This 2-Season Sci-Fi Series Is As Cheesy as It Is Horrifying

This 2-Season Sci-Fi Series Is As Cheesy as It Is Horrifying Jared Martin, Adrian Paul, and Lynda Mason Greene from the 1988 series, War of the Worlds.Image via Paramount Domestic Television By  Roger Froilan Published 54 minutes ago Roger is passionate about movies and TV shows, as well as the drive-in theater. Aside from hosting and producing three podcasts and a monthly live show, he also collects comic books, records, VHS tapes, and classic TV Guides. Currently, he's gotten into restoring cars and enjoys many of the shows on the Motortrend channel. Sign in to your Collider account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

There was a time in the late '80s when sci-fi shows felt like an after-hours carnival — dim lighting, rubber monsters, synth stings, and storylines that flirted with genuine terror before veering straight into delightful nonsense. You’d tune in for Friday the 13th: The Series, then stick around for Monsters, Alien Nation, or some rerun of V and wonder how television executives were simultaneously terrified of genre TV and addicted to producing it. Right in the middle of that neon-lit Bermuda Triangle sat War of the Worlds, a two-season 1988 to 1990 syndicated sequel to the 1953 George Pal movie that somehow shared DNA with the gritty future-noir of Max Headroom, the creature-of-the-week glee of Werewolf, and the earnest weirdness of Starman — all while playing everything dead serious, even when it probably shouldn’t have.

And if you were flipping channels back then — the old-fashioned way, thumb on the remote, hoping the antenna behaved — you remember how the whole landscape felt stitched together out of stuff that shouldn’t occupy the same time slot. You’d catch The Highwayman drifting by like a fever dream, or The Phoenix trying three ideas at once; you’d get the “who knows what we’re getting tonight” roulette of Freddy’s Nightmares or The Ray Bradbury Theater; or you’d hit Quantum Leap just when sci-fi was starting to figure out it could be emotional without losing the weird. War of the Worlds sat right in the middle of that messy little crossroads — too grimy to vanish, too offbeat to elevate, too committed to its own wild tone to ever melt into the background. And honestly, that’s exactly why it’s still worth revisiting.

'War of the Worlds' Season 1 Was Filled With Sweaty Paranoia

A creepy alien grabbing the Earth in War of the WorldsImage via Paramount Domestic Television

Season 1 opens like someone cracked a window into the wrong lab at the wrong hour. Everything feels damp, grimy, and pulsing with the kind of biological paranoia you only got from sci-fi before CGI smoothed out the edges. The Martians — still alive, still furious — ooze their way back into the world by hijacking human bodies, and it’s nastier than anything airing in syndication had any right to be.

Jared Martin leads the charge as Harrison Blackwood, all sharp intelligence, deep-voiced, and with a slightly haunted composure. Martin doesn’t play the role like a typical television action hero, as he’s more of an academic who suddenly realized his theories were a little too correct and now has to survive them. He’s the grounding force holding the show together while the aliens, the budget, and sometimes even the tone try to slip off the rails. Richard Chaves, fresh from Predator, steps in as Ironhorse, the military counterbalance with a coiled intensity and this unexpected emotional undercurrent. You can see the “I’ve seen monsters for real” energy in his eyes. He gives the show muscle, but also dignity, giving weight to storylines that could’ve been goofy without him.

And then there’s Catherine Disher. Years before she melted into the moody, gothic corners of Forever Knight, she was already delivering understated, deeply human work as microbiologist Suzanne McCullough. She’s the steady flame in the middle of the cold, clinical atmosphere — warm, thoughtful, quietly funny, and always present. Her chemistry with Martin gives the show the heart it desperately needs. Season 1 plays like the kind of dog-eared horror paperback you weren’t supposed to bring to school: sweaty, pulpy, fascinated with the body in all the wrong (and therefore very right) ways. It lingers in that way only the scrappiest shows do — not because it’s polished, but because it leans so hard into its own oddness that the edges start to buzz. There’s a faint “should I be watching this?” energy baked into the cheap lighting and stranger-than-it-needs-to-be creature work, the kind that gave late-night syndication its slightly dangerous charm.

Season 2 of the Sci-Fi Series Had a Dystopian Glow-Up Nobody Saw Coming

Then the show comes back for Season 2 and basically hits the self-destruct button by leaping forward in time just to see what rises from the smoke. Gone is the lab coat dread. In its place: decaying cityscapes, anarchic gangs, industrial grime, and aliens who look like they wandered out of a warehouse where someone forgot to turn off the uranium mixer. The whole thing suddenly has this scorched, junkyard pulse — less “government think tank” and more “civilization found dead in an alley.” It’s a shift that doesn’t warm up the engine; it peels out immediately, the visual palette going full rust-and-neon as if the production team decided subtlety was someone else’s problem. The tone shift doesn’t tiptoe — it lunges. The new aesthetic hits like someone dared the writers to merge Blade Runner and The Warriors with pocket change and a one-week shooting schedule, and everyone involved just nodded and said, “Why not?”

Half the cast is gone. And the world around the survivors seems to cave in almost overnight. Not in a poetic way, but with the rattling, half-broken energy of an arcade cabinet that’s been kicked too many times. The show stops feeling like a continuation and starts feeling like somebody grabbed the wrong reel out of the storage room, then shrugged and said, “Close enough.” It has this strange moment where you realize the show isn’t following its own footprint anymore — it’s veered off into something rougher, grimier, like a half-finished post-apocalyptic pitch that stumbled onto the set and nobody bothered to escort it back out.

Related This Is Undoubtably the Worst Movie of 2025 - So Why Is It Such a Major Hit on Streaming?

