Optical illusions. Tricks of the light. Those Magic Eye pictures. A drawing that looks like an old woman from one angle and a young woman from another. This is how nearly every episode of Beyond Belief: Fact Or Fiction begins, the cult classic anthology show that ran for four seasons from 1997 to 2002, with host Jonathan Frakes (replacing original host James Brolin) showing off some silly gag as if it were a holy artifact. The point of it, beyond highlighting some funky imagery, is to underline the explicit point of the show: It’s all about pulling off the big reveal, complete with Frakes making a meal out of the big moment (or, on a rare occasion, telling you how smart you are ). It’s the destination and not the journey, the explanation of why the drawing looks like two different things, not the things themselves.
Unlike other anthology shows, where you enjoy a story for the sake of the story, the meme-friendly Beyond Belief was a game with right and wrong answers. You were asked to solve a puzzle that just happened to look like prose, all so you could answer the show’s central question at the end of each episode: Was the story you just saw based on true events, or was it … beyond belief?
But what if you don’t play the game? What if you approach the stories on their own terms, as works of fiction and not pieces of a puzzle? What if you ignore the fact that this is a gimmicky anthology series about deciding whether or not bizarre stories about ghosts, premonitions, and bad people who karmically die of “fright” were loosely based on a real events or if they were—as Frakes puts it in so many episodes—dreamed up by the show’s team of writers?
As it turns out, some of the stories are really good. Others are absolute shit. So, in honor of this year being the anniversary of the premiere of Beyond Belief, we’ve compiled the definitive list of the 25 best fiction stories from the entire four-season run of the show. These aren’t necessarily the ones most likely to fool you into thinking they were true, as is the expressed purpose on the show. These are simply the best ones. They’re the most creatively interesting, the most satisfyingly spooky, and, in at least one case, the most audaciously and hilariously unhinged.
One interesting way to look at the fictional stories from Beyond Belief is to imagine what it would take for the story to be true—because, in theory, it’s not supposed to be obvious. “Baker Street” bakes this in with a quietly brilliant structural twist: The story’s narrator, a busybody neighbor who pokes her nose into the drama happening next door, is unreliable. She’ll describe her good-natured concern for the safety of the family next door in narration, but then when she shows up and talks to the family onscreen, she seems extremely rude.
The actual text of the story isn’t especially fascinating (a teen girl is dating a bad guy who may be possessed by the spirit of a different bad guy who was shot on the steps of the house when he tried to burn it down, and the story ends with the teen girl maybe being the one who was actually possessed), but the presentation is surprisingly clever. It is, though, worth noting that it might be clever on accident, because Beyond Belief isn’t the kind of show that would pull out a trick like an unreliable narrator without acknowledging the trick. You have to see both the old woman and the young woman for the illusion to work, after all.
This is a fun story featuring comedian Christopher Titus as a man who inherits a failed horse ranch from his grandfather. Nugget, the only horse left on the ranch, starts acting suspiciously one day and leads Titus to an old motorcycle under a tarp. He calls up a local motorcycle place and gives the owner (whose name is Danny Gaines, which you’ll remember because they repeat it a thousand times) its serial number, at which point Danny Gaines becomes very interested in buying it…for an insulting low-ball price. Titus is suspicious, so he decides not to sell and calls his mother to explain the situation.
She offers to look into it, but then Gaines shows up in person and insists that Titus accepts a check for $15,000. Just as he’s about to give up the bike, Nugget freaks out and distracts Titus long enough for his mother to call back and reveal that she somehow got in touch with Jay Leno and he wants to buy the motorcycle for $2 million. Titus then looks under the bike’s seat and finds a note: “To Priscilla, Love Elvis.” Why did Priscilla Presley’s motorcycle end up at this ranch? How did the horse seem to know about it? Beyond Belief has zero interest in answering these questions, but that’s what makes this a fun one.
Beyond Belief has a healthy “eat the rich” streak running under the surface, and while this story isn’t the best of them, it might be the most vicious. The hero is an excessively meek woman who works as the assistant to a horrible and mean Hollywood talent agent. He’s losing all of his clients because he’s an ass, but he blames it all on this poor woman who just wants to quit and spend time making ornate hand-woven dolls.
