cop. I realized they were transposing that and doing a funny take on that it in the afterlife. G vs E kept doing bold things like that. It wasn't the most consistently good show, but I felt it was a bold experimental show, and I liked how it played with the structure of what you can do on television. I knew it would be a controversial choice, because even I had my reservations about it. But I thought what it did right outweighed what it didn't do well.
Margolin: And you said that got worse when the Sci-Fi Channel took it over and it became Good versus Evil?
Muir: It became Good versus Evil and all the things I liked about it disappeared - all the wacky structure the over-the-top pacing, the humor. I felt it had all been mainstreamed and for me there was no reason to watch the show at that point. It had lost all the qualities that had made it interesting in the first place. I was sad to see that transformation.
Margolin: Moving up, next [on the list] is the show that starts the book off for you - which is Rod Serling's Night Gallery...
Muir: That show has gotten a lot of bad press. People have said 'Oh that wasn't as good as The Twilight Zone,' and 'Rod Serling really didn't have creative control' and such. Rod Serling is a hero of mine and he did write at least a third of the episodes in that series, so his voice comes through loud and clear in that show. Anytime you get a creative voice as powerful, as distinct as unique as Rod Serling's in a large portion of episodes, you're very lucky. There were a number of those shows that were just really fascinating. There was the famous one with the earwig...and it was a terrifying story. Another good show was called "Sins of the Father" about a character called a Sin-Eater. There were some weak shows - it had some of these little humorous things to connect certain stories, but overall I thought Rod Serling was there in spades and it was great to see an additional show from the genius who had made The Twilight Zone. Perhaps it was a lesser jewel in his crown but a jewel nonetheless.
"..the book he [Muir] was born to write...His analyses are first rate and based on a wide knowledge of the subject...TERROR TELEVISION is superlative television history."-BIG REEL
"Fans and researchers will appreciate the detailed, episode-by episode documentation and even nonfans will be engaged by Muir's informed and opinionated analyses."-Editor's Choice 2001, BOOKLIST
"...highly readable, extremely literate..."-ARBA
"...indispensable..."-CHILLER THEATER
"...essential"-RUSQ
Muir: Darren McGavin played Kolchak in that show, and he just made that series. He had his ratty little hat and funny suit. Every week, this little guy fought City Hall. The great thing about Kolchak is that it came out around the whole sort of Watergate/post-Vietnam context in the United States. People were very down on government, and didn't believe what government was telling them, and here was this series about a down-on-his-luck reporter fighting City Hall every week. He was fighting the police to find out the truth. He was fighting monsters. He was fighting local politicians. He's just this obnoxious, great character, who would go in and try to find the truth, no matter what - no matter how crazy it was, no matter how terrifying. He was horror TV's Everyman, and I just loved Kolchak. I thought it was a great show. Some shows were repetitive - people called it 'Monster of the Week,' but I enjoyed it. McGavin gave a great performance each and every time, his supporting cast was colorful and filled the show with humor, and, this Man Against City Hall aspect was really enjoyable.
Margolin: I agree. That's the first horror show I watched when I was a kid, and pretty much the last one I watched for many years, because I'm more of a science fiction fan than a horror fan, but something about him - Kolchak, the appeal of that character, just stayed with me. Even watching the reruns in 1981 on CBS Late Night was appealing because when I was ten years old I missed a lot of those episodes...
Muir: They edited a couple of episodes together as movies in the 1980s, and I'd only seen them in that format. So this was the first time I saw them in the regular series format, and I was just blown away. I couldn't believe how quirky and individual the show was, especially for the 1970s, when a lot of those shows were very cookie-cutter - Starsky and Hutch and Charlie's Angels, [they were] very black and white...and here was this quirky, individual show that was so much fun.
Margolin: It's a shame the show has never been revived. Darren McGavin has made appearances on X-Files as Mulder's predecessor and on Millennium as Frank Black's father. And as you point out, he's the real workhorse of terror television. He made more appearances in genre shows than virtually any other actor. But a revival of The Night Stalker - despite the fact that it was talked about when the ratings for the late night showings were so high twenty years ago, it just never materialized. Any plans for new novels and new comic books have just fallen by the wayside.
Muir: I would love to see a revival of the show, I just don't know who could replace Darren McGavin. This is a case where that actor just inhabited that character so well. I've heard some people say Nick Nolte would be good, or James Wood would be good, but Darren McGavin will always be Kolchak to me.
Margolin: He will live forever...
Moving on to number four on the list is a show that, again, I watched from the beginning and enjoyed, Millennium.
Muir: I have to plead a mea culpa here. I watched the first five or six episodes of Millennium and wrote it off as 'The Serial Killer of the Week,' and didn't come back to it until the third season. What a mistake that was! Fortunately the FX Network reran it, and I was able to catch all of the wonderful episodes I had missed. This was just a great show, in many ways the equal to The X-Files. It didn't have the same popularity, obviously, but it was really a beautifully done series. I liked the symbolism of the show, that Frank was working to protect his yellow house, that beautiful yellow house where his wife and daughter lived with him. That house was this great symbol of American purity, and he was always fighting the dark forces to keep it pure. In the second year, he lost his house and his family, and had to get it back.
