Review: Outer Order TV – The Last Great UHF Station That Never Was

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Somewhere in the forgotten airwaves, in a reality just adjacent to ours, Outer Order TV broadcasts to those who still find meaning in the flickering glow of static-laced reruns. It’s the kind of station you stumble upon after twisting the rabbit ears just right, sandwiched between a Spanish-language religious channel and a barely-functioning public access feed. The kind of station that exists for the true connoisseurs of displaced nostalgia—New Yorkers who still keep their old Factsheet Five issues in a milk crate under their bed.

Friday, March 28th, 2025 Lineup: The Curated Chaos

This is a schedule that plays like someone raided a VHS bin at a flea market, but with an archivist’s touch. Every selection feels intentional, a strange balancing act between half-remembered childhood oddities, cult curios, and ephemeral weirdness that’s always on the verge of disappearing from history.

Prime Time Selections:

• Welcome Freshmen (S01E02 – Extra Curricular)
  A Nickelodeon staple from the “not quite SNICK” era, airing as if the ‘90s kids watching it are still 12 years old, forever trapped in a rerun loop.

• Sapphire and Steel (S01E01 – Escape Through A…)
  Because nothing pairs better with faded cable ephemera than existential dread wrapped in a British sci-fi serial. David McCallum and Joanna Lumley look like they walked into a haunted PBS pledge drive, and it rules.

• Really Weird Tales
  A SCTV-adjacent anthology with John Candy, Martin Short, and Catherine O’Hara sending up Twilight Zone-style oddities. It’s what you’d expect an alternate universe Amazing Stories to be if it were run by people who actually got it.

The Midnight Slot – Where the Weird Creeps In:

• Nigel Kneale’s Beasts (Episode 2 – During Barty’s Party)
  Oh, you thought the night was gonna ease up? Nope. Kneale’s suffocating, paranoid horror lands like a hammer blow here. This is television made to unsettle you—Beasts is one of those shows that felt designed for someone to stumble upon accidentally at 2 AM and never forget.

• Beans Baxter Halloween Special
  A Fox Kids anomaly that exists in the liminal space between Max Headroom and Encyclopedia Brown. The Halloween special is the kind of thing that makes you question whether you imagined it as a child, and now Outer Order TV is here to confirm that, yes, it was real.

• Dawn Patrol: The Things You Watch at 4 AM When You Can’t Sleep

• Eek! The Cat – Eek Vs. The Flying Saucers
  Pure ‘90s Saturday morning chaos, animated in that way where everything looked slightly over-rendered but deeply energetic.

• Batman (1943) – Chapter 5
  Because no UHF station worth its salt isn’t airing some old serial between reruns of forgotten teen dramas.

• Student Bodies (S01E07)
  The ultimate late-night find—this Canadian teen comedy felt like someone tried to merge Saved by the Bell with the aesthetics of a Seventeen magazine doodle page. The mix of live action and hand-drawn animation gave it a weird charm, like a forgotten Nickelodeon experiment that somehow aired in syndication forever.

It fits perfectly with Outer Order TV’s “Did I imagine this?” ethos.

### **Final Verdict: The Zine Reader’s Dream Station**

If New York still had an independent UHF station that played fast and loose with licensing, *Outer Order TV* would be its holy grail. It’s the kind of place where you could catch a *Student Bodies* rerun before work and then argue with your coworker about whether it ever really existed. A transmission from a lost media junkie’s fever dream, built for those who still romanticize the ghost of early cable.    

If your idea of a perfect Friday night involves an ever-shifting lineup of forgotten sci-fi, surrealist teen dramas, and vintage low-budget horror, *Outer Order TV* is broadcasting just for you. Too bad it’s in a dimension just out of reach.