YMMV / Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

• Awesome Music: The spooky music played throughout each episode greatly amplifies the eerie atmosphere of the show.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Beyond Belief was a relatively popular show in Germany (called "X-Factor") during its run, perhaps even more so than in its parent country the United States. It has aired on Sundays for the last 17 years due to its constant high popularity. In fact, it's so popular in Germany that the show was revived in 2021, with the show now produced and set in Germany (except for Frakes' introductions, which are recorded in Los Angeles). The Paranormal Borderline and Scariest Places on Earth were also advertised as being part of the show, but were soon ditched in Germany as the format proved too different and thus unpopular. Jonathan Frakes says that he's just as likely to get asked questions about Beyond Belief as Star Trek when he goes to conventions in Germany.
• Growing the Beard: The first season was not exactly bad, but the show's more memorable segments (and groan-worthy puns) started when Jonathan Frakes (the Trope Namer himself) was cast as the host in the second season.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Comedian Rachel Reenstra appeared in the segment "The New House", where she played a mother who sees a vision of a ghost warning her there's a fire, and to save her daughter (it's revealed the ghost was of a woman who was unable to save her own daughter from a previous fire, and the story was listed as true). Only a couple months after the episode this segment was a part of aired, Reenstra's apartment caught fire, and burned down.
  • The segment "The Curse of Hampton Manor" ends with realtor Bev Conklin (played by Mary Frann) being fatally electrocuted after buying back the titular cursed house from one of her clients. In-universe, this is treated as a Laser-Guided Karma ending for Bev, given her status as a Jerkass who willfully sold the cursed house to her client and then callously dismissed his troubles before buying it back from him—for less than half of what he paid for it. But watching with the knowledge that it was Mary Frann's final role before her death (which occurred under two years before the episode aired) makes the ending tragic in a meta sense.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Kirby" involves an animatronic gorilla seemingly coming to life at night to kill a human being, over 10 years before the popular Five Nights at Freddy's franchise debuted.
  • "The Landlady" is about the titular woman who is being harassed by the ghost of a man she evicted prior to his death. The woman is played by Lorna Raver, who, years later, plays a woman being evicted from her own home... and summoning a demon to torment the young woman who refused to renew her mortgage, the opposite of her role in the episode.
• Informed Wrongness: The Realtor couple in "The Greedy Investor" are both somewhat Designated Villains who are just doing their job of foreclosing a house and requesting a woman to leave as per a previous agreement. Not only does the woman feel that they are completely in the wrong, but also puts on a fit (complete with a 'this house will never belong to you' curse) and acts as if the realtors were literally kicking and dragging her out of the house. Instead the wife is clearly empathetic and the husband was merely insensitive if anything, yet both are treated as despicable people by both the woman and the events of the episode that follow.
• Memetic Mutation: It's become a popular practice to edit clips of Jonathan Frakes' segments into rapid-fire compilations of him saying certain things for 47 seconds (and it has to be 47 seconds). It started in earnest with "Jonathan Frakes telling you you're wrong for 47 seconds", then quickly expanded to him doing other things, like asking rhetorical questions, interrogating you and, yes, telling you you're RIGHT. Frakes himself shared one of the videos on Twitter and said that he's "proud to be a meme."
  • This has expanded to slowing those same clips to half speed, making him sound like he's drunk. Combined with the nature of the questions Hilarity Ensues.
• More Popular Replacement: You'll notice that few people ever acknowledge that James Brolin was the host in the initial 6 episode first season. This is in part due to Jonathan Frakes being a much livelier host, with his more poetic tone colored with puns that he himself was aware of how cheesy they were, with Brolin himself being much more serious in his presentation.
• Narm: A lot of this comes from the show's acting, which tends to be silly or over the top at moments clearly meant to be serious. Every other story is guaranteed to have a bit of this.
  • From "The Wealthy Widow":
    "I'm Milo Younstun, and I want you to leave my Cassy alone."
  • The story "Cook Out". During a family barbecue, the grill malfunctions in strange ways long enough for a family member to learn that the meat is contaminated with e. coli. Out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, the family patriarch attributes the malfunctioning to divine intervention by a recently deceased uncle.
  • Even though it was a pretty creepy and well told story, "The Hooded Chair" (which is based on the Busby Stoop Chair in Thirsk, England) has an ending which is incredibly narmy.
    Talbot: I will not be destroyed by a chair!
  • The story "The Candidate". During a senatorial debate at a hotel, a dishonest political candidate suddenly Cannot Tell a Lie, unwittingly endorses his opponent, and blows the election. What made him do it? It turns out the hotel at which the debate took place was recently renamed the Lincoln Hotel, meaning it must have been Honest Abe's spirit that intervened, of course. One of the more farfetched and unintentionally hilarious stories.
• Narm Charm: Jonathan Frakes' puns and wordplay at the end of each segment are undeniably cheesy but intentionally and knowingly so and Frakes' sly, self-aware delivery makes them quite enjoyable.
  • This tends to be the main appeal of the series to new viewers in the present day. Given the rise of functional skepticism and general decline of supernatural beliefs in the two decades since it aired, the series is more enjoyed as an anthology of campfire tales rather than engaging in analysis of whether the segments are true or false.
• Periphery Demographic: Even if you're a skeptic who doesn't buy into the supposedly truthful supernatural elements, enjoying the show is still very possible if you just find the stories entertaining.
• Pop-Culture Isolation: While the show does have a cult following even after being off the air all these years, the show isn't all that well known outside of its fanbase. Some have speculated that airing sporadically on FOX as opposed to a set time on a main network channel never gave the show the exposure it deserved, and it would have been much more commercially successful if it got out to more viewers.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The segment "The Wailing" depicts a little girl's ghost played by Sara Paxton, years before her earliest of roles like Darcy's Wild Life.
  • The segment "The Newsstand" features a young Justin Chatwin, years before Shameless (US), Another Life (2019) and Dragonball Evolution (the last one he'd likely wish was more obscure than this).
  • The segment "Shared Vision" features a young Kirsten Prout, years before Elektra and Kyle XY.
• Spiritual Successor: To One Step Beyond (1959), which was also a Genre Anthology based on allegedly true stories of the paranormal.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The shows firmly dates itself in the pre-mass internet adoption 90s/early 00s with its format, where you have to wait until the end of the show to see which of the stories are "true." Nowadays, you can just head over to Snopes, or even just do a quick Google search, to find out which story is true before its even over.
  • At least two segments have portrayed cell phones as worthless gadgets that never work when you need them to. Needless to say, this leaves no doubt about the era in which these stories were filmed.
  • One story intro has Jonathan Frakes talking about how themed restaurants are all the rage. While was true back when the series first aired, in the years since, many of these restaurant franchises have scaled back or closed down, to be replaced with "fast-casual" type restaurants instead.
• The Woobie:
  • The titular character of "Anatole". Who can possibly look into those defenseless looking eyes and not feel instant sympathy? May also count as Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds considering the events that follow.
  • The main character of "The Portrait" has a really depressing life. He has the ability to give his subjects a death curse after he paints their portraits. He tries to make the best of it by painting terminally or chronically ill patients that request a peaceful end. Unfortunately, his final customer wasn't stricken with a disease, but suicidal. Unable to cope with the guilt, he paints his own portrait and dies. One can't help but feel sorry for a man that didn't deserve all that weight on his shoulders.

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