In the autumn of 1973, a Canadian television series went on the air with a pedigree no science-fiction show had ever enjoyed. It was created by Harlan Ellison, the most decorated short-story writer in the genre. Its executive producer was Douglas Trumbull, the effects genius behind 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its science adviser was Ben Bova, the editor of Analog. Its star was Keir Dullea, who had played Dave Bowman in 2001. And it was built around one of the smartest premises anyone had ever devised for a television series: a giant generation ship, centuries into its voyage, whose sealed-off inhabitants have forgotten they are aboard a spaceship at all.
Sixteen episodes later it was gone, its creator had disowned it under a pseudonym, and it was on its way to becoming a byword for how science fiction on television could go wrong. The Starlost is a failure — but it is a fascinating failure, and in some ways a prophetic one. It tried to do in 1973 what television would not manage for another twenty years: serious, serialized, literary science fiction. Understanding why it failed means understanding the state of science-fiction television in the early 1970s, and the state of Canadian television too.
Science fiction television in 1973: a graveyard
To see what The Starlost was up against, start with the landscape it entered. Star Trek had been cancelled in 1969 after three seasons. It was growing steadily in syndication — the reruns were building the audience that would eventually demand films and new series — but in 1973 there was no live-action Star Trek on the air. What there was, from September 1973, was Star Trek: The Animated Series, a Saturday-morning Filmation cartoon on NBC. That was the measure of the genre's standing: the most ambitious science-fiction show of the previous decade had been reduced to a children's cartoon.
The rest of the field was thin. In Britain, Doctor Who was in the Jon Pertwee era, still a family serial. ITV had launched The Tomorrow People in April 1973, a children's series about teenagers with psychic powers. The BBC tried something more adult the same year with Moonbase 3, a serious, unsensational serial set on the Moon; it ran six episodes and failed. Gerry Anderson's UFO had ended in 1971. In the United States, the season's big science-fiction hope was The Six Million Dollar Man, which began as a TV movie in March 1973 and became a series in January 1974 — but that was an action-adventure show with a science-fiction garnish, not speculative fiction.
Gene Roddenberry spent 1973 trying to get back on television. His pilot Genesis II aired on CBS in March 1973 and drew strong ratings, but CBS had only one science-fiction slot and chose instead to develop a television version of Planet of the Apes, the film franchise that was then at its peak. The Apes series finally aired in the autumn of 1974 and lasted fourteen episodes. Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes followed the same road to nowhere. The following year brought Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–75), and in 1975 Gerry Anderson returned with Space: 1999 — a show that, for all its lavish model work, has been described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as representing "a nadir in the quality of scientific thought in televised sf."
One critic, writing in PopMatters decades later, summed up the era bluntly: from the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969 to the debuts of Quantum Leap and Alien Nation in 1989, American television was "a sci-fi graveyard." The Starlost arrived in the middle of that graveyard, and it arrived carrying the heaviest expectations of any science-fiction series yet attempted.
Canadian television in 1973: drama on sufferance
The Canadian context matters just as much, because The Starlost was a Canadian production in a system that barely made drama at all.
Canadian broadcasting in the early 1970s was dominated by the question of American content. The Fowler Committee had reported in 1965 that two-thirds of evening programmes on English-language commercial stations in the Toronto area were of American origin, and that three-quarters of evening viewers were watching American shows. The Broadcasting Act of 1968 created the CRTC, and in early 1970 the new regulator proposed that 60 per cent of prime-time television be Canadian. Under pressure from broadcasters and politicians, the quota was cut to 50 per cent, prime time was redefined as 6 p.m. to midnight, and averages were calculated annually, so stations could bury Canadian content in the summer months.
CTV, the private network, was the regulator's constant target. At licence renewal hearings through the 1970s the CRTC berated the network for its lack of "real" Canadian content in prime time — drama with a Canadian setting, not shows shot in nameless cities with no licence plates visible and American money in close-ups, geared for sale in the United States. CTV pointed to its news and public-affairs programming and said it could do no more. It was not until 1979 that the CRTC imposed an actual condition of licence requiring CTV to broadcast a minimum of 26 hours of original Canadian drama in the 1980–81 season, rising to 39 hours the year after. Until the mid-1980s, as the CRTC itself later noted, virtually all prime-time drama in Canada was produced and broadcast by the CBC.
