Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

I hate how FOX keeps bringing this show back and then cancelling it. Sometimes you can get lucky and catch it on Sci-Fi, but still. This is an awesome show! The stories are some of the most fascinating and creepiest stories I have ever heard. FOX: PLEASE PUT THIS SHOW BACK ON AND LEAVE ON!!!!!!!!

Watching the stories on this wonderful show was like eating potato chips, you couldn't stop at just one. What fun, its like you got to play detective in finding which of the stories was fact or not. Some of the most outlandish ones turned out to be true! There was one I remembered. It was about a man who wrote a novel called Futility about the sinking of a great ship called the Titan that hits an iceburg in the North Atlantic. There is terrible loss of life because there are not enough lifeboats. The only thing was this book was written in 1898 14 years before the Titanic was even built. This actually was a true story. They cancelled this show too soon and I really miss it.

"Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction" has to be one of the coolest concepts for a series. Each episode has five fascinating stories are narrated or played out and you have to guess which ones are real and which ones are made up. At the end of each episode, it is revealed which ones are true and which are fiction. The stories run the gamut: some are scary, some touching, some just outright stupid. All of them have some element of unbelievability and make you say to yourself "There is no way in the world that this actually happened". While the acting may not be great and some of the stories may be corny, this show is still always fun to watch. The show's appeal is not really based on the acting, it is more based more on imagination and suspense.

Johnathan Frakes is unbelievably as the host. At the beginning of every episode, he'll show some kind of drawing or model which is not actually as it appears. After every story, he will come up with a pun which pertains to the story. For instance after a story in which a guy hitched a ride with a dead person, he said "Is this story true or are our writers just taking you for a ride?".

So, if you are fascinated by unbelievable real-life stories like me, I would definitely recommend it. It is one of the few good shows that really keeps my interest.

Since it was erratically scheduled on the Fox network, Beyond Belief never received much attention. I haven't seen it in quite a while; I don't know if it was canceled or if it's on hiatus, as it was previously, so I'll refer to it in the past tense. I enjoyed the show. James Brolin and Jonathan Frakes were great hosts, and the sleek, modernesque set was memorable. The acting usually ranged from awful to passable, although occasionally some really great performances were featured. I recall a story titled "Get Your Kicks at Motel 66," which featured the always-terrific Mary Woronov as the motel manager. She put on a great show, but she also made me realize how awful the other actors in the segment were! Still, despite a lot of mediocre performances and soap-opera style dialogue (typical of TV re-creations), I had a lot of fun trying to guess which stories were fact and which were fiction. If it's gone, that's very unfortunate. But...Fact: If it's coming back, I'll be the first in line for the guessing game!

This is one of my favorite shows on television. The concept is excellent. The production has a similar feeling to "X-files" and "Unsolved Mysteries", but is also in the tradition of "Ripley's Believe It or Not", "Twilight Zone", and other old shows that delved into the weird and wonderful.

I also enjoy guessing whether the stories are fact or fiction. The show invites the viewer to participate and give their belief system a workout.