Sci-fi series offers deja vu

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A 52-year-old man – an overworked man, a man of words – receives an advance copy of an upcoming science fiction series from ABC. Warily, he fires up the DVD player, expecting to see into the future.

But instead, he is transported into the past, into the 1950s and ‘60s, into a time when television talked and talked and talked.

Next stop, not the Twilight Zone. But it might as well be.

The show at hand is “Masters of Science Fiction,” a limited series of adaptations of short stories being offered up this month by ABC.

In some ways, this is pretty amazing stuff: material from such top-flight authors as Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison, interpreted by such well-known directors as Mark Rydell (“On Golden Pond”) and Michael Tolkin (“The Player”), with such actors as Sam Waterston, Judy Davis, Brian Dennehy, Anne Heche and Malcolm McDowell.

On the other hand, the series will be broadcast in the dead of summer on Saturday nights – suggesting that the network sees its likely audience as pudgy misfits in “Star Trek” costumes, their vintage plastic phasers set for “stun.”

Two of the six shows produced by Starz Media (also the creators of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” anthology series) will not be broadcast by ABC at all; they (along with the rest of the series) are targeted for DVDs and for showings overseas.

The first episode, “A Clean Escape” (airing at 10 p.m. Saturday), features Waterston as a man who has blocked years of his life from his memory, and Davis as a psychiatrist who is determined to make him remember.

We know that this is the future, because there are all kinds of panels that Davis presses to open doors and drawers and change the lighting.

And we know that this is the past, because the view is claustrophobic – mostly confined to the psychiatrist’s office – like the sets of so many black-and-white teleplays from television’s golden age.

While there are other characters on the periphery, this is basically a two-character play, and they talk in the way that people don’t on television anymore. Words flow the way they did in the medium’s early days.

“Jerry Was a Man,” scheduled for later in the month, is also talky. But based on a Heinlein story from 1947, the show has a kind of jokey playfulness.

The year is 2077; the age is one in which the fabulously wealthy are served by an underclass, and by “joes,” genetically manipulated humanoids.

One such humanoid, Jerry, survives his job as a minesweeper but has passed his expiration date and is destined to be ground up for dog food until he meets a billionaire, played by Heche.

To prevent Jerry’s kibble-ization, she goes to court to have him declared a man, suing the company that made him and the company’s mastermind, played by McDowell (who has come a long way and gone a lot gray since his most famous futuristic role, as Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”).

The differences between Heinlein’s story and this adaptation are worth noting. For one thing, Heinlein’s Jerry is a souped-up chimp, not a humanoid.

And when it comes time to argue Jerry’s humanity in court, his television lawyer emphasizes his willingness to sacrifice others in self-preservation, a human failing; Heinlein’s lawyer emphasizes Jerry’s ability to sing, evidence of a human soul.

But then, Heinlein was writing in a more optimistic age. And science fiction is really about the present, not the future; “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and “Star Trek” used the future as a canvas for morality plays about their times.

And so “A Clean Escape” is about the responsibilities of leadership at a time when technology can cause huge destruction. And “Jerry Was a Man” asks: What makes a human being a human?

There are not a lot of computer-generated effects to get in the way; in these two episodes, there’s really only one, a pet elephant that is a foot tall.

Rod Serling didn’t have the option of populating “The Twilight Zone” with tiny elephants, but he almost certainly wouldn’t have relied upon computers all that much, anyway. The morality play was the thing.

“Masters of Science Fiction” doesn’t have Serling. Instead, it has renowned brainiac Stephen Hawking, whose machine-generated voice introduces and summarizes each episode with Delphic pronouncements and questions like: “If necessity is the mother of invention, what will drive our ingenuity when our needs have been fulfilled?”

This is just the kind of thing that charges the imaginations of 14-year-old boys – or of older boys who sit at home on Saturday nights, phasers at the ready.