You can probably already guess where this is going, but what gives “Needle Point” its place on this list is the performance of the mean talent agent, who is a full-on cartoon character in his awfulness, and the fact that the meek lady immediately jumps to creating a special doll of her boss and—somehow—using it to magically murder him. He doesn’t learn a lesson; he doesn’t even suffer for his crimes. He just gets executed. Surely a workers’ rights story we can all relate to in some way.
This story loses the thread near the end, when it unnecessarily goes out of its way to offer a (nonsensical ghostly) explanation for what happens, but everything up to that is a blast. A girl from a small town is starting her freshman year at a prestigious faraway college, and she’s absolutely in love with her dorm room. Unfortunately, one of her friends shows up one day and explains that some creep is stalking girls on campus and—ahem—“beating them up.” The friend gives the girl an airhorn and pepper spray and tells her not to be out of her room late at night.
Of course, she ignores that and stays late at the school’s computer lab doing homework, and while walking home—close enough that she can see her beloved dorm room’s window—she gets jumped by a man in a bush. But before you can think “this subject matter is way too heavy for this show,” the story turns into a Bourne movie and the girl beats the dude’s ass with karate moves that she has no way of knowing. It’s super cool and silly, but then a lady shows up at the dorm and explains that her daughter, a karate master, used to live in that room until she was killed in a car accident. It just doesn’t land the final punch, so to speak.
It’s rare, but some Beyond Belief stories are just nice little tales of mysterious things happening with no explanation and everybody comes out of it okay. This is one of those, with a guy who works at a bus station showing up at work one morning in a panic because he had a dream about a specific bridge collapsing as one of their buses drove over it, killing everyone involved.
Everyone he works with ignores him, except for the driver of the bus that he dreamed was going to crash, who hesitates just long enough for everyone to hear on the news that a bridge had collapsed. If the driver had left on time, he would’ve been there and his passengers would’ve died. Wow! But why did the driver listen to his coworker’s warning? Because he had the same dream. No complaints, a nice efficient story.
The best thing about “Makeup Magic” is that it could very easily be read as a story about two women falling in love. It opens on a woman named June who feels that she is too boring or plain because she is constantly ignored by everyone she works with and is left to eat lunch alone all the time. One day, she sees a woman being harassed by a guy, so she steps in and demands that the creep hits the bricks and knocks him into a fountain. The woman introduces herself as Clarice, explains that she’s a former model, and offers to use her expertise to give June a makeover.
Despite Clarice barely using any makeup, June suddenly feels more beautiful and confident, with her makeover somehow being permanent and never needing a touch-up (because it’s actually about confidence, you see). One of her coworkers even tries to flirt with her, but she brushes him off in hopes of finding Clarice again. She eventually does, but Clarice’s face is now covered in scars from an accident in a fire…which she says happened two years before they ever met! Clarice assumes that June will want nothing to do with her now that she knows what she actually looks like (her changing appearance is never explained), but the two of them go out to dinner together and June explains in a voiceover that she thinks Clarice “was sent just for me” and that she’s “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.” Aww!
As with “The Dorm,” there are some topics that Beyond Belief feels ill-equipped to handle, and there’s some uncomfortable implications in “The Devil’s Tattoo” as well. What saves it is that the whole thing feels like one of those Christian haunted houses where “disobeying your parents” or “smoking” are the real horror story. Plot-wise, it’s about a controlling bad-boy boyfriend who drags his innocent girlfriend to a tattoo parlor and demands that the guy give her a tattoo of the devil. The artist seems freaked out and tries to refuse, but bad-boy boyfriend forces him to agree to it. The artist secretly explains to the girl that bad-boy boyfriend has brought two other girls in to get the same tattoo, and they both mysteriously disappeared right after thanks to the boyfriend’s “partner.”
The boyfriend then threatens to kill the girl if she doesn’t get the tattoo, at which point the tattoo machine somehow comes to life and explodes, killing bad-boy boyfriend and saving the girl’s life (apparently). It’s not especially scary and it doesn’t make sense as a story that could’ve hypothetically been “true,” but the idea of a tattoo of the devil on its own supposedly being an awful and evil thing is cute. You can picture the worried parents saying “Did you hear about so-and-so? She was a nice girl until she got a tattoo of the devil and now she’s dead.”
