I remember this show fondly... it's one of my all-time favourites. I still have the entire series on Beta (recorded off-air during a bad thunderstorm, but what can you do?) I agree with the other posters about it probably being "too smart" to be successful, but I think it was further harmed by the writers' strike that year. The network kept repeating the only 7 episodes (I assume) because there was nothing else in the can. By the time the dispute was resolved, the damage of endless repeats had been done. Too bad. I was in high school when the series debuted, and I loved the fact that the show made me look things up. It really made me want to understand the topics being featured. (And it was a lot harder to look things up back then... no internet!)
... View MoreThe first time I watched an episode of this series, I was "zapping" through the channels, looking for anything worth watching, and got it running, missing maybe five minutes from the beginning of the show. The script was so wonderful that I got caught immediately. The complexity of the characters were captivating and, soon, I had myself into the story, even missing the beginning of the episode. Only in the next week, when I watched another episode, that time from the very beginning, I found out that the responsible for that wonderful series was Isaac Asimov, the greatest science fiction writer of all time. Yes, surely there are fantastic stories from other writers, like "Dune" by Frank Herbert, "Ripples in The Dirac Sea" by Geoffrey A. Landis, "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card, "Contact" by Carl Sagan and many others, but while those are precious pearls from a dozen writes, most (if not all) of Asimov stories are precious gemstones, he could not only produce wonderful stories, but lots of them! It's a pity when you get some masterpiece concepts like those in "I, Robot" collection by Asimov and waste them with a movie like "I, Robot"...Oh, but not this time! This series didn't have high-end visual effects or some Hollywood super star obfuscating the viewers from what is important in the movie... No, it had excellent stories, wonderful scripts and not very well known actors, but good ones nonetheless.This series proved one thing, good science fiction doesn't require complicated explanations to impossible arguments, just good ideas and a fine tuning of the elements...
... View MoreProbe was one of the best sci-fi shows I have ever seen and coming from me, that's high praise because I'am not easy to please. The acting was wonderful. My main beef is that it was done away with so soon. My other problem is that it is only shown ,like, once every three or four years!
... View MoreProbe was one of the best shows of 1988. It was intelligent, well-written TV, with a mildly misanthropic main character and a lot of quirky performances. Naturally, it got cancelled despite the combined creative talents of William Levinson (Columbo) and Isaac Asimov. Lots of shy, subtle humor and in-jokes. Catch it if you can.
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