Anyhow after sorting the chaff from the wheat, we reach the most effective episodes of season one, although I don’t want to over-sell the following episodes. They have some points of interest, but I could recommend quite a few things that you would be better off watching – actually an incredibly long list of things!

“I’ll Give a Million” is a relatively fun episode in which two mean business men make a pact with the devil, literally, when one of them comes up with a brilliant scam for fleecing the other. He offers to buy his friend’s soul for a million dollars, receipt of said item to be taken on death. As he points out, who would turn down a million dollars for something as intangible as a soul, and his victim agrees. But as his health starts to fail, the victim becomes ever more desperate to buy back his soul, and offers more and more for it each time. Unfortunately, the victimizer holds out for too long and his victim dies before he can cash in on his scam – at which point, a ghost appears with the property in question. The upshot is a heart attack, upon which the devil turns up to claim both souls.

“Pain Killer” is a slightly jokey tale of a man whose wife is giving him a pain, literally, and whose doctor (a rather charming Farley Granger) proscribes her murder as the only viable treatment, the murder to be done by a proxy. On her death, the ailment clears up immediately but, when asked to return the favor for another of the doctor’s patients, the man refuses with dreadful consequences.

“The Odds” isn’t really that good except for a wonderful turn by Danny Aiello as a bookie who cheats the fates, while “Slippage” has a great concept and a pretty pitiful execution: a young man gradually disappears as family and friends gradually forgot about him. “Mookie and Pookie” has an interestingly eerie quality, although I couldn’t for the life of me say why; and it concerns a sister whose twin brother dies having left instructions for her about how to finish a computer project on which he has been working, a project that has somehow downloaded his consciousness to his computer.

“The Madness Room” is absolute tosh but, for some reason, I really liked it. I saw everything coming a mile off but somehow the wooden predictability seemed to work here, as though the whole thing was a loving homage, which I don’t think it was. Anyhow, it concerns a couple living in an old house, and he has a weak heart and a best friend who seems a bit over familiar with the wife. When the three of them contact a ghost who resides within the house, the spirit tells them about a room that drives people mad, and obviously, they decide to search of the cursed room … I won’t bore you with the ending, which you have probably largely guessed, but it worked for me as an episode.

However, the two stand out episodes are “The False Prophet and “The Tear Collector”, if only because they are so extraordinarily weird. In the first, Ronee Blakley (a beautiful actress/musician, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Robert Altman’s Nashville, was married to Wim Wenders (1979-1981), worked with Bob Dylan and appeared in Nightmare of Elm Street) plays a woman who lives her life on the guidance of a computer fortune teller. When she encounters the latest version, it seems to fall in love with her but it also encounters competition from a preacher who wants her to live for the moment. The result is somewhere between a high-camp soap-opera and really far-out art project – but it isn’t predictable!

In “The Tear Collector”, a perpetually sad and tearful Jessica Harper runs into an odd but sensitive Victor Garbor, who values her tears and invites her over to his place so that he can watch her cry and collect her tears. Talk about strange fetishes! Anyhow, even more oddly, she thinks that she has found her soul mate and pays regular visits to this metaphysical pervert, until she finds that he is doing the same with a variety of different women (and seems to have been doing it throughout the ages!) Distraught, she break up with him and runs out into the road where she is nearly run over by a taxi, out of which climbs an attractive young man tells her that she has a beautiful smile – the tear collector’s strange attentions seem to have left her all cried out and she is now ready to live a happy life.

Of course, that description doesn’t begin to capture how weird this episode really is. It is almost worth watching the whole of season one just for this one episode … almost.