In 1997, one of the most bizarre television programs to ever make it to primetime made it to primetime. It was a cheaply made show that told stories of the weird and paranormal. Each episode featured five live-action stories, any of which could be true or false. The show was Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. As we enter spooky season, we wanted to take a moment to discuss this anthology oddity. It was an absolutely insane show when you think about it. And it remains one of the great cult shows of all time.
Beyond Belief: Humble Beginnings
The first season premiered in the summer of 1997 and starred James Brolin as the host. Fans of the series don’t really talk about this season, though. It’s not that it was bad; it just didn’t star Jonathan Frakes as the later seasons would, and that’s what made the show so special. This project would not have succeeded without Frakes. Brolin is fine as a host, but Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction doesn’t function on “fine”; it requires absurd. Frakes delivers on that.
Because everything about this show is cheese, and the concept is a skeptic’s nightmare. Anyone with a healthy sense of scientific acumen is going to immediately declare everything in the show as fiction. As we mentioned before, there are five stories in each episode. They all have some kind of premise that ranges from mildly absurd to bat shit ridiculous. One segment may be about a race car driver forced off the track by a phantom car. Then the driver finds out his vehicle was about to explode from a faulty gas line. The ghost saved his life! Or a story about a grill that belonged to a man’s recently deceased uncle. During a cookout, the grill erupts in flames and burns all the burgers. Turns out the burgers were all tainted with E.coli. The grill saved everyone! HAUNTED GRILL! Things like that.
Jonathan Frakes Took the Show to Another Level
James Brolin was not the right host to do wraparound segments for this kind of nonsense. So when season 2 started and Jonathan Frakes came in to host, he knew he had to amp up the cheese. And boy did he ever. Frakes leans HARD into the ridiculousness. Because it’s not just the stories that are bad. Oftentimes the acting is just above mediocre, and sometimes below. The writing is often so horrible that you have to wonder if the writers were smirking to themselves as they penned the scripts.
That’s why, leading into the segments, Frakes will ask some kind of ridiculous question to set up the story. He’ll ask you questions about bicycles, parking spots, themed restaurants, or other random inanities. Then, at the end of the segments, he’ll pose some bizarre questions to try and explain the story in a “logical” way. Logical is in quotes there because Frakes will suppose things that no normal man would ever ponder. And then he’ll wrap up the segment with a pun. He’ll say something like, “Was this story about the haunted quilt stitched together from the truth, or was it just a patchwork of lies?” And then he’ll smirk. You know that phrase about the cat who caught the canary? This man caught all the canaries in the northern hemisphere.
Just Who is Robert Tralins?
It helps acknowledge the cheesiness, though. Again, some of these stories are so absurd and predictable that there’s no way they’re true. Even if they claim they’re true, they can’t be. They’ll often say at the end of an episode that the stories are deemed to be true based on the research of author Robert Tralins. But Tralins was a novelist who wrote stories that ranged from pornographic to science fiction.
There’s nothing to say that his “research” wasn’t just stories he made up. Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter because the enjoyment comes from seeing what crazy shit is going to be presented to you next. Oftentimes the stories the writers made up are more mundane than the ones said to be fiction. Hell, they even recycled the urban legend about the guy flashing his high beams to alert the car in front of him that there was a killer in the back of their car.
For whatever reason, the show has been remarkably popular in Germany. It’s broadcast under the name X-Factor: Das Unfassbare. The writer of this article can personally attest to this. He’s mentioned the show to some of his German friends who didn’t recognize the name Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. But when he said, “I think it’s called X-Factor in Germany,” they replied, “Oh, of course, I love that show.” In fact, it’s so popular that new episodes were made starting in 2021 exclusively for Germany. They even brought Frakes back to host.
Give Us More Beyond Belief
Counting the first season with Brolin, there are four official seasons in English. It’s not enough. The new German episodes were all reportedly filmed in English. They haven’t been released stateside yet. Maybe they will. Hopefully they will, that is. The world needs more Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. It’s a great show for families to watch. It’s compelling for different reasons. Younger audiences will take it seriously, as will people who are less cynical and scrutinizing. Meanwhile, skeptics and fans of camp television will love it for how cheesy it is. It’s the kind of thing that rallies people together to watch for pure fun.
Additionally, Beyond Belief manages to do all this without being too scary or gory. All of the stories are pretty PG. The effects are low budget enough to where they’re not going to scare anyone. Not to mention, the stories are often groan-inducingly bad, so any sense of terror is removed. But that’s the magic of it all. You get to see what horror looks like within the constraints of PG television. There are episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that are way more terrifying than this show. But damnit if Beyond Belief doesn’t try its little heart out.
A Revival Shouldn’t be so Hard
We need this show back on television. We need it to be just the way it was back in the ’90s. It has to be low-budget, cheesy, stupidly ridiculous, and PG-rated to keep that level of restraint together. Sometimes setting limits leads to creative decisions that turn out spectacularly. Horror can be a very serious subject, but other times it just needs to be dumb fun. Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction is that dumb fun.
So what about that program that tried to get you to tell the truth from deception? Is it something that deserves to come back, or should it stay buried in a bed of lies?
