An Analytical Guide to Television's One step Beyond

There are many books written that are essentially episode guides for various series. Many are adequate in nature, giving detailed summaries of the various episodes in the particular series.

Some, however, go beyond just being adequate, and strive to be as complete and useful as possible. This is one of those type of books. For one thing, it includes material covering the history of the series, John Newland and his various projects, a sort-of sequel series called The Next Step Beyond, five appendices, and a bibliography.

Then there's the episode summaries themselves. They tell what happened in the episodes, of course, and who performed in them. But one thing the author, John Kenneth Muir, does well is to go beyond the basic information. He relates the episodes to other episodes in the series and to various episodes of other series and even to movies.

This makes the value of the summaries that much higher than in a “basic information” type of book. The author's approach is also very balanced. He admits when some episodes don't actually work well.

The book, additionally, is readable. It's not done in a stuffy or boring style. All of this makes this book an excellent reference source for those interested in a really good TV series from rather long ago.

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