A delightfully silly story in a show full of silly stories, there are two important things that “The Dresser” establishes early on: A “mannequin dresser” is a real job that is very prestigious, and the “Spring Fling” window display at a local department store is the most important event of the year in the fashion industry. The story concerns Gerald Stanley, an expert mannequin dresser who has served a department store for decades along with his team of mannequins, which he calls his “troops.” He has been training an up-and-coming hotshot mannequin dresser named Craig, who wants Gerald’s job so bad that he tries to undermine him by telling their boss that his style is outdated and that he’s going to blow the Spring Fling window.
The boss fires Gerald, and as he’s cleaning up his stuff, Craig taunts him and starts destroying the mannequins for his “art.” He says his hip and new Spring Fling display is going to be—and this is the real plot, not some joke—a pile of dismembered mannequin parts with clothes just draped on top of them. It’s edgy! It’s punk! It’s for a thing called the Spring Fling! Unfortunately for Craig, the mannequins then come to life and beat him up, and he quits in terror. Gerald gets his job back, and nobody knows what really happened to Craig. Very, very silly, and one of the best parts is that it comes in an episode that is ostensibly all about dreams and nightmares … but this story doesn’t have any dreams or nightmares in it.
The guy who played Jacques Renault on Twin Peaks (R.I.P. in real life ) is a tombstone-carver, and his latest client is a wealthy widow who definitely killed her husband or is at least eagerly profiting from his death. She instructs Jacques Renault from Twin Peaks to make her dead husband the cheapest and dopiest tombstone he can and explains that a man named Nathan Dunbar will come by later to pay for it. But when Nathan Dunbar shows up, he says no, the dead husband wanted a hilariously ornate tombstone, big enough to blow all of the dead man’s cash.
A proud Jacques Renault from Twin Peaks unveils the tombstone at the man’s funeral and is shocked to discover that the widow is furious and that a totally different man claiming to be Nathan Dunbar is saying that he never approved of the changes. A stunned Jacques Renault then looks around and sees a photo of the deceased … who happened to look exactly like the man who paid for the more extravagant tombstone. A nice twist about sticking it to a mean lady, though Jacques Renault from Twin Peaks would probably be locked in some legal feud over this for a long time.
Beyond Belief likes to teach lessons, but sometimes it’s just a mean show where bad things happen for no reason. This is one of those, centering on a woman whose family used to run a historic merry-go-round that somehow developed a reputation for being cursed. To reclaim her family’s legacy, the woman decides to rebuild the merry-go-round and run it for 24 hours with her boyfriend onboard to prove that it’s safe.
In true horror-story fashion, though, the merry-go-round’s excessively creepy old mechanic shows up and warns them that the curse is real and that they shouldn’t rebuild the merry-go-round. They ignore him and go through with the plan, and after some time on the ride the boyfriend begins to feel sick. Rather than, you know, stop the ride and help him, they keep it going until he collapses and dies. It turns out that there was a poisonous snake inside one of the wooden horses and it bit the boyfriend. Everyone turns to the mechanic who said this would happen, and he responds by shrugging and saying “it’s a curse.” An absolute dick of the highest order. Very funny.
Beyond Belief is rarely a sweet show, but this story is a pure romance: A girl is on the outs with her boyfriend, Ricky. He’s been going out and partying with his friends every night, and he even forgot their big anniversary dinner. She kicks him out; he says he loves her and wants to change, but she can’t take it. She moves out, leaving behind a sweet card about the happier times she and Ricky had together, and she moves across the country. She makes new friends and starts a new career, occasionally calling old friends to check on Ricky, but nobody has heard from him.
One day, her laptop breaks and she takes it in for repairs. When she gets it back, a screen saver turns on that shows a photo of her and Ricky! The show treats it as a supernatural twist, but the girl—to her credit—immediately figures it out: This is Ricky’s laptop somehow, and the repair place switched them. She goes back to get answers, but the dork-ass nerd behind the counter is all “I can’t tell you information about our other customers” and she’s like “but the owner of this laptop is my old boyfriend and I might still love him.” Then Ricky miraculously shows up because he also realized the laptops were switched! He got his life together and is now successful but he misses her and she misses him! Sorry if that seems a little enthusiastic, it’s just very sweet. Love is nice.
