Welcome to Paradox
television series
Welcome to Paradox was a Canadian science fiction television series aired on the Sci Fi Channel in the U.S. and subsequently on Showcase in Canada. It was first broadcast on August 17, 1998, ran for one season, with the final episode being released November 9, 1998. As this was part of a crop of new shows produced in 1998 by Sci Fi Channel and it was not successful beyond the first season, it was never placed in syndication. Betaville was the original title for the series.
The series is an anthology hybrid. The stories all took place in the fictional future city of "Betaville", a nod to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. However, the majority of the stories were adapted from short stories that were originally unconnected with that fictional city. The stories were adapted from older works by famous science fiction authors which explored the impact of certain technologies on the human body and psyche, and the theme of humanity being overwhelmed by hostile technologies. Each episode had a host—originally to be named "Paradox" until the concept was dropped—that served as a narrator, adding a prologue and epilogue to the show as with The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. The Volkswagen New Beetle was chosen to be the transportation of Betaville; one was used whenever a car was needed in a story.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3567146. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Welcome to Paradox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.