A lot of reviewers choose to bury "The Starlost," but I'm here to praise it. This four-DVD collection of all 16 episodes of the show may be one of the most awaited releases ever — at least among a certain crowd.The Canadian television series is largely known as being a high-profile disaster — not a financial one, but a creative one, thanks to the loud mouth of legendary science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who created it. Ellison had a bad break-up with the show's producers (after writing the first episode), and he began to cry artistic compromise, brandishing the finished product as just south of loathsome.The show — run in Canada in 1973, followed by a late-night stint in the United States on NBC — has been an obscurity since. In that time, it gained a reputation for being a lifeless, cheap piece of junk, a laughable disaster deserving ridicule. Does it deserve that legacy? I don't think so.The set-up is inspired. The show begins in a weird Amish/hillbilly community called Cyprus Corners, where Devon (Keir Dullea) finds himself on the wrong side of the town elders when the girl he loves, Rachel (Gay Rowan), is promised to his friend Garth (Robin Ward).Rebellious and shunned, Devon makes his way to a site of local worship — a dark cave protected by a massive steel door. He manages to get past the door and discovers that his world is merely one biosphere of 53 on-board a giant spaceship called the Ark, which was launched from Earth 500 years before. It is now without a crew and hurtling toward a sun. Eventually, Devon, Rachel and Garth all find themselves wandering the ship, moving from biosphere to biosphere in an attempt to find someone with the ability to correct the doomed course.This journey sometimes results in stories that are pretty intriguing — check out "The Goddess Calabra," which has Rachel captive as the only woman capable of breeding in a biosphere ruled by cryptic religion, or "Gallery of Fear," which has the trio stumble upon an art gallery where their memories become part of the installation. Other times, the story can be admittedly a bit silly — witness "The Beehive," in which the travelers discover a biosphere of giant bees. It's hardly ever boring though.The show is realized via clunky but sincere performances and sets that look good but suffer thanks to the use of video, which adds little ambiance to the surroundings — scenes are often just way too well lit. The production is comparable to British science fiction of the same era — often it looks better than "Doctor Who.""The Starlost" seems less like a professional television production and more like a spirited public-access show, but that's really part of the charm. Slick production values often mask old ideas and this shows' contemporaries — "Battlestar Galactica," "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" and "Man from Atlantis" — only drive that point home. "The Starlost," by contrast, was a low-end maverick among standard television fare. If it doesn't quite match an episode of the new "Battlestar Galactica," it certainly beats every episode of the original one, and that's the comparison that counts.Admittedly, "The Starlost" is not for everyone, but I found it to be every bit as eccentric and diverting and exciting as it was to me as an 8-year-old. If shallowness is the biggest scourge of much of today's screen science fiction then "The Starlost" stands up very well. The DVD set is a great bit of video archeology.

And deservedly so, but I think the harshest critics of this show are being overly hard.The best way I can describe "The Starlost" is as a low-budget version of "Dr. Who". In fact, for the longest time (like someone posted on the BBS) I too thought this was a lost episode of the British TV show that I just needed to it track down.Through the miracle of Youtube I rediscovered it, then went on to investigate what happened to this show.Ho boy.As has already been posted, the creative powers were sold a bill of goods. The money people wanted to recapture that low steady audience market share that Star Trek had proved existed, and talked sci-fi types into creating what eventually became "The Starlost". The creative types, seeing that the wool had been pulled over their eyes, walked and put all the blame on the backers.I think this too is also too harsh. Harlan Ellison and his confederates were duped, of that there is no doubt, but, in my opinion, they should have bucked the money people, shot what they wanted, and pull a page out of the BBC's play-book by making a quality low-budget TV show.And, believe it or not, this is what they did, though unwillingly and begrudgingly. As other commentators have pointed out the production values are sub-par. The "special" effects are not so special, the supporting cast is hit-and-miss, and the rewritten dialogue should not have been as dumbed down as it was.But, in spite of all the poor tweakings by the financial powers, and despite the callous and blame-minded psychology that the creative team eventually adopted, the crux of the story still manages to shine.Poor production values to somewhat hamper this show, but despite marginal execution, the coordination of story and those same low production values help preserve the creative teams' intent.The SFX are poor (marginal at best), the actor thesping the computer terminal acts like he's in a B-movie, before CGI we're treated to a poorly shot (though magnificently designed) miniature and cheap video animation, and the local theatre groups cast in the support parts have a hard time keeping up with the leads. But, for all that, and for a show produced in the early 70s, it's actually okay for what it is.Mind you, if I were to helm this thing I would've either stopped production entirely or thumbed my nose at the backers and shot what I wanted. But, I would've made the best of a bad situation, and not cry foul when given the opportunity of a lifetime to shoot what could have been a truly magnificent sci-fi show.

