i saw some of these. the first episode is excellent. all the others i saw were fairly poor.

i don't remember stephen hawking anywhere tho. guess he's a DVD only extra.

'including two never-before-seen episodes'.

Feh. Maybe if you live in the US, but here in Canada, SPACE has played all the episodes already.

Unfortunately the series is a little weak... the best of them is the adaptation of the Heinlein story, "Jerry was a man". While none of them were outright bad, from a series called "Masters of Science Fiction" I expected better.

I'm not sure I understand why this is called "Masters of Science Fiction". Sure, it's science fiction, but the "Masters" part? Let's see:

Harold Becker: Zero prior directorial credits for science fiction, unless you count "Mercury Rising".

Darnell Martin: Zero prior directorial credits for science fiction. In fact, almost all of his prior experience is with television drama.

Michael Petroni: No prior directorial credits for science fiction, but did write the screenplays for "Queen of the Damned" and an unspecified number of episodes of the canceled scifi TV show "Miracles"

Mark Rydell: 25 prior directorial credits spanning fifty years. Zero directorial credits for science fiction.

Michael Tolkin: Zero prior directorial credits for science fiction, but wrote the screenplay for "Deep Impact".

Jonathan Frakes: Okay, Riker might possibly count.

But how on earth can this ragtag group of seemingly randomly selected filmmakers be called "Masters of Science Fiction"?

"Masters of Horror" had Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Beastmaster) and Stuart Gordon (From Beyond, The Pit and the Pendulum) and... and... sorry, I'm starting to get upset.

@Wonderfoo: I suspect you might be being intentionally obtuse, but in case you're not, I believe the title refers to the authors of the stories that were adapted.

@Robotech_Master: You give me too much credit. I didn't even realize that all of the stories were adaptations of stories from scifi authors. I was simply expecting (and assuming) that this series would follow the formula of "Masters of Horror". *sheepish grin*

Now if only 3 out of 4 of the episodes aired in the U.S. hadn't been so bad. (My candidate for the pick of the litter is "A Clean Escape".)

One of the unaired ones is based on a Sheckley story. I think I'll go reread some Sheckley instead.

yeah, these were all pretty horrible. abc dumped them at like midnight on saturdays, so you really had to be aware of them to try and catch them. stephen hawking just did a voice-over intro and outro, twilight zone style.

Stephen Hawking did the small introductory talk at the start of each episode.

His voice not really being his, I've always wondered whether it was really him.

Masters of SF doesn't compare to Masters of Horror (the later being much better).

I must concur with the majority of commenters here. This was a lackluster series. I did see all six as well and none of them were very well produced, despite standing on the shoulders of giants. I feel though that this is a series destined to fail, as the short stories that these were based on are some of the canon readings of sci-fi, and as such have been regurgitated by screenwriters and other novelists for years now.

Summed up, my impression of the series: Rudy has fallen on hard times.