Like “The House On Baker Street,” this is a story that’s better served if you don’t necessarily accept the canonical interpretation. A regular modern guy is out hiking in the American Southwest in the middle of a heatwave. Desperate for water, he stumbles into an abandoned cowboy town…that is somehow full of cowboys. They don’t understand his modern ways and are baffled by his modern money, and when he tries to call someone for help the sheriff shoots his huge ’90s cellphone and locks him up.
The next morning, the dude wakes up to find that the town is abandoned again, but a police officer happens to drive by and spots him. When the dude gets a good look at the cop, he realizes he looks identical to the cowboy sheriff! He even finds his huge ’90s cellphone with a bullet hole in it! Was it a dream? Did he really go back in time? Or, and this is our much better read on it, did he stumble upon a group of asshole cowboy re-enactors who wanted to fuck with this dude by shooting his cellphone and making him think he had gone back in time? A solid prank.
On paper, this seems like another Christian haunted house episode, but in practice it’s a full-on body horror urban legend. A teenage girl has been throwing up in the morning and started developing a pregnant-looking bump on her stomach. She’s also having weird cravings and a big appetite. Her parents assume that she and her boyfriend have been doing it, but she vehemently denies that they’ve had sex. For some reason, the family doesn’t take her to a doctor until she obviously seems very pregnant, at which point they discover an odd cyst of some sort. She says she has felt movement in her stomach, but the doctor shrugs it off.
They take her in to surgery to remove the cyst and discover that it’s not a cyst at all…it’s a live octopus! Apparently she swallowed a “fertilized octopus egg” while swimming in the ocean and it grew in her stomach, and Frakes explains in his little wrap-up segment that the scientific community has been trying to suppress this story for “years.” That’s why you’ve never heard of someone getting pregnant with an octopus baby! Big Science is covering up the truth! Oh wait, no, this is a fake story made up for a TV show. But damn, it’s still fucked up!
This story is high up in this ranking for sheer competence alone. It’s an effective spooky story that wraps up neatly, even if it’s not wall-to-wall thrills. It’s about a man who has been struggling with claustrophobia for some time, with his fears escalating recently for no apparent reason. His wife takes him to a hypnotist who looks a distracting amount like Hillary Clinton, and while under a trance, the man explains that he grew up in a farmhouse even though his wife says he grew up in the suburbs, and when asked to give his name he says “Stuart Metcalfe” instead of whatever his real name is. He then he starts describing something scary happening and freaks out, at which point Hillary Clinton pulls him out of his trance.
As the days go by, the husband has decided to get really into drawing. He’s been sketching random stuff all the time, and while out on walk with the wife in a part of their city they’ve never been to, he sees some buildings that he recognizes from his sketch pad. He runs off, remembering something, and descends into a phenomenally creepy basement through a door in a creepy alley. As if he’s been in this basement before, he runs to a patch of dirt on the floor and furiously begins digging until he discovers…the buried remains of Stuart Metcalfe, a kid who was murdered the day before he was born.
For a show that is so enamored with premonitions and inexplicable ghostly figures saving people from harm, it also has a sharp edge. That’s clear in “The Tractor,” a story about an extremely bitter old man who was left without the use of his legs after a stroke and is on the verge of losing his beloved farm. He has actively pushed away every member of his family until none of them can stand to be in the same room as him, save for his once-beloved granddaughter Julia. She wants to help him sell the farm so he can at least stay in his house, but all he does is say horrible nasty shit to her.
While trying to move an old tractor, Julia falls and gets knocked unconscious, with the tractor slowly rolling back toward her head. Unable to get her to wake up by screaming, the old man miraculously stands up and runs to the tractor, holding it back long enough for Julia to move out of the way. And then he drops dead on the spot. He doesn’t become a nice person; he doesn’t reconnect with his family and agree to sell his farm. He does one last good thing and gives his life doing it. Damn.