Despite scathing reviews, this sci-fi flop continues to climb on the streaming charts.

Posts By  Collier Jennings Aug 29, 2025

Into this chaos steps Adrian Paul, a few years shy of becoming Highlander’s Duncan MacLeod. Even before the ponytail era, he moves through scenes like someone who already knows the room bends around him a little — that combination of fluid physicality and that soft, haunted undercurrent he’d later perfect. He carries himself like he’s been through the story already and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up, with a calm, seasoned gravity that steadies the frame without ever calling attention to itself. Season 2 is messy, sure. Wildly inconsistent. Sometimes reaching five steps beyond what it could reasonably execute, but the ambition is the charm. It swings big when other sci-fi shows play it safe, and even the misfires have personality.

This series works — when it works — because the cast behaves like they’re acting in two entirely different versions of prestige TV, neither of which the network actually ordered. Jared Martin brings a calm, cerebral center. Richard Chaves gives everything this grounded soldier’s gravitas. Catherine Disher supplies the humanity, the warmth, and the brains. And Adrian Paul walks in with mythic energy just when the show threatens to spin off into pure chaos. Take any one of them out, and the whole thing collapses into camp. Leave them in, and the series becomes this strangely earnest mix of horror, sci-fi, and late-night syndication bravado — the kind of thing you can’t remake today because nobody would ever approve of something this weird with a straight face.

Here's Why This Odd Little Sci-Fi TV Relic Still Deserves a Watch

Lynda Mason Greene as Suzanne, and Jared Martin as Harrison Blackwood in War of the Worlds.Image via Paramount Domestic Television

War of the Worlds is the sort of show that shouldn’t work on paper, but it keeps shape-shifting just enough to survive itself. It's bleak when it needs to be, soft when you least expect it, and chaotic in ways that somehow never feel sloppy. You get the sense the crew rebuilt the mood of the show week by week, trusting instinct more than structure, and that roughness ends up being part of its spine. It lands in that small, electric pocket alongside V, Alien Nation, Max Headroom, and later oddball favorites like Invasion or Night Visions — shows that weren’t afraid to get messy if it meant doing something interesting.

If you grew up taping syndicated weirdness off a Zenith, this one’s already burned into some recess of your brain. And if you didn’t, watching it now feels like stepping sideways into a different version of TV history, one where the best stuff was made by people betting big with small tools and trusting the audience to meet them halfway. What’s left is a two-season sci-fi-horror experiment built from ambition, limitation, and a streak of creative stubbornness that still makes it one of the most unforgettable slices of late 1980s television.

War of the Worlds

Like TV-PG Drama Action & Adventure Science Fiction War Release Date 1988 - 1990-00-00 Network Syndication Directors William Fruet, George Bloomfield, Armand Mastroianni, Neill Fearnley, Mark Sobel, Allan Eastman, Colin Chilvers, Gabriel Pelletier, George McCowan, Francis Delia, Jorge Montesi, Joseph L. Scanlan, Paul Tucker, Timothy Bond, Winrich Kolbe Writers Tom Lazarus, Greg Strangis, Jim Trombetta, Nancy Ann Miller, Patrick Barry, Durnford King, Herbert Wright, Carl Binder, Janet MacLean, Sylvia Clayton, David Tynan, David Braff, Lorne Rossman, J.K.E. Rose, Tony Di Franco, Michael McCormack, D.C. Fontana, Forrest Van Buren, Jim Henshaw, Sandra Berg, Judith Berg, Arnold Margolin, Norman Snider, Naomi Janzen

Cast

See All

• Adrian Paul John Kincaid
• Aki Aleong Tao
• Alex Carter Clark
• Amos Crawley Young Harrison

Genres Drama, Action & Adventure, Science Fiction, War Seasons 2 Powered by Expand Collapse

• TV Features
• sci fi
• Drama

Follow Followed Like Share Facebook X WhatsApp Threads Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit Flipboard Copy link Email Close Thread Sign in to your Collider account

We want to hear from you! Share your opinions in the thread below and remember to keep it respectful.

Be the first to post Images Attachment(s) Please respect our community guidelines. No links, inappropriate language, or spam.

Your comment has not been saved

Send confirmation email

This thread is open for discussion.

Be the first to post your thoughts.

• Terms
• Privacy
• Feedback

Recommended 2 days ago

'Stranger Things' Stars Say Even the Duffer Brothers Were Speechless After the Series Finale: "Nobody Knew What to Do"

3 days ago

Jennifer Lawrence’s First Oscar-Nominated Role Is Still One of Her Best Performances

3 days ago

‘The Family Plan 2’ Review: Mark Wahlberg Faces Off With Kit Harington in Apple TV’s Lackluster Sequel

2 days ago

George R.R. Martin Confirms New 'Game of Thrones' Sequel Spin-Off at HBO

More from our brands

37 Shows on Netflix That Couples Can Binge-Watch Together

The 25 Best Shows on Crave to Watch Right Now

25 Best R-Rated TV Shows of All Time, Ranked

50 Best New TV Shows to Stream Right Now

Every Season Of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ranked

35 Best Sci-Fi TV Shows, Ranked

10 Underrated ‘90s Sci-Fi Shows Worth Revisiting

What To Watch

July 20, 2025 The 72 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now Trending Now ‘NCIS: Origins’ Needs To Double Down on Gibbs and Lala’s Romance This Refreshing Stephen King Miniseries Deserved More Than Its 53% Rotten Tomatoes Score The 10 Worst Sci-Fi Movies Released Since 'Battlefield Earth'