With as many streaming services as there are these days, from Netflix and Amazon to Crave and Disney+, I find myself flocking to older TV shows that may have flown just under the radar of mainstream viewing audiences back in the day.
I'm particularly intrigued if shows carry a sense of reality with them, lifting stories from real life and introducing them to the masses.
One of the shows that managed to do so brilliantly was called 'Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction', which ran from 1997 to 2002 on the FOX network and produced four seasons. This show had the viewer playing a guessing game of sorts as it aired, providing you with five stories and asking you to come up with what stories actually happened and what stories were the work of imaginative writers.
The viewer was offered the challenge of determining which were true and which were false. At the end of the show, it was revealed to the viewer whether the tales were true or works of fiction.
In short, it asked you whether something was, of course, fact or fiction.
I can still remember watching the show when it originally aired on TV back in the day, and FOX even had a 1-800 number you could call to make your guess and proclaim something to be true or false. Hey, that's what we called interactive television in those times!
The show was hosted by James Brolin in the first season, who I thought did a good job, but it was Jonathan Frakes who really brought the show to life and gave it a particular air of authenticity. He was so good at making you ask yourself what to believe and what not to believe, questioning certain things and getting you to really think before he told you what was fiction and what came from real life.
I swear, there are some stories that I'm still asking how they could possibly have any truth to them, but the show told me they are.
Let's start with the opening story of Beyond Belief, season one/episode one, which does its part to grab your attention from the get-go. This creepy tale tells the story of a woman who, after suffering a nervous breakdown, can't stop seeing the ghost of a deceased woman standing behind her in her home's second-floor mirror. No matter what she does, the woman continues to appear as if she's trying to say something, and the human woman can't do anything to ignore it or make it go away.
Her therapist disagrees with her getting rid of the mirror, but what she does do is cover it with a blanket, which mostly works. One night during a thunderstorm, the woman is all alone when a man breaks into her home and tries to take advantage of her. She runs upstairs, and that's when the man sees the ghost in the mirror. He freaks out and runs off, but he's caught by the police shortly afterward. According to the authorities, the woman in the mirror was actually his first target from some time ago.
True or false, Dear Reader? How about this one...
This entry dives into the fear of the unknown that we all have, but with something of a creepy twist. In the story, a young boy named Danny is terrified by a monster in his closet, so much so that he sleeps downstairs on the living room couch as much as possible. Everyone knows how much the closet freaks Danny out thanks to his older brother telling the whole school. Danny's mother tells the viewers that he's been labeled as a coward by the bullies.
When Danny tries to confront his bullies, they drag him upstairs and threaten to lock him in the closet. Danny, however, dares his brother to go into the closet first, and when he does, something gets him. Or, at the very least, he's never seen again. A young boy enters a closet, closes the door, and essentially disappears into thin air.
Shall we keep going? Okay then...
The fourth season featured a chilling entry that tells the story of a young woman hired to house-sit for a man named Lloyd Thompson, an architect who's gone overseas for a month. That evening, everything is going fine until she's barraged with strange footage of a man mixing something with a shovel on the family TV. No matter what she does, the channel switches back to the unsettling footage.
After unplugging the TV, the young woman continues to hear the sound of scraping and mixing, so she does the only thing that make sense: she follows the sound into the basement. Once she's down there, she realizes that she's in the same room from the footage, and that's when she finds a video camera. It plays the same footage that she saw earlier just as she hears someone shouting for her help.
The house-sitter winds up finding a woman in the ash catcher, who explains that Mr. Thompson tried to bury her alive before taking off for Europe.
One more? Okay, you twisted my arm...
In a story from the show's second season, we meet a family that has moved into a new home who has to deal with a giant ghostly face with big red eyes that keeps floating through the air and screaming at people in the middle of the night. The imagery used to show this really raises the hair on your arms, let me tell you! It first appears while the family's son is enjoying some milk and cookies, but as predicted, the family thinks the kid is making it all up. The family eventually starts taking things seriously when the mother sees the face in the same spot one night.
After the family discovers that the house's original owner took his own life in the garage, they hold a family meeting to discuss the paranormal presence. Once they start chatting about the haunting, it's clear that the nanny doesn't believe that anything's happening, and she does her best to dispel the idea of a ghost. At the end of the story, the nanny tucks the boy into bed before her eyes turn red in the final scene.
So, what do you say, Dear Readers? Have I presented you with four tales inspired by real-life occurrences, or did I just make you read a load of nonsensical BS?
Well, according to the show's research, all of these stories are in fact true. Yes, even the one where the nanny's eyes turn red! But Hollywood being Hollywood, I have a sneaking suspicion that the suspense was ratcheted up just a tad here and there with certain stories.
In the end though, it goes to show that sometimes real life can certainly be beyond belief.
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
