No single person was responsible for the creative success of The Outer Limits, just as no one recurring theme or story element gave the series its distinctive voice. From its rotating band of actors, writers, and directors, to its relatively consistent crew of technicians and production staff, the show was a unique collaboration of artists and craftsmen. What follows is an appreciation of a select few of them.

—Mark Holcomb and David C. Holcomb

Playwright, hard-science afficianado, and erstwhile mystic Leslie Stevens (or L. Clark Stevens, to use his nom de crackpot) is the indisputable father of The Outer Limits. Fans tend to forget this, and he's more likely to be remembered as the money man who got the show off the ground and then stepped aside to let Joseph Stefano make it soar.

It's true that his Daystar Productions developed so many series pilots over the years that he gave the term "line producer" new meaning. But while he seemed less interested in nurturing a show than in starting it and moving on, the sheer variety of the projects he took on reveals an artist with creative energy to burn: the Polanski-esque thriller Private Property; Incubus, a William Shatner vehicle spoken entirely in Esperanto; and, later, a handbook for something called "electronic-social transformation". Eclectic, maybe, but hardly the work of a intellectually bankrupt hit-and-run hack.

Stevens wrote and directed "Please Stand By," the prescient pilot for The Outer Limits, and three of its episodes, which ranged from the interesting ("The Borderland") to the charming ("Controlled Experiment") to the downright weird ("The Production and Decay of Strange Particles"). His creative presence, however, influenced the series long after his direct involvement had dwindled; it was, after all, his baby. After leaving the show at the end of the first season, Stevens continued to write plays and films, and devoted much of his time to what can only be described as "New Age" concerns. He died in April of 1998.

Leslie Stevens—artist, eccentric, and deal-maker—had just the right amount of professional drive and creative passion to get the things that interested him onto the small screen and into our memories forever. Electronic-social transformation indeed.

Any appreciation of The Outer Limits must be, in part, a hagiography of Joseph Stefano. The show's producer, in a dynamic and literal sense, he was the creative force behind the best of the defining first season. Infusing the show with a dark (though neither humorless nor hopeless) zëitgëist informed by the murky terrors of psychoanalysis and the banal brutalism of human society, Stefano offered television perhaps its last bang of "golden age" intelligence. With rubber monsters, no less.

Most of all, he was a writer. Virtually every episode during the 1963-'64 season reflected his input—sometimes just a tweak toward perfection, other times major revisions, and, once or twice, too little, too late.

Before The Outer Limits, Stefano wrote music; he turned to visual art with his arch, genuinely brilliant screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's opera of sickness, Psycho. He was on tap to do the same for Marnie when Leslie Stevens beckoned with a position as production executive on Please Stand By. After the show ended for him in late 1964, Stefano returned to cinema. The Eye of the Cat (expanded from a proposed Outer Limits script deemed too frightening for kids) is probably his best and most widely known postseries work. It's typical of his later writing: interesting, sometimes arresting, but pale in comparison to the classic TV show.

Stefano, as prodigious creator, isn't lost to his audience. We can enter his world, one of amazing art and absorbing philosophy, as we access the radiant legacy of his signature series. It's his best work. Joe Stefano, who passed away in August 2006, was and is The Outer Limits.

For all that, Stefano wasn't the only talented and worthwhile writer on the show. Meyer Dolinsky was one of several Outer Limits writers who seemed to implicitly grasp what Stefano and Stevens were after. His three episodes ("The Architects of Fear," "O.B.I.T." and "ZZZZZ") lack the murky psychological underpinnings of Stefano's episodes, but they're just as emotionally complex and thought-provoking; the first two are, in fact, undisputed series classics. Dolinsky went on to write for other television shows, notably Hawaii Five-O, and then scripted a couple of regrettably forgettable films. Again like Stefano, he appears to have done his best work for The Outer Limits.

Former actor turned prolific television writer Anthony Lawrence also penned two of the series' best episodes—"The Man Who Was Never Born" and "The Children of Spider County." Both are poignant character studies in which sterile values clash with messy realities, and each introduced a welcome dose of sentimentality to a series known for its bleakness. Like Dolinsky, Lawrence went on to write for Hawaii Five-O.

Harlan Ellison, excellent writer, charismatic presence, and genuine pain in the ass, wrote two episodes for the series' second season. One is good ("Soldier," the season premiere), despite wildly incongruent acting styles and a rushed ending; the other—"Demon With a Glass Hand"—is simply perfect, the one authentic classic Outer Limits from that season. We'll never live it down.

Prior to writing the emotional, effective "The Chameleon," Robert Towne made his living as a Corman hack at AIP (a hugely unlikely leading man, he even acted a bit). After The Outer Limits, he went on to write Polanski's still brilliant Chinatown (1974) and its stillborn sequel, and to both write and direct the appropriately single-minded Personal Best (1982) and a few other middling movies.

Other Outer Limits writers worth noting: Robert C. Dennis contributed a whopping four screenplays to the second season, some good ("Cry of Silence," "I, Robot"), one not so good ("The Brain of Colonel Barham"), and one great ("The Duplicate Man"); David Duncan, who was responsible for the stale and contrived "The Human Factor" from the first season, is best remembered for his B horror movie pedigree—he wrote the bizarre and entertaining The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958) and The Leech Woman (1960) before his work for the show.