Welcome
Welcome to our new blog! We are very pleased to present you with a blog about the most exciting sci-fi TV shows out there. We bet that you share our love for TV series exploring interesting scientific concepts and we hope you become a regular reader of ours.
On this page, you will find out more about our first blog and how we intend to develop it. Learn more about the history of the sci-fi genre on television and delve deeper into the plots of your favourite show.
Welcome again and enjoy reading!
Early History of Science Fiction on TV
Televised science fiction has a surprisingly long history. Britain took the lead when BBC broadcast R.U.R. (a sci-fi play by Czech playwright Karel Čapek) on 11 February 1938 when television was at its infancy, and barely anybody owned a TV set. However, this was during the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction (1938-1946) during which the genre gained critical and commercial recognition.
A longer version of R.U.R. returned to the screen again in 1948. Various H.G. Wells’s works were also adapted for television such as his novella The Time Machine in 1949.
Their American counterparts only began producing science-fiction shows in the late 1940’s. The first series was Captain Video and His Video Rangers running from June 1949 to April 1955. It was almost immediately followed by the cult-classics Space Patrol (March 1950) and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (August 1950).
Still, American sci-fi wasn’t an instant success. Arguably, it became what it is today, because of, you guess it right, The Twilight Zone. The original show was first broadcast in September 1959 and it wasn’t expected to stay long, but viewers thought different, and the series ended up producing 156 episodes.
Although the early British and American sci-fi productions didn’t have big budgets and their effects were rather primitive to our contemporary imagination, they did surprisingly well with these limitations. Many of them pioneered techniques such as superimposition, apparent invisibility and so on that we still see today.
As you can see, science fiction has long been the underdog of TV. Almost every sci-fi show (especially the early ones) was considered a gamble at one point and studio executives have been cautious with producing new shows (remember Star Trek OS?).
Many have failed to captivate the audience, but many others have done it rather successfully, even if it took them some time (Star Trek again). Now, however, we believe that the average spectator is much more likely to tune in and watch a new sci-fi show, otherwise Netflix wouldn’t have bought them by the bulk!
Blog Contents
We hope we can make this blog as topically diverse as possible. You can expect to learn a lot more about various science-fiction TV shows, but we want to add little twists to our articles. We don’t intend to only analyse a show as a whole, but to provide some interesting angles to it or to talk about its production.
Our little team will get to work immediately, because we don’t want to disappoint our first readers. We all hope you take a liking to our blog, and we encourage you to suggest ideas for future articles as well. Everyone is a film critic in their own right, and no-one’s point-of-view matches exactly that of another person, so we know we will learn a great deal from you.
Thank you again and enjoy our blog!