The folks at Beyond Belief were having a ball when they made this one, and it’s a shame that there weren’t more stories like it. A wealthy woman is murdered by her philandering husband (played by Lois Loan’s boyfriend from Seinfeld, if that reference works for you), but as the hard-boiled detective narrator explains, he did such a good job cleaning up the crime scene that there’s nothing to hold him on. The detective, played by character actor Jeff Doucette, is hamming it up like a master, and there’s twinkly background music and a truly wild page-turning scene transition that seem better suited for a hokey Agatha Christie knockoff than anything else. (As if this isn’t that.)
The dead woman’s pet parrot ends up blowing the case open when it repeats her dying words (“Don’t do it, John!”), prompting our lovable detective character to quip, “the bird was a stool pigeon,” which is really funny. Also: The parrot’s name is Woofy, which is just a phenomenal gag (because it sounds like a dog’s name).
Yes, this episode is canonically called “E-Mail II” because an earlier season already had a completely unrelated episode called “E-Mail” and nobody thought that weirdos on the internet would someday be keeping track of these things.
That alone is funny, especially since the episode is not strictly about email at all. It’s about a woman who buys her husband Richard a new (used) computer, which he quickly falls in love with. After using it all day, Richard tries to go to sleep only for the machine to turn itself on and receive an email containing a spooky GIF of a pharaoh. This keeps happening, freaking out Richard and his wife, so they try calling a tech guy for help. Though initially unconcerned, he starts to realize he’s in a spooky story when they unplug the computer and it still turns on with spooky emails containing Egyptian imagery.
Richard somehow deduces that the emails are messages for him, and he tries responding to one. He gets a response back from the old owner of the computer, who happens to be some kind of archaeologist exploring a site in Egypt, and after chatting for a bit they realize he’s become trapped in some tomb. The tech guy shouts, “I’ll call the state department!” which is a funny thing to shout, and then Richard sends a message about how it’s a good thing that the trapped guy had access to a computer. But then the guy responds: “I HAVE NO COMPUTER.” And that’s how it ends! Now listen, we’re not playing the “is this true or fake” game, but if this one were true, how could it be true? They would find this guy trapped in Egypt and he’d say “I was sending telepathic messages to my old computer”? That may sound like a complaint, but it’s not. It’s just absurd fun, which is what you should expect from something called “E-Mail II.”
A creep who makes money by stealing personal info from people’s garbage finds himself overcome with curiosity about a fancy couple that has moved in across the street from his house. They’re an older man and a younger lady, and the older man is apparently some kind of baron from Europe. Unable to resist, the creep goes through the garbage and steals some bank info, which he uses to get a bunch of their money. The lady confronts him, saying she knows what he did, but rather than being mad about it, she wants him to take all of the barons money so she can run away from him.
He agrees, and as they’re celebrating, she drugs him, knocks him out, and then steals all of the money for herself while making it seem like he acted alone. When he wakes up, in addition to being pursued by the police, he discovers a weird mark on his neck…or, rather, two weird marks. Bite marks. Yes, the neighbor lady is a vampire, even though that never came up before, and the story ends with the creep in a hospital insisting that he got scammed by a vampire. He even bares his teeth and reveals vampire fangs of his own! Again: How could this be a true one? But it’s not, and as a completely ridiculous vampire story, there is a lot of fun to be had. Really, who can resist a surprise vampire story that is also a “creep gets his comeuppance” story?
Speaking of creeps who get their comeuppance: “Halloween” is about a mean man who hates Halloween and spends every year harassing any trick-or-treaters foolish enough to knock on his door. After screaming at some kids, someone in a Grim Reaper outfit shows up and knocks at his door, ignoring his attempts to frighten them. The Grim Reaper keeps coming, escalating its own scares from strangling a dummy that looks like the mean man to actually sneaking into the house and terrorizing him.
As the horror ramps up, a freak storm hits outside and turns this into a proper haunted-house story—even if the one doing the haunting might just be a particularly scary kid in a mask. Once the Reaper starts fully threatening to kill the man by swinging a knife around, the man begins to have a heart attack and the Reaper disappears. As the man’s wife tries to call an ambulance, she’s told that nobody will be able to get to their house because of flooding from the storm…but then how did the Grim Reaper get there? Legitimately a nice scary story, with some creepy costume design on the Reaper.