The results of the quota system were not always edifying. The most notorious example was The Trouble with Tracy, a CTV sitcom produced in 1970–71 at a rate of nearly 130 episodes in five months, largely from recycled radio scripts, to satisfy Canadian-content requirements. It became a byword for wobbly sets and flubbed lines — a cautionary tale about what happens when a regulator demands Canadian programmes without anyone paying for them properly.
The Starlost was a different kind of answer to the same pressures: a Canadian-made series with American studio money behind it. Twentieth Century Fox chose to produce in Toronto, where the exchange rate was favourable and Canadian subsidies were available — Ellison himself claimed the subsidies were the reason the production was shot in Canada. It was filmed in Toronto on videotape rather than film, another cost-saving measure that would come back to haunt it. For Canadian television, a science-fiction series with a Hollywood effects supervisor and a major American science-fiction writer was an extraordinary event. It was also, as it turned out, a fragile one: the money was American, the creative control was contested from the start, and the production existed in the gap between two systems that each assumed the other was paying for quality.
The premise: a ship that forgot itself
The premise, as Ellison conceived it, was genuinely strong. Foreseeing the destruction of Earth, humanity builds a multi-generational starship, Earthship Ark — 50 miles wide and 200 miles long, carrying dozens of biospheres, each kilometres across and housing people of different cultures. Their goal is to find and seed a new world around a distant star.
More than a hundred years into the voyage, in 2385, an unexplained accident throws the ship into emergency mode. Each biosphere is sealed off from the others. The crew is killed. And over the centuries, the descendants of the colonists forget they are aboard a spaceship at all. Each sealed community develops its own culture, its own religion, its own explanation of the world — and none of them knows the truth.
The series begins in 2790, 405 years after the accident, in Cypress Corners, an agrarian community whose culture resembles that of the Amish. Devon (Keir Dullea) is a young man who questions the elders, above all their insistence that his love Rachel (Gay Rowan) must marry his friend Garth (Robin Ward) in an arranged match. When Devon defies them, he discovers that the elders have been manipulating the local computer terminal, which they call "the Voice of the Creator," to issue their orders. He is put on trial for heresy and condemned to death by stoning.
An elderly dissenter, Abraham, gives Devon the key to a doorway Abraham himself is afraid to enter. Devon escapes into the service areas of the ship, finds a computer data station, and learns the truth: his whole world is one dome on a vast starship, and the ship is in trouble. He returns to tell his people and is nearly executed. Escaping with Rachel's help on the night before his death, and pursued by Garth, he flees into the ship. When Rachel refuses to return, Garth joins them instead.
The three eventually reach the ship's bridge — and find the skeletal remains of its crew, its control systems inoperative. Worse, they learn the Ark is on a collision course with a Class G star, much like the Sun. The only hope is to find the backup bridge at the other end of the Ark, hundreds of miles away, and reactivate the navigation and propulsion systems. Getting there means travelling through the ship's many sealed communities, each with its own customs, beliefs and laws, some of them hostile to outsiders. Along the way they are occasionally helped — and occasionally hindered — by Mu Lambda 165, the ship's only partially functioning computer interface, voiced by William Osler, who also provided the opening narration for each episode.
It was billed in its early stages as "The Fugitive in space," and the comparison is apt: three fugitives moving through a new world every week, with a long journey and a destination they may never reach. But the premise had something The Fugitive did not: every new society was a thought experiment. Each dome was a culture that had been sealed off for centuries and left to develop on its own premises — a theocracy here, a eugenics laboratory there, a society that had forgotten women existed. The generation ship was not just a setting; it was a machine for generating stories about what human societies become when they are cut off from one another.
