The Writers' Room

Once again, Erik and Kyle have gotten to the end of a series! This month marks the final episode discussing  The Outer Limits and they're thankfully ending with a bang. Story editor Seelag Lester is the subject, who wrote "Wolf 359," the amazing two-parter "The Inheritors" and the final episode ever, "The Probe." Next month, a new show has been assigned...

Once again, Erik and Kyle have gotten to the end of a series! This month marks the final episode discussing  The Outer Limits and they're thankfully ending with a bang. Story editor Seelag Lester is the subject, who wrote "Wolf 359," the amazing two-parter "The Inheritors" and the final episode ever, "The Probe." Next month, a new show has been assigned...

It's our penultimate episode about  The Outer Limits , so why not talk about a bunch of crap? It's another of our now-ubiquitous episodes about writers who wrote only one episode. This time out it's "Cold Hands, Warm Heart," "Behold! Eck," "Expanding Human," and "The Premonition." Also, we've got announcements about our next two shows we're going to cover...

This month it's some episodes of  The Outer Limits season 2. We cannot say fairer than that. It's a trio of stories more or less by two writers; Jerry Sohl adapted his own short story for "The Invisible Enemy," Milton Krims rewrote a Stephen Lord treatment into "Keeper of the Purple Twilight," and then Krims rewrote Sohl for "Counterweight." And that's not all the rewriting there was in these. Not...

Friends! Because we're all having a rough go of it socially distancing, we thought we'd give you a little extra treat. The commentary we normally do once a month for our Patreon patrons is free for all to hear! And it's a good one. We talked about the Doctor Who episode "Oxygen" for our Who for Schools raffle winner, and for the commentary, Erik and Kyle are joined by podcast superstars Joy Piedmo...

This month, Kyle and Erik are back talking about  The Outer Limits season two, and with it...a writer! It's Robert C. Dennis, a very prolific TV writer who here is adapting three short stories and re-writing another writer's story for a fourth. They are "Cry of Silence," "I, Robot" (no, not that one), "The Duplicate Man," and "The Brain of Colonel Barham". Some of these are good and some of them s...

What's this now?! Why yes! Erik and Kyle have given  The Outer Limits a break for a month in order to talk about  Doctor Who again! As part of the Who For Schools initiative, a lucky raffle winner got to decide what New Who episode we discussed. The winner has chosen "Oxygen" by Jamie Mathieson. We're talking Capaldi, Nardole, Bill, and dystopian capitalism. Yay!

Happy New Year! And what could be happier than covering one of sci-fi's most famous writers? That's right, for episode one of our look at  The Outer Limits season 2, we're talking about the great Harlan Ellison and his two scripts, "Soldier" and the immortal "Demon with a Glass Hand." Next month, it's more  Doctor Who ...for a bit.

Can you believe it's been a year already? Kyle and Erik finish up their 12 months of discussing the first season of  The Outer Limits with a countdown of their top 10 and bottom 5 episodes! Next year we begin season 2, with the two episodes written by the great Harlan Ellison! If you have a suggestion for a classic genre show to discuss after  The Outer Limits , email us at erikandkyle@gmail.com!

This month, Erik and Kyle only have two episodes left in season one of  The Outer Limits . Fittingly, they're both would-be spin-offs from each of the show's two driving creative forces. First up is "Controlled Experiment," a comedy take on sci-fi from series creator Leslie Stevens. Second is the bat-poop crazy "The Forms of Things Unknown" from head writer Joseph Stefano.

In this month's penultimate look at the first season of  The Outer Limits , Kyle and Erik discuss four stories by four different writers, to varying degrees of interest. Those episodes are: "Specimen: Unknown" "The Guests" "Fun and Games" "The Special One" Two of them are really quite good!

This month, as we head to the end of  The Outer Limits season one, we have a quartet of very odd stories, all featuring input from story editor and Joseph Stefano's right-hand man, Lou Morheim. These include "The Mice," "Second Chance," "Moonstone," and "The Chameleon." Robert Towne wrote that last one.

