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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 9/16/26: There is nothing wrong with your television set [1]

['A Random Idiot', 'Dan K', 'Thom Hartmann']

Date: 2026-09-16  

The Outer Limits premiered on this day in 1963 and ran for a year and a half.

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The Outer Limits is an American television series that was broadcast on ABC from September 16, 1963, to January 16, 1965, at 7:30 PM Eastern Time on Mondays. It is often compared to The Twilight Zone, but features a greater emphasis on science fiction (rather than stories of fantasy or the supernatural). It is an anthology of self-contained episodes, sometimes with plot twists at their ends.

If you’re a certain age, you might remember the opening.

Each show began with either a cold open or a preview clip, followed by a narration over visuals of an oscilloscope. Using an Orwellian theme of taking over your television, the earliest version of the narration was: There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter.[3] We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits. A similar but shorter monologue caps each episode: We now return control of your television set to you, until next week at this same time, when the Control Voice will take you to… The Outer Limits. Later episodes used one of two shortened versions of the introduction. The first few episodes began simply with the title screen followed by the narration and no cold open or preview clip. The Control Voice was performed by actor Vic Perrin.

Props and actors from this show were also used in Star Trek.

As a personal note, this episode gave me the first nightmare I can remember.

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