The Sixth Sense was one of the very few TV series to delve into the psychic world as a dramatic one-hour show.Dr.Michael Rhodes(Gary Collins)is a university professor who would investigate psychic phenomena and the lives of those it affected.This was a cool show that created some eerie episodes that were best viewed with the lights out.While Rhodes was written as a rather one-dimensional character,Collins brought a warmth & intelligence to the part that made you like the guy.The ESP aspects of the show would be shrouded in a mystery-of-the-week plot.Haunted houses,visions,ghosts,premonitions,psychic powers,you could look forward to chills from such stuff each week.Sadly,the show was re-packaged to run as part of the reruns of the fine Night Gallery show.But they cut the one-hour series back to 30-minutes in doing so,which makes the half-hour episodes incomprehensible & rushed.Still,it was a creepy show for its era(1972)and it was able to do it within the restrictions & lack of imaginations of the network.The X-Files was able to take the concept much further & with the benefits of later day technology & fx.But The Sixth Sense walked the path earlier.

Created by writer Anthony Lawrence, after the 1971 TV movie "Sweet, Sweet Rachel", and supervised during the first season (the first thirteen episodes) as an executive story consultant, the framework of "The Sixth Sense" is detective story but with wild macabre elements throughout the ESP phantasmagoria: delirious visions, hallucinations, apparitions, delusions, nightmares, mind transfers, memories from strangers, premonitions. As in the tradition of the private eye helped by his secretary, Dr. Michael Rhodes is supported by assistant librarian Nancy Murphy who only stays during the first seven episodes. The show's first ambition is to introduce to the audience the paranormal by rational and scientifical means and therefore, Dr. Rhodes plays the edifying and idealistic College professor who encounters hostility and skepticism. Too rigid and anecdotal to turn into a success, "The Sixth Sense" displays good episodes as "The House That Cried Murder", "Lady, Lady, Take My Life" (featuring a psychic lynch mob), "Once Upon a Chilling". Actually, "The Sixth Sense" is the second attempt to spread the ESP genre, after the 1959 anthology "One Step Beyond"--hosted and directed by John Newland; Newland participated in three "Sixth Sense" episodes: "Dear, Joan, We're Going to Scare You to Death", "Through a Flame, Darkly" and "And Scream by the Light of the Moon, the Moon"--, but with a regular conventional character and an early 1970's psychedelic film-making style. Many directors from other Universal fantastic shows worked on "The Sixth Sense": John Badham, Jeff Corey, Daniel Haller and Barry Shear from "Night Gallery" and Allen Barron from "Kolchak, The Night Stalker".

In January 1972, "The Sixth Sense" began as a midseason replacement series on ABC and was a 60 minute episode per Saturday evening. (ABC had quickly dispatched most of their new shows that had begun earlier in September of '71.) While not a runaway hit by any stretch of the imagination,especially when your main audience would've been watching "Mission: Impossible" on CBS, the show was picked up for the following fall (in the same killer time slot)and was a distant memory by winter. While not nearly as subversive as "Kolchak" or even "The X Files," the series had a distinct flair for creepiness for early 1970s standards. Having seen some of the cut and paste jobs done in the syndication package, I can say without doubt that the show was much more interesting at its full 60 minute length. One hopes that with the new interest in old TV shows on DVD, Universal might dust off the sixty minute episodes for those of us who often championed shows without a prayer on ABC.

This show aired in the Fall Season of 1972-73 and was quickly forgotten, probably due to it's genre (paranormal drama) and it's half-hour length. It centered on a professor (Gary Collins who actually acts in this) who explored cases of the mind, e.g. ESP and telekinesis.Sadly, no one really remembers this series and the fact that a popular movie came out with the exact name makes it even more of a rarity. Not a bad show, it will cause somewhat of an air of suspense, all in a bite-size package.Fortunately, this series was reedited into the syndication package of "Night Gallery" (which itself was badly edited) and can be seen wherever half-hour segments of "Night Gallery" is being shown. The only difference is in the very beginning where the typeface is different and a few more credits given to Anthony Lawrence and one other person. There is still the Rod Serling prologue (which he was paid handsomely for) and even some paintings to accent these episodes. Not a bad fate for a half-forgotten TV show.It's two-hour pilot, "Sweet Sweet Rachel," is often aired as a movie. If anyone has a copy of this pilot or some of the episodes, please email me. I would be very interested in completing my collection.