Where does science fiction history begin? It all depends on who you ask and what medium we’re talking about. In the world of literature, many experts will cite the 1805 French novel The Last Man by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville or Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein. Film gets much trickier, though the 1927 classic Metropolis still feels like a safe bet in terms of the true birth of sci-fi cinema. But what TV? Is there a specific moment we can pinpoint when science fiction television, as a subgenre, began?
In a sense, if we don’t count the fact that various 1930s Flash Gordon film serials were broadcast on TV in the 1950s (those are the ones George Lucas watched as a kid) there are only a handful of early TV series that can truly claim that title of “first sci-fi TV show.” And in the U.S., you’ve basically just got two: Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and another series, which aired around the same time, Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Although Captain Video traded timeslots with Tom Corbett on the DuMont Television Network, this series preceded Tom by one year. Starting on June 27, 1949, Captain Video became the first new live-action science fiction TV series to air regularly in the US. And, six years later, after airing roughly 1,500 episodes, the series ended on April 1, 1955.