Forget about "The Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" or the classic "Doctor Who" years with Tom Baker: CTV's THE STARLOST is the creepiest, most subtly disturbing television show ever made for general audiences. The background story about how the show came to be reads like a Nazi War Criminal Tribunal transcript: Harlan Ellison -- not exactly the most laid back person in first place -- is suckered into helping to create an epic television show set in the future, with space ships, laser beams, intergalactic voyage, combining the best talents of the era (Douglas Trumbull, Ben Bova, "Star Trek"'s alumni of superlative writers) with state-of-the-art technology, to be filmed in London for a worldwide audience hungry for creativity that had never been seen before. The scope would have dwarfed "Star Trek" with an emphasis on real science, astronomy, physics, engineering and a fearless sense of speculation about what could be out there in the universe.Then it all fell apart: The budget was drawn & quartered, the production syndicated, to be made on the cheap in Canada with a production staff of unknowns who were not trained or equipped to handle such a project. The story premise reduced to the lowest common denominator and the talent marginalized by the stupidity of those who only saw it as another way to sell toilet paper, frozen dinners and underarm deodorant. Blatant misrepresentation of intent finally drove Trumbull and Bova from the sets, and finally Ellison announced he'd had enough. Before the first pilot episode was ever taped he'd demanded that his name be removed from the credits lest the producers reap an undeserved bounty off his well-respected propz. Hyped beyond any possible ability to deliver what it boasted, the show premiered in 1973 to abject indifference from thunderstruck audiences who could not fathom what the point of it all was, mixing 3rd rate television production techniques, bizarre illiteracy of both form and content, and bare-bones production values that were put to shame by that which it attempted to mimic.Without Ellison's guidance the show became a sort of working example of how NOT to approach the science fiction genre, at the same time dumbed down beyond belief and yet defying any sort of accepted formula. Punctuated by bizarre, ultra-cheap quasi-minimal production design, brain dead writing and lunkheaded conceptual inconsistencies, it is a unique, remarkable failure of humanity attempting to do something great and yet stubbing their toe on the wainscoting with each step. It was canned almost immediately with the basic conflict of the last remnants of humanity in search of a new world on a giant, derelict space ark unresolved. They are still out there, somewhere, lost and unable to find their way home due to indifference, greed and incompetence.And yet what a show it IS in the form of the precious 16 episodes that were made, 10 of which are available now on a DVD box set from Britain. It's the creepiest television show ever made for family audiences, nightmares of it's basic concept of three lost humans moving from compartment to compartment on an unbelievably huge, lumbering, abandoned "Earthship Ark" haunted me for thirty years. Most of it isn't very good in the traditional way of looking at television, but as a kind of kitschy, ambiguous and hopelessly retarded entertainment it's truly one of a kind, for which we should probably be thankful. Harlan may not wish it so but THE STARLOST remains a remarkable example of humanity at their most clueless, with the potential of what could have been eclipsing that which was.I will let others describe the details of the premise, what interests me about the show is how utterly rudderless, forlorn and misdirected it all feels looking at the remnants 30 years later. If you want a more accurate look at what the show COULD have been, make sure you read the book adaptation of Mr. Ellison's "pilot episode" story, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES, which opens with a really eye-opening 20 page account of the hell he went through just to get this much accomplished. By all accounts he is to this day bitter, caustic, and openly hostile about the experience, and I agree that an authorized present day attempt to re-visualize his concept is entirely appropriate. Not a "re-make", since THE STARLOST as it is known today doesn't really officially exist. It was taken away from him and made stupid by those who pulled the strings; The idea is still worthy.None of which, by the way, is meant to denigrate the efforts of those who stuck around & gave it the good old college try. It's not their fault. They did their best and just happened to come up empty, though some of what survives to this day is remarkable: The principal leads (Kier Dullea, Gay Rowan, the perpetually gruff Robin Ward, and William Oster as the endlessly helpful computer "host") were very well cast and gave their all, and the guest appearances by some of the best & brightest of the day (the late Lloyd Bochner, a misplaced Walter Koenig, "Space: 1999"'s Barry Morse, priceless Ed Ames, and John Colicos who even makes the word vegetable sound like a Shakespeare sonnet) are wonderful. Trumbull's special effects don't come across well on the small screen but are entirely practical given Bova's scientific guidance. Superficially the show resembles "Doctor Who" though far, far less profound as realized.If it had been made right by honest visionaries who were interested in amounting to more than the sum of their parts it could have gone on for three or four seasons at least, perhaps even fulfilling Ellison's proposed story arc of the three heroes eventually repairing the ark and setting it on it's way again. Yet as an unfinished sketch of that idea it exists like a half remembered dream, haunting because of it's fleeting nature rather than hampered by never having been finished.8/10. In spite of everything, 8/10.

The Starlost had the potential to be a classic science fiction series as it was created by the superb writer Harlan Ellison. The premise was intriguing: earth is abandoned by the humans that have poisoned it in various ways. A great spaceship arc is constructed and a series of domes house various cultures. At some point in their journey an accident occurs killing the crew, the domes are sealed off, and in time the different societies within them come to believe only in their own world and are unaware they are part of a massive starship.3 individuals from a dome with an agrarian community discover the truth, along with the fact that the ark is on a collision course with a g-class star.The series revolved around their attempts to save the ark. unfortunately Ellison came into conflict with the producers & writes extensively about this in an intro into the book based on the series, Phoenix Without Ashes.The fact that the show had a shoestring budget did not help either.This would be a wonderful premise to revive with Ellison on board, and the state-of-the-art special effects now available.