'Way Out

Way Out was a dark anthology series that aired on Friday nights at 9:30 PM in in the slot before Twilight Zone on CBS between March and July of 1961. It replaced one of TV's most notorious bombs, Jackie Gleason's "You Are In the Picture", an ill conceived game show. It premiered with strong ratings for the debut episode of "William & Mary" based on Roald Dahl's short story, but failed to sustain its audience and was canceled by July of 1961. Roald Dahl wrote and delivered the dark, wry introductions and sign offs with panache. Beginning each show with a, "How are you?" He would offer advice on, disposing of unpleasant spouses, or recount facetious stories of his boyhood in Norway where, when somebody died, and the ground was frozen solid, they would sharpen the legs and hammer the body into the ground, "like an enormous nail."

Fondly remembering this almost forgotten chapter in television history, Mike Dann says, "Way Out was one of the last weekly dramatic shows to be done in New York. Practically more than any other show, while it was not the most important, it represented the end of the era of New York as a production center for prime time. The only thing we had left then was variety shows. It meant the death of drama in New York, which is a great loss fore everyone."One I would dearly love to see, but have not been able to find is "Soft Focus" starring Barry Morse with makeup by Dick Smith. The program is subtle and needs repeated viewings to be fully appreciated. I hope it comes out on DVD or VHS.

Does anybody remember the TV show Great Ghost Tales. This show was very similar to Way Out. First, it was filmed live in New York City. Second, the show came on at 8:30 P.M. CST. Like Way Out, the show was short lived. Great Ghost Tales ran for 12 episodes, Way Out for 14. Fourth, Richard Thomas of The Waltons fame starred in one episode of Way Out and one episode of Great Ghost Tales. Way Out aired on CBS from 3/31/61 to 7/14/61. Great Ghost Tales aired on NBC from 7/6/61 to 9/21/61. The show replacing Great Ghost Tales was Hazel. A viewer would almost get the impression that Great Ghost Tales was a continuation of Way Out on another network with another announcer, Frank Gallop. On Way Out the episode that frightened me the most was "I Heard You Calling Me" about a woman who drowned 49 years ago aboard the Titanic. She haunted the room on the 7th floor of a hotel in London. On Great Ghost Tales, it was "A Phantom of Delight". This episode was about a woman who died forty years ago on her wedding day. Wearing her wedding gown, she would haunt her bedroom that was left locked and untouched by her parents.

This is a sadly overlooked anthology series which only ran from March to July 1961 (14 episodes). Although it had the low budget look of the early drama anthologies, it was quite unique and twisted. It often contained dialog that was both creepy and amusing. The series was hosted by Roald Dahl and he did an excellent job of setting up the mood for the stories. His monologues were clever, somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock. The stories themselves included such diverse plots as a man who has a chemical that can change facial features by touching up photos, an actor who can't remove his Quasimoto make-up, a new neighbor who can turn people into frogs, a married man who falls in love with a decapitated woman kept alive by electricity (with a light bulb for a head!), a woman who keeps waking up from nightmares only to find she is still dreaming, an undertaker who seems willing to help murderers "dispose of the body", an actress who discovers that during night rehearsals actors are really murdered & a dying old professor who is given an offer by a doctor to keep his brain alive in a tank after his body is dead. This show aired the 1/2 hour before The Twilight Zone on Friday nights. Seeing them as a child was quite frightening. Now seeing the only 5 stories that I could find as an adult, I can see how well written they were. I am really hoping this series shows up on DVD. At only 14 episodes, the whole series would make a great set.

This certainly would make a nice DVD box set. Actors and crew on this show are a who's who of Television in the 1960's. I've only seen 5 episodes all were odd in the best sense of the word and none of these five sound like the best of the series even.

The show features eerie electronic music in part by Robert Colbert who went on to to Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker. Title sequence of hands sticking up like trees out of sand is also memorable.

The show, like Roald Dahl's fiction, has heavy doses of dark dark humor, so much so that it's hard perhaps to call it horror but also hard to accept as just comedy either. This sets it apart from the lighter comedy episodes of other fantasy shows of that, or any, era, and perhaps left a mass TV audience confused and abandoned. It certainly had a good lead in time slot right before Twilight Zone and would make a nice lead in to those shows.

So it's too bad, though maybe not too much of a surprise, that the show didn't catch on. Someone bring these to DVD to be rediscovered as they deserve to be. Seems like a show ahead of it's time. Looks to have been shot on video, though copy I saw was so murky it was hard to tell.

This T.V. show aired when I was 9 years old. All I can remember about it was that the first episode scared the heck out of me, the second episode scared the heck out of my grandmother and the third episode ( having to do with nuclear war, I believe) scared the heck out of my parents. After that, we weren't allowed to watch it anymore, and I wish it was available on tape or DVD so I could see for myself what I missed. Now that I look back, after seeing everything in the horror and sci-fi field that's come out since, I wish I could see these episodes and compare them to all the shows I've loved since then, like Twilite Zone or Outer Limits.