Although television presented a postwar door to the future, even its visionary series have faced difficulties balancing family audiences (fewer monsters), small screens (diminished special effects) and continuing characters. Hence, science-fiction television has tended to borrow plots from other genres—especially westerns and war movies—and sometimes recycled sets and props as well (evident in Star Trek or Time Tunnel and even later shipboard ensembles like Battlestar Galactica). Space and technological wizardry nonetheless, have underpinned children’s programs, including the 1950s Space Patrol and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and the animated sitcom The Jetsons (ABC, 1962–3).

Beyond science fiction, moreover, TV crime adapted sci-fi technology and formula morality to anachronistic settings and international intrigue (The Wild Wild West).

Meanwhile, a submarine framed high-tech melodrama in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (ABC, 1964–8), and robots and monsters enlivened a family Lost in Space (CBS, 1965– 8). Nïght Stalker (ABC, 1972) even brought newsroom humor to revisit classic monsters.

Nevertheless, a few series really tested the medium and its mass audiences.

The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–5) and Rod Serling’s eerily masterful Twilight Zone (CBS 1958–65, 1985–7, syndicated 1987–8) both became classic not only on the basis of their disquieting imaginations, but also through careful direction and vivid acting. Each set itself apart from television itself in famous introductory sequences—the first warned the viewer not to try to control the set, which had been taken over by unknown forces, while Twilight Zone offered a surrealist montage with Serling’s clipped voiceover. Both the entire series and individual episodes have become classics.

The 1980s and 1990s proved dry decades for science fiction, unlike movies, although a new sci-fi cable network presents movies and older series. Alien Nation, however, extended the premise of a refugee alien population in the United States beyond the 1988 movie’s themes of race and drugs to encompass family culture and sexuality. The closing of the millennium, moreover, coincided with the X-Files (FOX, 1993–), where aliens and unexplained phenomena converge with paranoia about the government itself. In 1999 Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, launched Futurama, vaulting a New York teenager into the year 3000.

Sci-fi TV betrays roots of American media and culture. Only after decades did Star Trek’s universes produce female and black leadership, although it offered a wider range of characters than many mainstream shows. Family, nation, consumption and morality moreover, seem continuous, however futuristic worlds lament twentieth-century war, pollution, racism and poverty). Perhaps the primary divide between shows like Star Trek and the alternative Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and X-files, however, is the divergence between the future as a continuation of the American way and those shows that underscore an unease with the way things are and might be.