Beyond Belief shows surprising restraint when it comes to adapting popular urban legends, because that’s a pretty cheap way to find a story that might be true, but “Bright Lights” is an example of the show doing it really well. A woman is on a long drive to visit a sick family member, and after getting lost, she stops for a moment at a creepy bar in hopes of getting some coffee. At the bar, a trucker named Gunnar tries to talk to her, but it’s late at night and she’s already freaked out by being lost, so she brushes him off.
Back on the road, the woman starts getting tailed by a truck driver who keeps laying on their horn and nudging her bumper. Terrified, the woman tries to call for help but drops her car phone, forcing her to pull over. The truck follows her and Gunnar steps out, carrying a shotgun. The woman steps out of her car, assuming that she’s about to get murdered, but Gunnar doesn’t aim the weapon at her. Instead he keeps it trained on her backseat and demands that the man with the knife get out as well. Yes, like in the classic urban legend, the creepy trucker was trying to warn her that a killer was in her backseat! What saves “Bright Lights” from being too familiar, though, is that Gunnar is surprisingly endearing beyond the “creepy loner trucker” trope. He even gets a nice button where he snaps at the murderer for interrupting the flirty moment he has with the woman he saved.
The closest Beyond Belief ever came to a Stephen King story, “The Land” is about a girl named April whose father, Joss, is struggling to keep their farm afloat. After Joss rejects an offer to buy the land, April spots him talking to a weird man in black out in the middle of a field at night. The weird man is supposedly a wealthy neighbor, and April secretly follows him and her dad as they walk around the farm, performing some kind of ritual.
A bolt of lightning then hits Joss, obliterating him, and a terrified April runs back to the house to tell her mother, failing to notice that a crucifix on the wall has turned upside-down. When they return to the field, Joss is gone…but his clothes are there in a pile of ash. A big storm then comes out of nowhere, with gusts of wind that sound like the voice of the now-dead father, and in the morning all of the fields are full of healthy crops. There’s even a scarecrow wearing Joss’ clothes, which is nicely grim when you think about this family having to keep living their lives with that just outside. Basically, a dude sold his soul to Satan to save his farm, and despite the limitations of this kind of show, it’s pretty badass and bleak. This is another story where there’s no lesson or optimistic bow, it’s just “oh shit” and then it ends.
Years ago, a woman was murdered outside a dive bar, with the killer dismembering her corpse and leaving only her hand behind. Eventually, in a creepy move that the show does not acknowledge as creepy at all, the owner decides to lean into the macabre appeal of that history and turns the whole bar into a hand-themed tourist destination. There’s even an animatronic hand in a jar on the bar that a man in a back room can use to point at people. It’s kitschy fun!
But that’s not how the bar’s latest patron sees it. He’s immediately disturbed by the hand, and he throws a fit when he sees it point at him—which, even when it’s explained, is a really creepy image. The bartender gets the hand guy to stop doing the pointing and the disturbed guy seems more relaxed until the hand starts moving again. The other people in the bar laugh as he starts to lose it, screaming at the hand and demanding that the bartender stops screwing with him, but the bartender insists that their hand guy stopped doing it when he asked the first time.
The disturbed patron won’t listen, and he destroys the hand in a jar while screaming that everyone in the bar knows who he is and that they’re all messing with him…because he is, of course, the guy who had dismembered the woman in the first place. Is it The Telltale Heart? Yeah, a little bit, but it’s full of good performances from everybody and the single location (the gross and exploitative dive bar) weirdly feels like a place that would really exist.
Clive Kincaid hosts an inexplicably popular late-night radio show that seems to entirely revolve around him taking calls from the audience, often about supernatural occurrences, and then mocking them. He’s an ass, and it doesn’t make sense why anyone in the universe of this story would like his show, but it does seems like it would be pretty funny.
One evening, during a storm (this show loves a storm), Clive gets a call from a little boy who asks him about his illegitimate son, Robbie. Clive gets mad and hangs up the call, telling his producer not to let that weirdo get on the line again…but the producer says she didn’t even hear the call he’s mad about; it had somehow only come through in his booth. The boy calls again and insists that Clive tell his listeners about Robbie, and he eventually gives in: Robbie was a boy he fathered with a woman from a one-night stand, and he only ever saw him once, from a distance. He tried to work up the nerve to talk to him but couldn’t. He was too scared.