From BBC pitch to syndicated compromise
The road from that idea to the screen was short and unhappy. In February 1973, Fox television producer Robert Kline approached Ellison to create a science-fiction series of eight episodes, to pitch to the BBC as a co-production. The BBC turned it down. Unable to sell The Starlost for prime time, Kline decided on a low-budget approach and produced it for syndication; by May he had sold it to 48 NBC stations and to CTV in Canada.
Then the writers' strike intervened. The Writers Guild strike ran from March 6 to June 24, 1973, and Ellison could not begin work on the series bible until Kline negotiated an exception with the Guild, on the grounds that the production was wholly Canadian. Ellison went to work on a bible for a series now planned at 24 one-hour episodes, dated April 10, 1973.
The production's great technical hope was Magicam, a system developed by Douglas Trumbull. Two cameras, their movements controlled by servos and synchronized, would film actors against a blue screen while a second camera shot a model background, allowing the camera and the actors to move together through miniature sets. It was a genuinely innovative idea — and it did not work reliably under weekly production conditions. The production fell back on simple blue-screen effects, which forced static camera shots. Worse, the Canadian studio space that had been rented was too small to build the required sets; partial sets were built, but the lack of space hampered everything.
As filming went on, Ellison grew disenchanted with the budget cuts, the details that were changed, and what he called a progressive dumbing down of the story. Even the title of the pilot was changed: he had called it "Phoenix Without Ashes," and it aired as "Voyage of Discovery." Before the pilot finished production, Ellison invoked a clause in his contract to force the producers to use his alternative registered writer's name — "Cordwainer Bird" — on the end credits.
Cordwainer Bird was Ellison's long-standing distress signal. He had first used it in 1964, on a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode, and had threatened to use it on his famous Star Trek script "The City on the Edge of Forever." It told his readers that a work had been taken from him and altered beyond recognition. On The Starlost it appeared on the series itself, before the first episode had even aired. Ben Bova, the science adviser, had no such exit clause and stayed on, offering advice to a team of Canadian writers who ignored his scientific counsel as often as they followed it. Trumbull, too, drifted away. The three big names who had given the project its lustre were gone before the show reached the screen.
How the series progressed
Sixteen episodes were made, airing weekly on CTV from September 22, 1973 to January 5, 1974. The pilot, "Voyage of Discovery," sets up the premise with real force: the heresy trial, the escape, the discovery of the bridge and the collision course. It is the episode closest to Ellison's original conception — so close that the unfilmed script, rather than the episode as broadcast, won Ellison the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay on March 31, 1974.
What follows is a slow drift away from that promise. The second episode, "Lazarus from the Mist," brings in Sterling Hayden as Jeremiah, a ship's engineer awakened from suspended animation — the kind of direct engagement with the Ark's machinery the premise seemed to promise. "The Goddess Calabra," the third episode, is the most literate of the run: from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, it strands the trio in a biosphere populated only by men, where Rachel is mistaken for the goddess the survivors worship. It also features the series' most distinguished guest pairing, John Colicos as the Governor and Barry Morse as Shaliff.
"The Pisces" uses time dilation — an exploratory vessel returns after a ten-year journey to find that 400 years have passed. "Children of Methuselah" finds the trio in a module occupied by children who believe they have been piloting the Ark since it left Earth. "And Only Man Is Vile" is a eugenics story, built around a scientist trying to breed a hardier race of humans.
The nearest the series comes to a continuing arc is the two-parter about Oro, the alien. In "The Alien Oro," Walter Koenig — Chekov of Star Trek, playing here without a trace of a Russian accent — is an alien who has crashed into the Ark and is harvesting parts to repair his ship. Garth falls for a woman who must leave with Oro to survive. In "The Return of Oro," the alien returns as commander of Earthship Ark, offering to take its people to his home world — until Devon discovers, by asking a robot the right questions, that the offer is a lie. It is the closest the show gets to the serialized storytelling its premise demanded, and it is also a reminder of how rarely the show attempted it.
