Who doesn’t love finding some weird old science-fiction show you barely knew existed?
I stumbled onto Otherworld while digging around Television Obscurities and, naturally, went looking for it on YouTube. It lasted only eight episodes on CBS in 1985, which is exactly the kind of television artifact that makes me curious.
Why did nobody watch it? Was it terrible? Was it ahead of its time? Did CBS stick it somewhere to die?
There’s only one way to find out.
The copy I initially watched looked like somebody had rescued it from an old VHS tape, which honestly adds something to the experience. This isn’t one of those beautifully restored old shows where you can count William Shatner’s pores. This looks like 1985.
Unfortunately, the video quality also makes an already strange show a little harder to follow.
And Otherworld is very strange.
Welcome to Wherever the Hell We Are
Otherworld S1E1: “The Rules of Attraction” opens on the Sterling family visiting Egypt when they’re led inside the Great Pyramid during a rare planetary alignment. Their guide disappears, something resembling a portal opens, and suddenly the whole family has been dumped into another world.
That’s a pretty solid opening.
They emerge from the water, wander through the desert and eventually encounter a futuristic vehicle and an armed military officer carrying something that certainly doesn’t look like it came from 1985.
Here’s where Otherworld started losing me.
Why isn’t anybody freaking the f*ck out?
Your family just walked into a pyramid in Egypt, got sucked through some kind of interdimensional tunnel and emerged in a place with futuristic cars and laser weapons.
I’d have questions.
The Sterlings react more like the hotel accidentally lost their reservation.
That strange lack of urgency continues once they reach civilization. They bluff their way onto transportation, acquire a house and start settling into their new lives remarkably quickly.
Mom June (Gretchen Corbett) learns she’s going to be a housewife. The kids head off to school. Dad Hal (Sam Groom) tries to figure out where the hell they are.
Everybody just sort of…gets on with it.
For a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to.
Then the Grocery Store Got Me
The premise of Otherworld is much more interesting than the Sterlings initially make it seem.
This isn’t simply Future Earth.
The world they’ve landed in is divided into separate zones controlled by an authoritarian government, with heavily restricted travel between them. The Sterlings have also accidentally acquired an access crystal belonging to Commander Kroll, played by a very young Jonathan Banks, which makes them fugitives almost immediately.
Yes, Mike Ehrmantraut is chasing a wholesome 1980s family around another dimension.
I’m listening.
But the scene that really got my attention happens somewhere much less exciting:
the grocery store.
June is looking at generic cans marked “meat” and asks what kind of meat is inside. The stock boy doesn’t understand the question.
It’s meat.
What kind?
Meat.
It’s such a wonderfully simple little piece of world-building because suddenly you realize the Sterlings aren’t merely somewhere with different technology. Basic assumptions about ordinary life don’t work here.
And things get considerably stranger.
Wait. They’re Robots?
The family is invited to dinner by their new neighbors, where June’s illness becomes a problem. There’s radiation in this world.
The neighbors aren’t particularly concerned about it because radiation doesn’t affect them. They’re androids.
And that’s when Otherworld finally started clicking for me.
Humans once lived here, but they destroyed themselves. The machines they created survived.
Now we’re watching a 1985 television series talking about artificial beings created by humans who have inherited a world after humanity managed to wipe itself out.
I’m not going to pretend Otherworld predicted ChatGPT or our current AI obsession. Science fiction had been exploring artificial intelligence, robots and humanity destroying itself long before 1985.
But that’s exactly why old science fiction can be so much fun to watch now.
The technology changes. The anxiety doesn’t.
Humans create something in their own image. Humans lose control of it. The creation starts wondering whether it’s any less alive than its creator.
We’ve been worrying about this crap for a very long time.
“What Makes Me Not Human?”
The best part of the episode comes through Trace (Tony O’Dell), the Sterlings’ teenage son, who has managed to fall madly in love approximately seventeen minutes after arriving in another dimension.
Teenagers.
He becomes attached to a girl named Nova( Amanda Wyss), and eventually she has to confront the fact that she isn’t human.
Except Nova doesn’t see it that way.
She thinks. She feels. She loves. She believes she has a soul.
So what exactly makes her less human than Trace?
That’s a much more interesting question than I expected this goofy-looking 1985 show to ask.
And it’s also where Otherworld becomes frustrating, because there’s a genuinely good science-fiction concept underneath some fairly clunky execution.
The Sterlings should be terrified. Their reactions often don’t feel remotely believable. The dialogue can be awkward. Trace’s instant romance is hilarious. And at various points I wanted somebody — anybody — to react like an actual human being who had just discovered that everything they understood about reality was wrong.
Yet every time I thought about shutting it off, Otherworld gave me another reason to stay.
Commander Mike Ehrmantraut Wants His Crystal Back
It also helps enormously that Jonathan Banks is running around as Commander Kroll.
The Sterlings accidentally get possession of his access crystal, essentially a key that allows them to move through restricted areas, and Kroll wants it back. Badly.
That establishes what appears to be the larger engine for the series: the Sterlings travel from zone to zone looking for a way home while Kroll hunts them.
It’s a premise I can work with.
By the end of the episode, they’re fugitives again, Nova can’t follow them across the forbidden zone, and the family is back on the road.
Which brings us to the most annoying thing about discovering an obscure canceled television show:
There are only eight episodes.
So I’m already wondering whether this thing gives me any kind of ending or whether I’m about to spend eight hours following these people through another dimension only to have CBS leave them there forever.
We’ll soon find out.
Seventeen Minutes In, I Was Almost Out
Otherworld is exactly the kind of show that screws with my usual instincts.
At around 17 minutes, I thought I might be done. The family wasn’t reacting believably. I wasn’t completely sure what was happening. The VHS-quality upload wasn’t helping. And the whole thing had that unmistakable mid-’80s science-fiction cheese coating.
Then came the grocery store.
Then the androids.
Then Nova.
Then the revelation that humanity had destroyed itself and left its creations behind.
Suddenly I wanted another episode.
This isn’t Fringe or 12 Monkeys. You don’t need a corkboard and twenty feet of red string to follow it. It’s a relatively straightforward adventure series with an interesting science-fiction idea underneath it.
And it’s definitely not perfect. But perfect isn’t the question around here.
The question always is: Did I enjoy it enough to keep watching?
And, yep, I sure did.
The Sterlings may be bizarrely calm about getting thrown into another dimension, but Otherworld eventually gave me enough weird shit to make me want to follow them through the next tunnel.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE. Otherworld takes a while to get moving, and its wholesome 1980s family sometimes reacts to interdimensional insanity like they’re changing hotels. But stick around. There’s a strange, surprisingly thoughtful little sci-fi show hiding underneath the VHS fuzz — and I’ve got seven episodes left.
- ➝ 📺 Watch If You Dare: We gathered all the episodes we could find, along with trailers for this obscure sci-fi show on our Otherworld (1985) YouTube Playlist. And I found an upscaled version, too!
- ➝ 📡 Keep Exploring: Looking for something else to watch? Head into the Free TV Frontier for the good, the bad, the forgotten, and the stuff hiding in streaming’s weirdest corners.
- ➝ 📇 The TV Rolodex: Looking for a specific legend or forgotten loser? Search our TV Rolodex: A–Z Archive to see every show we’ve embraced or chased.
- ➝ 💡 PTC Streaming Tip: Streaming availability changes constantly. Check our FAST TV Streaming Guide to see what’s currently hiding out there for free.