The boy on the phone claims that he’s Robbie, and Clive starts to break down. You can’t be Robbie, Clive insists, he died last summer. As the boy on the phone brings up details only the real Robbie would know, Clive’s producer and boss watch from outside the booth as he completely loses his mind, screaming about the illegitimate son that he let die.
It’s an impressively intense story, and the essentially solitary performance from Kevin Meaney as Clive is one of the best “bad guy has a breakdown” bits from the whole series.
This single story justifies this entire experiment, since more than any other segment on Beyond Belief, it could easily stand alone as a good work of fiction. It centers around a cool mystery, and it has a clever hook where it’s presented as a local legend. It’s a famous story in the small town where it happened, and everyone who was there has their own take on what it all meant.
A soaking wet man in a tattered suit is stumbling around a small town, moaning “they towed my car” to anyone within earshot. Everyone ignores him until he finds a little boy who introduces himself by saying “ma says I’m real nosy.” He asks the man who he is and where he’s from, but he mostly just says—in detached confusion, as if even he doesn’t understand why he’s there—that “they towed my car.” The boy takes him to the local tow-truck man, who says he hasn’t towed anything lately…oh, except for that car he fished out of the lake.
The man in the suit runs to the car and starts banging on the truck, saying he needs to get something out of it but it’s stuck. The man steps aside and the tow-truck man pops it open with a crowbar, revealing a dead body dressed just like the man in the suit…who has now disappeared.
It’s a great small story that is handled really well, with the whole Beyond Belief team just reaching well beyond their means and ending up with a short that hits all of their favorite beats with surprising grace.
But god damn, there are simply not enough overly glowing things to say about “Bon Voyage,” one of the most stunningly deranged works of American fiction ever performed in front of a camera. It may be impossible to overstate how bananas it is, if only for one cheer-inducing artistic choice, and you must watch it before reading any further. It’s that good.
The story begins in 1937. Two couples, the Chandlers and the Delaneys, are taking a trip together. They’re all good friends, they’ve been friends for a long time, and they all tell each other everything…except for the story of the Chandlers’ failed honeymoon. The Chandlers insist that they never tell anyone that story because it is simply too beyond belief. People would think they were mad. But fine, they concede and agree to tell it.
We now enter the story within a story within the framing device of Beyond Belief itself (got that, Cobb?), which takes place 22 years prior on the day after the Chandlers’ wedding. They’re laying in bed, so in love that they fell asleep holding hands, and when they wake up they realize that their wedding rings have somehow fused together. As hard as they try, they cannot pull them apart. They have to call a jeweler, who carefully saws the rings apart without cutting their hands, but it all takes so long that they miss the cruise they were supposed to take for their honeymoon. But it’s all for the best, because their cruise ship was the RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German U-Boat. Had their rings not gotten fused together, they would’ve been killed.
We jump back to 1937 and the Delaneys are stunned. Their friends miraculously survived a disaster! How did their rings get fused? Nobody knows, but it seems like they were simply saved by the invisible hand of fate that day. Thrilled by the good story, the Chandlers and the Delaneys decide to go check out a nearby observation deck… because, as it turns out, they’ve been on a blimp this whole time. As the foursome looks out the window to the ground below, the color slowly fades out and the show cuts to real black-and-white footage of the vessel they’re riding on: the Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity.
Yes, the invisible hand of fate saved the Chandlers from dying on the Lusitania just so they could die on the Hindenberg 22 years later. Complete and utter madness. What is the point of this story? Why did destiny decide to exclusively fuck with these two nice people so cruelly? Why did the show slowly transition to black and white in the middle of a scene? They could’ve just spliced in footage of the real Hindenburg disaster and nobody would’ve been shocked; it’s not like the story wasn’t already completely off the rails.
If anything is truly beyond belief, it’s the fact that the creators of this show put together something so hilariously bizarre just for the sake of their twisted fact/fiction game. There are better stories on this list, certainly more coherent ones, but the wild swing of “Bon Voyage” gets to the core of why these stories are still memorable 25 years after the show aired.