Otherwise the episodes are standalone allegories, and the quality is uneven in the extreme. "Circuit of Death" has a disillusioned man triggering the Ark's self-destruct, and Devon and his companion miniaturized to stop the detonation. "Mr. Smith of Manchester" is an industrial dystopia, its ruler polluting his own city to manufacture armaments. "Astro-Medics" and "The Implant People" deal with a medical ship and a society ruled by pain-inducing brain implants. "Farthing's Comet" sends Devon outside the ship to rewire a panel during a comet passage. "The Beehive" — a science installation where a scientist has bred giant mutant bees — is the show at its most frankly preposterous.
Two further episodes were planned and never filmed. The Starlog Photo Guidebook of 1981 lists "God That Died" and "People in the Dark," the latter by George Salverson, in which the trio find a dome whose people have lived in darkness since the accident. The final episode that was made, "Space Precinct," ends not with a climax but with a shrug: Garth decides to return to Cypress Corners, is recruited into the inter-ark police force, and the journey simply continues. The Ark never reaches its backup bridge. The collision course is never resolved. Fox declined to pick up its options for the remainder of the series, and the story stops mid-sentence.
That unresolved ending is the show's epitaph in miniature. The central arc — the race to the backup bridge before the Ark hits the star — is the thing the series was built around, and it is the thing the series almost never returned to. The syndicated, episode-of-the-week format pulled against the serialized premise at every step. Each dome was a new story; the ship itself was the story that got lost.
The cast
The central trio carried the series, and the casting of Keir Dullea as Devon was the production's single greatest asset. Dullea was, in 1973, still Dave Bowman in the public mind — the astronaut who had journeyed beyond the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey five years earlier. His presence gave The Starlost a credibility no other actor could have supplied, and it is a measure of the show's problems that even Dullea later said he was disappointed with the finished product.
Gay Rowan, a Canadian actress, played Rachel, the emotional centre of the trio — loyal, compassionate, and the character through whom the show most often registered the human cost of the domes' strange societies. Robin Ward, also Canadian, played Garth, who begins as Devon's rival and Rachel's betrothed, the man sent to hunt them down, and becomes the practical third member of the expedition. William Osler, as the voice and image of Mu Lambda 165, was the show's fourth regular presence: the half-broken computer that was sometimes the trio's only ally and sometimes their obstacle, and the voice that opened every episode.
The guest stars were, episode for episode, stronger than the material they were given — and several of them carried science-fiction credentials of their own. Sterling Hayden, the film star of Dr. Strangelove and The Godfather, played Jeremiah, the engineer awakened from suspended animation. John Colicos, the first actor to play a Klingon on the original Star Trek, was the Governor in "The Goddess Calabra"; a few years later he would play Baltar, the traitor of the original Battlestar Galactica. Barry Morse, his co-star in that episode, went on to play Professor Victor Bergman in Space: 1999. Walter Koenig's Oro is the show's most memorable guest performance, not least because Koenig was then still Chekov in the public mind and here played a wholly different kind of alien.
The rest of the list reads like a catalogue of 1970s character acting: Lloyd Bochner as Colonel M. P. Garroway; Frank Converse as Dr. Gerald W. Aaron; Simon Oakland as Dr. Asgard; Percy Rodriguez as I. A. Richards; Ed Ames as President Mr. Smith in "Mr. Smith of Manchester"; Alexandra Bastedo as Egreck 419B2 Idona in "The Alien Oro"; Antoinette Bower as Dr. Heather Marshall; Diana Barrington as Captain Janice; Angel Tompkins as Daphne. It is a strong bench. That so little of their work survives in the memory is a verdict on the scripts and the production around them, not on the actors.
How it was received
Contemporary reception was poor, and the most quoted verdict came quickly. Reviewing the first episode in Vancouver's The Province on September 21, 1973, Michael Walsh found the model work impressive but concluded the show was "written, directed, acted, lit, photographed, recorded and edited like a church basement production." The line has followed The Starlost ever since, as a shorthand for the gulf between its idea and its execution.
The historians have been no kinder. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described the series as "dire." The Best of Science Fiction TV included it in its list of the "Worst Science Fiction Shows of All Time." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction's television survey calls it "the awful Generation-Starship programme The Starlost (1973)."
