It’s okay if you don’t remember the UPN series “Deadly Games.” Few probably do. The UPN, as some may recall, debuted in January 1995 along with the pilot episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.” Paramount had long been interested in the TV game and had even considered launching its own TV network centered on a “Star Trek” series as far back as 1978. It finally got its wish nearly two decades later, although much of the UPN’s original programming wasn’t terribly popular.
“Deadly Games” was one of the network’s early short-lived attempts at a successful sci-fi show. It wasn’t a success, sadly, premiering in September 1995 and lasting only 13 episodes before ending the following January. In a surprising piece of talent wrangling, however, Leonard Nimoy served as an executive producer and directed the show’s pilot episode, “Killshot.”
As a director, Nimoy was already quite experienced by 1995. After doing some TV work in the 1970s, he spent the first half of the ’80s helming a pair of successful “Star Trek” films: “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (which made things “awkward” for Nimoy’s co-star William Shatner) and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” He then proceeded to call the shots on the comedy “Three Men and a Baby,” which became the biggest domestic box office hit of 1987. That is to say, Nimoy would’ve been a respected director even without his reputation as an actor by the time the ’90s rolled around.
“Deadly Games” itself was an ambitious sci-fi series with a wild premise. The main character, through a series of plot contrivances, accidentally unleashes multiple video game antagonists into the real world, forcing him to fight them face-to-face. Christopher Lloyd, who had previously collaborated with Nimoy on “Star Trek III,” plays the main villain.
Deadly Games was sci-fi with a psychological wrinkle
The main character of “Deadly Games” was one Dr. Gus Lloyd, an antimatter physicist and video game enthusiast played by James Calvert. In the show’s pilot, Dr. Lloyd is going through a very rough time in his life. His wife has left him, and he is wracked by bad memories of his neglectful father, Dr. Jordan Lloyd (Christopher Lloyd).
As a form of therapy, Dr. Lloyd has been engineering a complex, photorealistic video game wherein all the in-game villains have been programmed to look like the people he blames for his misery. His ex-wife Lauren (Cynthia Gibb) is the “princess” he must rescue, appearing in the game as The Girl. Meanwhile, the game’s villains are modeled after everyone from his ex-girlfriend to his divorce lawyer, a greedy mechanic who ripped him off, and his father. In the game, his father is a demonic presence known as Sebastian Jackal.
Naturally, there’s a lab accident that causes the video game’s villains to manifest in the real world. They’re seemingly not made of flesh and blood, though, and retain their video game weaknesses. So, Dr. Lloyd has to find and “defeat” them in specialized ways that correspond both to their video game nature but also something deep-seated within his own psychology. The character called the Boss (LeVar Burton) is vulnerable, for instance, to pink slips and literal red ink, whereas the Motivational Speaker (Dwight Schultz) needs to “eat his own words” to be killed.
You may note some similarities between this premise and that of “Scott Pilgrim,” the celebrated Bryan Lee O’Malley comic about a slacker 20-something who’s forced to face his anxiety about his girlfriend’s evil exesadly Games” came out about a decade earlier
Deadly Games sported a very impressive supporting cast
The villains on “Deadly Games” were all played by a rotating panoply of recognizable guest stars, many of them carried over from the then-current “Star Trek” shows and movies. For example, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, and Dwight Schultz — Data, Geordi, and Lieutenant Barclay on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” respectively — had roles as the video game villains the Practical Joker, the Boss, and the Motivational Speaker (a very different part from the one Schultz played on “The A-Team”). Even actor Beth Toussaint, who a guest spot on “Next Generation” once, appear as the Ex-Girlfriend.
Meanwhile, Anthony Michael Hall plays the Camp Counselor, Mark Pellegrino plays the Car Mechanic, Shirley Jones plays a character named One Mean Mother, and former supermodel Kathy Ireland plays the Perfect Woman. The video game villains are all hellbent on destruction and behave as if they are still inside a game. Only, this time, the threat of destruction is very real. It’s a novel premise, and it came at a time when mid-budget, high-concept sci-fi TV was riding high. What more, it taps into mid-’90s anxiety about video games and their undue influence on a generation’s psyche. There was every reason to believe this show would have been a hit.
Behind the scenes, Leonard Nimoy’s son, Adam Nimoy, joined his dad by directing an episode of “Deadly Games.” In addition, a couple of episodes were helmed by Christian I. Nyby II, the son of “The Thing from Another World” director Christian Nyby. That’s quite the sci-fi legacy on this show.
“Deadly Games” was swiftly canceled, and it’s rarely mentioned these days. It’s not currently available on streaming, but re
