About "One Step Beyond:" No Twilight Zone Imitator, It Was First!
Because the much higher budgeted "Twilight Zone" could afford not only better production standards, but also better press and publicity releases. Sci Fi author Rod Serling became a household name (and in 2010-11, the subject of Geico mimic ads), many believe "One Step Beyond" was an imitation of "The Twilight Zone." It was not. John Newland began production treatment a year before.

As an actor/director in general, John Newland was best known as a television as host of the series One Step Beyond. He made his first feature film, That Night (1957) -- a daring, ahead-of-its-time story of a businessman's heart attack and its effect on his family -- during that same period. His second movie, The Violators (1957), attracted less attention, and since then Newland has worked largely in television-based material, including The Spy With My Face (1968), an above-average feature film adaptation of a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode featuring Senta Berger with the usual cast of Robert Vaughn, David McCallum, and Leo G. Carroll, and TV movies such as A Sensitive Passionate Man (1977) and The Suicide's Wife (1979). - Bruce Eder, Rovi