I liked how the series worked with symbols, and the individual stories were terrific. The format changed a couple times. At the end of the second season there was a plague that was supposed to kill off the whole world, but then Millennium was renewed for a third season unexpectedly and so they had to come back and say 'No, the plague only killed eleven people in Seattle,' and such. There were some quirky things like that, but overall I thought it was a great series. I loved Lance Henriksen in it, and Megan Gallagher. It was a good paranoia trip. There were a lot of good stories about The Millennium Group, this cult that was doing underhanded and frightening things, and sometimes would be heroic and sometimes villainous.
Margolin: Like Kolchak, it starred an unlikely hero for television. Lance Henriksen is not the attractive leading man type, and they established him in the show as being 50 years old, which for a leading man on a TV series is very unusual, especially on a genre series.
Muir: Not only that, he wasn't this happy, charming, witty character. He was a sullen, solitary, contemplative individual. He was introverted. He was troubled, and not in a sort of handsome David Boreanaz-Angel way. He was legitimately troubled by things that he saw, his psychic visions. He was great.
Margolin: The show was unbelievably intense. I was thinking of the second episode, "Gehenna," where they microwaved people to death in a giant microwave oven...
Muir: That was really gruesome. They did some things on that show that were unbelievable. And it wasn't a particularly humorous series either. The X-Files had a lot of frightening visions, but you always had Mulder's sense of humor. Millennium was much darker.
Margolin: I'm just glad they got to wrap up that Frank Black storyline on that episode of The X-Files.
Muir: I must confess that when I heard that David Duchovny was leaving the series, I secretly hoped that Lance Henriksen would come along as Scully's new partner. Not that Robert Patrick isn't wonderful, he seems to fit in very well, but I just loved the character of Frank Black and would love to see more of him.
Margolin: I guess you couldn't have the sexual tension since Frank is old enough to be Scully's father.
Muir: That would be a different story.
Margolin: Moving on to the number three show. Let's get a little lighter here with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Muir: That's just a fun show. It really is. When I wrote this book, it had just finished its third season. Those first three years are an incredible three years about one thing. Horror isn't just scary, it isn't just to terrify, it can inform and enlighten you too. What that show is all about is equating horror with adolescence, particularly the experience of high school. I liked that it was about this girl who had to balance her responsibilities as she grew up with her school work. I liked the fact that it dealt with her problems with a boyfriend who sometimes ran hot and cold - Angel had a bad habit of turning evil. It was a great coming of age story.
Buffy has now left the high school milieu, and I still watch it and enjoy it but I don't think it's quite as powerful. I do admire Joss Whedon for taking the characters and having them grow up, but I think those first three years of Buffy - equating the high school experience was horror, were just brilliant.
Some critic early in the show's run said that it had the best dialogue of anything on TV, next to Seinfeld. That's true. The writing on that show, the dialogue specifically, is so sharp, so funny it's really a wonder.
Margolin: I guess the fact that Joss Whedon writes a lot of the episodes himself has a lot to do with it. It's that 'vision aspect' you were talking about that Chris Carter has, or Straczynski had with Babylon 5, or Serling had with Night Gallery, or even the creator of Nowhere Man had with his show. I see in one of your appendices you list the episodes of Nowhere Man, and the creator of that show wrote about a third of the episodes of the series.
Muir: That was another good paranoia trip Nowhere Man. I wasn't sure if that would qualify as horror or action-adventure, that's why it has smaller coverage in the book. It was a fine series, and they wrapped it up in one year. I would have liked to see it go on for five years.
But as far as Buffy is concerned, you're right. Joss Whedon has such a distinct voice. I like to see that on a mass medium like television. I like to hear an individual voice, not a homogenized, committee voice, but a single, unique, valuable voice coming out of the TV set. It's really great.
Margolin: Speaking of individual voices, at the number two position, there's Twin Peaks. There's David Lynch...
Muir: I was one of those people who missed a couple Twin Peaks in the middle when it was on originally. I lost the thread and gave up, but [when writing the book] I was able to rent all of the videos and watch them in order in a period of about three or four days, and believe me I didn't want to know anything from the outside world. I didn't want to see anybody, I didn't want to eat, I didn't want to answer the telephone, I just wanted to watch this show.
Watching it from story to story in that fashion, it was the most compelling, connected, bizarre and often horrific series I could have imagined. I just thought it was unbelievable. It evoked something of the Blair Witch before the Blair Witch, because there was an unseen terror in the forest that dwelled over the town of Twin Peaks.
There was some wacky humor, those David Lynchian touches, but for me it was this great story about a dark lodge. In the second season they determined that there was this evil, 'other' dimension in the forest, and in the final episode that's where they found Laura Palmer. It was freaky and trippy and strange - and a great show.