This month, Erik and Kyle keep digging deeper into the troubled psyche of  The Outer Limits  season 1's showrunner, Joseph Stefano. These three episodes--"The Invisibles," "The Bellero Shield," and "A Feasibility Study"--each represent the writer's best (and most upsetting) traits.

This month, Erik and Kyle are joined by writer, podcast, smart person extraordinaire, Paul Cornell to discuss the  Outer Limits episode "Nightmare." "Nightmare" is a very somber episode about humans facing interrogation from a superior alien aggressor. Can their fragile Earth psyches take it?! This discussion goes deep on rules of engagement, interior storytelling, Southern Gothic Sci-fi, and writ...

This month we begin our look at  The Outer Limits ' most important writer, producer, and story-shaper, Joseph Stefano. We go in-depth on "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "The Zanti Misfits," and "Don't Open Till Doomsday," and figure out what Gothic Sci-Fi really means.

This month, your faithful hosts have three stories from three different writers of  The Outer Limits . First up is "The Human Factor" by David Duncan, an episode that seems like  The Thing but is more like  Face/Off . Next is "Corpus Earthling," a creepy little story about alien rocks by Orin Borsten. And finally, "Tourist Attraction" by Dean Riesner, a former child actor who went on to work with...

This month, Kyle and Erik look at two more writers of  The Outer Limits . It's Jerome Ross, who wrote "The Man with the Power," and Anthony Lawrence, who wrote "The Man Who Was Never Born" and "The Children of Spider County." Enjoy!

An early contender for MVP writer of  The Outer Limits season one, veteran TV writer Meyer Dolinsky wrote three fascinating and troubling episodes, two considered legitimate classics. First is "The Architects of Fear" which inspired Alan Moore's  Watchmen ; the paranoid Cold War thriller "O.B.I.T."; and a legitimately weird one, "ZZZZZ" about a super attractive bee woman.

This month, Erik and Kyle delve further into  The Outer Limits by talking about two episodes written by the writing team of Allan Balter and Robert Mintz ("The Hundred Days of the Dragon," "The Mutant"), and the one episode written by Ellis St. Joseph ("The Sixth Finger"). They get well into themes of bettering humanity, evolution, mutation, giant brains, giant eyeballs, goopy faces, and telepathy...

Here we go! A new year and a new season. Erik and Kyle are embarking on their journey into the 1960s sci-fi anthology series  The Outer Limits , which ran for 49 episodes on ABC TV in the United States and has since been reappraised time and again. We know a thing or two about series that began in 1963 that have gone on to longevity. To begin, we look no further than the series' creator, Leslie St...

Hello everyone! Happy New Year! First and foremost, welcome to 2019 and The Writers Room's new direction. It's still Erik and Kyle discussing old TV sci-fi, but for the next year or so, we'll be talking about the original 1963-1965 series  The Outer Limits . To start with, we're doing a bit of a primer about the series, how it came to be, who were the key creative types in charge of its 49 episode...

It all comes down to this! Erik and Kyle finish up their six-year journey into the writers of classic  Doctor Who with part two of their listener question answer thing. Thank you to everyone for listening for this long (but very fun!) folly of ours. We'll continue to talk about  Doctor Who going forward, but we're also jumping into new but similar shows, beginning with the original run of  The Out...

This month, friends, it's all over bar the shouting. Kyle and Erik tackle some of YOUR questions and discussion topics about their six year journey into the writers and writing of the classic series of Doctor Who . On order are things like which script editors were the best, what Doctor/companion teams were best served on screen, and what we'd recommend to new viewers. As referenced in the episode...

66 episodes down covering individual writers of classic  Doctor Who , and only one to go. Crazy. Erik and Kyle finish up their revisitation of Eric Saward, six years after the initial foray, by talking about his two Dalek stories--Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks. One of them is good but not a  Doctor Who story, the other definitely is a  Doctor Who story but is terrible. Wh...

The end is the beginning is the end! When we started our journey through the first 26 years of  Doctor Who via the writers and the stories they wrote, we tried to start big, by tackling the stories written by '80s script editor Eric Saward, and in doing so, we bit off more than we could chew. So, to wind down  The Writers Room mark 1, we're going back and doing Saward in two goes rather than just...