No matter the genre and no matter the decade, whenever a TV show has enjoyed a great deal of success, it has inevitably been followed up by some kind of knock-off. When Seinfeld became a hit sitcom in the 1990s, its formula was largely copied by Friends. After ThunderCats became a popular Saturday morning cartoon in the 1980s, it was ripped off by SilverHawks. And back in the 1960s, when the sci-fi anthology series The Twilight Zone became an early television phenomenon, along came The Outer Limits.
Created by Leslie Stevens, The Outer Limits was simply ABC’s attempt to replicate CBS’s success with The Twilight Zone. Both shows were high-concept series with different casts and ideas every week carried out by some impressive writers and a wide array of actors who would become well known later. Like the Twilight Zone, the show leaned heavily into science fiction elements with deeper human messages underneath that were often laced with irony.
Fortunately, The Outer Limits was more than just a pale imitation of The Twilight Zone and it managed to create some memorable imagery and stories in its own right — stories that are worth watching while they’re free to stream on Tubi.
“You are about to enter another dimension”
To give you an idea of just how similar these shows were, every episode of The Twilight Zone opens and closes with narration from its creator, Rod Serling. Every time, he tells the audience, “You are about to enter another dimension.” The opening sequence features trippy images like a spiral and a giant blinking eyeball as the camera hurdles through space. In The Outer Limits, announcer Vic Perrin speaks over an introduction with an oscilloscope as he warns the audience, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.” Perrin also ends the opening by saying, “You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to…The Outer Limits.” While The Outer Limits clearly copied The Twilight Zone here, for many 1960s sci-fi fans, both intros became memorable.
While The Twilight Zone had heavy-hitter writers like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, The Outer Limits had episodes penned by Harlan Ellison and Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano.
The stories themselves were also filled with interesting, original concepts, like the episode “The Architects of Fear,” where scientists fake an alien invasion in an effort to get humanity to put aside its differences. “The Man Who Was Never Born” is about a time traveler who ends up in a desolate 22nd century Earth. “The Sixth Finger” is about an ordinary man who becomes the subject of an experiment that causes him to rapidly evolve and gain godlike powers. And “I, Robot” is about an intelligent AI robot charged with murder (which is derived from the same source material as the Will Smith movie by the same name). Granted, some of these concepts may seem rudimentary in 2026, but they were breakthroughs in the 1960s and wholly original from The Twilight Zone’s stories. The show also featured impressive makeup and creature effects for the era.
But The Outer Limits didn’t just distinguish itself with quality writing and production design. It also benefited from a bit of good timing. See, The Twilight Zone premiered in 1959 and quickly became a huge hit. The show was so successful that, for its fourth season, CBS executives expanded the show from a half-hour format to a full hour. And while that season has its merits, most Twilight Zone fans will tell you that the fourth season was the show’s weakest. Even CBS came to realize this, since the show went back to a half-hour format for its fifth season.
That fourth season of The Twilight Zone aired in the first half of 1963, and in the fall came The Outer Limits, which aired on Monday nights on ABC. The fifth season of The Twilight Zone began just a week later, with episodes airing on CBS on Friday nights. It’s possible that the Twilight Zone’s momentary dip in quality helped boost its imitator, or perhaps the success of The Twilight Zone simply proved the appetite for shows in that format. Regardless, The Outer Limits was a big success in its first season.
Then for season 2, The Outer Limits shifted to airing on Saturdays, and the ratings tanked. It was canceled midway through its second season. Still, that was hardly the end of The Outer Limits since it was rebooted to even greater success in the 1990s, with a revival lasting seven seasons. Meanwhile, the multiple attempts to revive The Twilight Zone have not proven nearly as successful.
There’s also one interesting bit of irony to point out about The Outer Limits. While the show was, in many ways, a rip-off of The Twilight Zone, in the 1980s, The Outer Limits gained renewed notoriety when one of the biggest movies of the decade ripped it off. After the debut of James Cameron’s blockbuster film The Terminator, Harlan Ellison claimed that the movie plagiarized its concept from an episode of The Outer Limits that he wrote. Like The Terminator, “The Soldier” is about a pair of warring soldiers from the future who do battle in the past. While The Terminator director James Cameron denied the allegations, the production company, Orion, capitulated. Ellison was then given a settlement and had to be credited on all future releases of The Terminator.
It’s that kind of irony that would find itself the subject of many a good Twilight Zone episode (and even a couple of Outer Limits stories).
The Outer Limits is available for free to stream on YouTube.