Margolin: You didn't want to eat? You didn't even want a good cup of coffee?
Muir: I probably wanted some pie. What were your thoughts on the show?
Margolin: Quite honestly, I lost track of it. That was a really tumultuous time in my life...I missed some episodes and I lost track of it. I had some friends who were totally devoted to it, and they'd have little parties and get together every week and watch it, and have donuts and coffee.
Muir: The same thing happened to me. I lost it on the original run and I'm very grateful I wrote this book and thought that I should include it, because I got to see all the episodes, and I was very impressed.
Margolin: At the number one spot, to nobody's surprise, is The X-Files.
Muir: This book was written when the first six seasons were done, and I wrote 'There's never been a bad episode of The X-Files,' and I stand by that statement, but I think there were some not-so-good episodes in the seventh season. I thought 'I've cursed this show,' I've just named it the best horror show of all time, and along comes the seventh season with a couple of weak shows.
But overall The X-Files is brilliant. It made horror smart. It made horror reflexive. It changed the genre. Think of how many shows came into being, not necessarily as copies of The X-Files, but because The X-Files was successful. We got Millennium, Dark Skies, The Burning Zone, Nowhere Man...
Margolin: Strange Luck...
Muir: Exactly. Also American Gothic, Kindred: The Embraced, maybe even Buffy got to TV because of The X-Files. This series proved that horror could be smart, scary, and it could be done on TV in a non-cheesy way. I think The X-Files will be remembered on a par with Star Trek, because the characters have the same kind of dynamic. Mulder and Scully are cultural icons now. Their relationship forms the philsophy of the show.
Looking at the early seasons of the show, you see that Chris Carter is viewing the world through two views: the skeptic and the believer. Everything that happens on that show comes from one of those points of view. Again, to have a voice, to have a point of view on a series, is stunning - but to get two opposing points of view, and two opposing, smart points of view is even more impressive.
The X-Files has done everything. It's gone to old horror legends, it's done new horror legends. My favorite episode was the one like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. It was called "Home," and it was about three mutant brothers and their strange mother living in a house filled with booby traps. It was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen on TV, and I loved it.
I think it's a great show, and I hope it continues to be a great show.
Margolin: Let's cover the five worst terror television program. Your worst series of all time in horror is....Freddy's Nightmares.
Muir: Freddy's Nightmares looks like it was shot on home video, wherever they could rent space cheaply. They would do two half-hour stories per hour, and it was so cheap that they sometimes used the same set for different stories. There was one [episode] set in a hotel convention room, and it was the only set. It was used in two stories that had nothing to do with each other, and nobody bothered to redress it...
They took this great character Freddy Krueger and just totally mangled his history. The first episode just completely changed his history as it had been known in the film series. It wasn't even a good rendition of the films.
Margolin: Number two is Stephen King's The Golden Years.
Muir: That was a short series on CBS in 1991 about a man exposed to green radiation who started aging backwards and becoming young again. Watching that show was like sitting in molasses. It was the most slow, boring, uninteresting series I think I've ever seen. It wasn't particularly that the production values were bad, or anything like that, it was just deadly deadly slow.
Margolin: Number three is Love and Curses, which was the re-titled and continuing version of She-Wolf of London, which you actually liked.
Muir: I thought She-Wolf of London was a pretty good show, pre-X-Files. It was trying to do the same thing as X-Files, it was trying to take old myths and legends like Bog Men and Succubi,and put them into a horror show where they would be debated by two personalities, a brash American student and a sort of staid-British professor. Some of those stories were quite good.
But then they moved the cast out of England for Love and Curses, brought them to L.A., and made the British guy a kind of smarmy, smart-ass. It just completely degenerated into these ridiculous stories. There's one I will never forget about trolls living under a housing development in Los Angeles, and they were zapping people and making them work underground, and there was a wizard. It was just the worst thing you've ever seen. It was an interesting series, and it degenerated into this garbage by the end of it.
Margolin: At number four is the show that you summed up in the same way I did before I even watched an episode - and this is why I never watched it, which is Burning Zone: "Outbreak on a weekly basis."
Muir: It was 'Disease of the Week.' How's this to draw you to your television? Every week you see innocent people afflicted with horrible, deforming diseases. There was one episode where people just had their bones snap. There was another, where people would spontaneously combust and all that would be left was their sneakers. It was just a thoroughly unpleasant show. I don't want to see people getting sick every week.
It was so unbelievable because not only were people getting sick every week, but they were getting cured every week. They always got cured kind of instantly and the team could move on. It was unbelievable as well as distasteful.
Margolin: At number five is The Hitchhiker.
Muir: I didn't object that much to the HBO version of the series. I thought it was The Twilight Zone with T & A, but taken on those terms well, okay, fine. Why not have a racy anthology? That seems perfectly appropriate. But then the show went to the USA Network and it couldn't do any of that anymore, so what was it? They never re-defined what the show should be, so it just became a bizarre anthology completely inconsistent with what had come before.