Weekend assignment #30:By-gone TV

John Scalzi, of By The Way has handed down the latest weekend assignment:

"Assignment:  What gone, but not forgotten, TV series do you miss the most?

Extra Credit:  If you had to be on a game show or reality show, which one would it be?"

Hmmmmmm. What gone, but not forgotten TV series...? Well, one of my favourite TV shows is gone, and almost completely forgotten. In fact, it was practically never known. I dont think it was ever shown outside of local Toronto area Canadian television.

"May I be of assistance?"

So asks 'The Host,' an AI computer interface, and Devon, Rachel, and Garth are drawn out of their comfortable rural existence and confronted with the harsh reality that their world is a spaceship, and it's broken, and nobody alive knows how to fix it.

Created by Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, and intended to feature story arcs by writers such as A.E. Van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin, Phillip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973's The Starlost was one of the most ambitious science fiction television projects ever conceived. The premise of the show was simple: "In the year 2790 A.D., a giant Earthship, Ark, drifts through deep space, out of control, its crew having been killed five hundred years earlier. When the accident that killed the crew occurred, the airlocks connecting the ship's domes that housed the last survivors of the dead planet Earth were sealed. Cut off from the outside world, many communities simply forgot that they were on a spacecraft. They accepted that their world was fifty miles in diameter and the sky was metal. Content with their lot, no one knew that their world was in grave danger. Without a crew at the helm, the Ark was on a collision course with a sun." As mentioned above, the three main characters accidentally find a way out of their sealed habitat and have their worlds turned upside down. The Ark is a sprawling, 200 mile long series of interconnected domes; each dome containing a completehabitat, and each dome sealed off from all the others, and the engineering areas of the ship. Devon, Garth and Rachel travel from dome to dome, trying to find someone, anyone, with the knowledge to correct the ship's course, and save the last remnants of humanity.

In the end, The Starlost succumbed to what all ambitious science fiction television projects succumb to: producers that don't get it and don't think the fans will get it, and budgetary constraints that rein in any serious special effects, not to mention paying for quality writers. Only one of the planned story arcs ever played out, the one by LeGuin, and the series rapidly devolved into a predictable weekly western style shootout. Only 17 episodes were ever shot, and The Starlost was truly lost, in the basement archives of the CTV television network. Apparently, the episodes were later knit into 5 movie length segments, which I understand are currently available from Amazon.com on VHS. The website I pulled most of this information from also indicated that as of 1999, the rights to develop a major motion picture based on the series had been sold to Sony Pictures, but I can find no evidence that the film project was ever actually begun.

So if The Starlost turned out to be a low budget hack sciffy show, why do you say it's the series you miss the most? Heck, I was a kid. I ate that stuff up. Don't get me started on Space:1999, or Battlestar Galactica.