But the reception story is more complicated than the legend allows, and the complications are worth recording. The ratings record is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. The common summary — that the show performed poorly and was cancelled — fits its brief life and modest look. But the historian John Kenneth Muir, citing earlier research, has noted claims that the series was at one point the second-highest-rated show in Canada and was briefly considered for continuation by NBC affiliates. Those claims rest on secondary sources rather than direct ratings records, so they should be treated as evidence that the ratings story was uneven rather than uniformly dire. What seems clear is that the Canadian response was warmer than the show's later reputation suggests, while in the United States, syndication often placed it in Saturday-morning slots that undermined its serious intentions. A show conceived as adult, literary science fiction was being sold to children between cartoons.
The ironies piled up after the show left the air. Ellison's original pilot script won the Writers Guild Award — for the script as written, not as filmed. Bova vented his frustration in an editorial in Analog in June 1974, and the following year published The Starcrossed, a roman à clef about a scientist hired as adviser to a terrible science-fiction series. Ellison's own account of the debacle, the essay "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto," appeared as the foreword to Edward Bryant's novelization of the original script, Phoenix Without Ashes (1975). The novel let readers compare what Ellison had written with what had reached the screen — and the comparison did the broadcast version no favours.
Lasting impact
The Starlost has never been revived, and it has never really been forgiven. But it has never quite gone away, either.
The afterlife began almost immediately. The episodes were rebroadcast in 1978 and again in 1982, and in the late 1980s five pairs of episodes were edited together into feature-length films for cable — The Beginning, The Return, Deception, The Alien Oro and The Invasion. All sixteen episodes were released on VHS, and in September and October 2008 VCI Entertainment released the full series on DVD, digitally remastered, with a "presentation reel" hosted by Dullea and Trumbull — made before Ellison's departure, so that he is credited under his own name, and including sample Magicam footage and model work from Silent Running. In early 2019 a Roku channel began airing The Starlost as its only programme. The full series has circulated on YouTube. Its IMDb rating sits around 6.2 — mediocre, but the rating of a show people are still watching and arguing about half a century later.
The novelization has had a longer life than the series. Phoenix Without Ashes (Amazon affiliate link) remains in print in various editions, and in 2010 IDW Publishing adapted it as a graphic novel — Ellison's version of the story, finally told in pictures, thirty-seven years after the television version failed to tell it.
The show's larger legacy is as a cautionary tale and as a first draft of things that came later. It was an early attempt at serialized speculative fiction on television outside the American networks, and its failures map neatly onto the reasons serialized science fiction took so long to arrive: the economics of syndication, which demanded self-contained episodes; the immaturity of the effects technology; and the reluctance of executives to trust an audience with a continuing story. When Battlestar Galactica (1978), Babylon 5 (1993) and The Expanse (2015) finally made serialized space opera work on television, they were solving problems The Starlost had identified first. The generation-ship concept itself — sealed cultures, forgotten origins, a ship that is a world — has echoed through science fiction ever since, from Silent Running and Logan's Run to Star Trek: The Next Generation's isolated societies and, most recently, SYFY's The Ark (2023), which replays the premise of a damaged colony ship whose crew is dead and whose survivors must improvise.
There is also the Ellison legend. "Cordwainer Bird" became, after The Starlost, the most famous pseudonym in science fiction — a byword for a creator disowning his own work, and a story every television writer of the next generation knew. And there is the simple fact of the series bible, which still circulates among fans: a document for a 24-episode series about three young people discovering their world, written by one of the best writers in the field, for a show that was never allowed to be what it was written to be.
The Starlost failed on almost every count that matters to a television series: it looked cheap, it sounded stiff, it lost its creator, it lost its story, and it ended without an ending. What it did not fail at was the thing that mattered most to its creator: the idea. A ship full of sealed worlds, each with its own truth, carrying the last survivors of Earth toward a star they may never reach — that idea was good enough to survive the show that carried it. Fifty years on, it is still the reason people watch The Starlost, and still the reason they wish it had been better.
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