Oliver Stone & Kathryn Bigelow’s R-Rated Sci-Fi Miniseries Has Aged Like Fine Wine

Published Sep 26, 2026, 10:58 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While there is no shortage of new sci-fi TV for fans of the genre, viewers shouldn’t sleep on Oliver Stone and Kathryn Bigelow’s classic of the genre from the ‘90s. There has, it is fair to say, never been a better time to be a fan of sci-fi TV. In the cyberpunk subgenre alone, the upcoming shows Neuromancer, Blade Runner 2099, and Robocop promise to reinvent some of the most iconic franchises of the ‘80s and finally adapt a legendary William Gibson novel from the same decade.

Meanwhile, The Big Bang Theory’s spinoff Stuart Fails to Save the Universe has brought sci-fi tropes like multiverses and time travel into the world of raunchy, R-rated comedy, offering viewers a live-action alternative to Rick and Morty. Apple TV’s Silo and Hulu’s Paradise both offer claustrophobic spins on dystopian shows, while the acclaimed video game adaptations The Last of Us and Fallout prove that post-apocalyptic stories can also be sprawling epics.

The only problem with this deluge of high quality sci-fi TV and streaming shows is that it can sometimes distract from the genre’s fine small screen history. When there have been more than ten new Star Trek shows in the last ten years, viewers might be tempted to throw on a new title instead of digging through the archives for an underrated classic. However, this is worth the work on occasion. For instance, Wild Palms is an underappreciated and remarkably prescient sci-fi drama featuring a host of starry names that has been unfairly forgotten since its 1993 release.

ABC’s 1993 Miniseries Wild Palms Has Only Become Better With Age

A sci-fi drama that was dubbed an “event series” when it debuted on ABC in 1993, Wild Palms starred James Belushi, Bebe Neuwirth, Kim Cattrall, China Beach's Dana Delany, and Robert Loggia among a host of other stars. Written and created by Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills screenwriter Bruce Wagner and executive produced by Platoon’s Oliver Stone, the show was based on Wagner’s earlier comic strip of the same name published in Details magazine.

Set in 2027, Wild Palms focuses on a lawyer, Harry Wyckoff, who finds himself drawn into a dark underworld of political subterfuge in his new role working for a shady media company. The company’s vanguard technology is a 3D virtual reality system that projects life-size images into civilian households, a powerful tool that a cult known as The Fathers want to use as a mass brainwashing device.

While the show’s stylistic experimentation has become more appreciated in recent years, more importantly, it is the narrative themes of Wild Palms that have become more and more relevant in recent years. While many great cyberpunk shows like Altered Carbon establish elaborate far-flung future settings, it is unnerving to see just how much the 2027 of Wild Palms resembles the reality of 2026, wherein many users of free, widely available technologies are becoming increasingly immersed in AI-generated fake news.

Wild Palms Has One Of The Best Casts In TV History

Each episode of Wild Palms was directed by a notable filmmaker, with Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey’s Peter Hewitt, The Chocolate War's Keith Gordon, and Three O'Clock High director/ frequent U2 collaborator taking the reins on an outing each. Most notably, Point Break director Kathryn Bigelow, fresh from directing that iconic action cult classic, also helmed an outing of the miniseries.

This top shelf directorial talents might help to explain how Wild Palms managed to amass such an impressive cast, with stars like Ernie Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Brad Dourif, Robert Morse, and David Warner rounding out the already-impressive lineup mentioned earlier. The series even featured a cameo appearance from William Gibson, playing himself, as well as a cheeky appearance by Stone where he discusses his then-recent 1991 movie JFK, making Wild Palms one of the starriest satirical sci-fi extravaganzas ever.

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  Brad Dourif

  Chickie Levitt

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  Grace Wyckoff

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  Tommy Lazlo

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  Jim Belushi

  Harry Wyckoff