Uncle Martin of My Favorite Martian: Antennae, Telepathy and the First Sitcom Alien

My Favorite Martian premiered on CBS on September 29, 1963, and was the first American situation comedy built around an extraterrestrial. Tim O'Hara (Bill Bixby), a reporter for the Los Angeles Sun, witnesses the crash of a small spacecraft, finds its pilot, a middle-aged man in a silver suit, and brings him home to the garage apartment he rents from Mrs. Lorelei Brown, a widow who spends three seasons suspecting something. The pilot is a Martian, an anthropologist who had been observing the Earth and was knocked from orbit by a passing X-15, and Tim, judging that no editor would print the truth, introduces him as his Uncle Martin. Ray Walston, a Broadway actor with a Tony for Damn Yankees, played him as a dry, elegant, faintly exasperated academic who could lift a sofa by pointing at it.

The show was created by John L. Greene, produced by Jack Chertok, and drew on the wave of fantasy sitcoms of the early 1960s, Mister Ed, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, in which a suburban household hid something magical; its innovation was to make the something a scientist from another planet. It ran 107 episodes, the first two seasons in black and white and the third in colour, and ended on May 1, 1966, weeks before the show that inherited its premise, Star Trek, put a telepath with pointed ears on a starship.

Martin's Martians are human in appearance and outlive us by centuries; he is about 450 and considers himself in early middle age. What sets them apart is inside and, when he uses it, on top. He is telepathic, and reads Tim's thoughts as a matter of course, which the show used as its main engine: Martin knows what everyone in the room is thinking and cannot always keep from responding. He levitates objects and himself, becomes invisible when he needs to and sometimes when he does not, speaks to dogs and, over the series, to a horse, and can speed himself up so that a room's worth of chores happens in a blur. Whenever the powers are in use a pair of silver antennae rises from the back of his skull, and the show's most repeated shot is Martin snapping them down as someone enters.

He is also a scientist, and the series gave him a workshop under the garage where he builds, over three seasons, a time machine, a machine for turning objects to gold, a spaceship that never quite gets repaired, and a series of devices that go wrong in ways the episode needs. Martin's Mars is a civilisation centuries beyond Earth, peaceful, dry, and mildly contemptuous of the humans it studies, and the character's affection for Tim is the show's argument that a superior being could still be a friend.

The premise was revived twice. My Favorite Martians, a Saturday-morning cartoon in 1973, gave Martin a nephew and a dog and ran a single season; My Favorite Martian the film, released by Disney in February 1999, cast Christopher Lloyd as Martin and Jeff Daniels as Tim, gave the Martian a talking spacesuit and a pursuing government scientist, and let Walston, then 84, appear in a cameo that revealed his character to have been a Martian all along. The film was a flop and the series it came from was, by then, a memory kept alive by cable reruns and by the one thing about it that every viewer of a certain age retained: the antennae.

The show's real legacy was the form. Every alien lodger since, Mork in 1978, ALF in 1986, the Solomons in 1996, Roger in 2005, is Uncle Martin with a different set of powers: the stranded visitor, the human who hides him, the nosy neighbour and the weekly failure of the disguise. Martin was also the friendliest Martian on television at a moment when the planet's reputation was still Wells's; a year after the series ended, Mariner 4's photographs of a cratered, airless Mars made a Martian anthropologist impossible, and the lodgers who followed came from planets nobody could check.

Telepathy was the visitors' language before it was Martin's. George Adamski's Venusian in 1952 communicated by telepathy and gesture, the contactees who followed him received their messages the same way, and when Betty and Barney Hill described their 1961 encounter under hypnosis, the beings on the craft spoke to Barney without moving their mouths; the Hill abduction, which became public in 1965 while My Favorite Martian was on the air, fixed telepathy as the standard alien speech, and the abduction accounts of the 1980s and 1990s almost never report a spoken word. A Martian who hears what you think, and is too polite to say so, was drawn from the same well, and the show made it comedy a decade before the lore made it dread.

The idea that a mind could be read or entered from outside has its own history in the culture, in the psychic-research programmes of the Cold War and in the songs the article on songs about mind control and mind reading collects, from Pink Floyd's lunatic to the puppet masters of metal. Martin's antennae are the friendliest version of it. His planet is covered in the life on Mars article, which explains why an anthropologist could not have come from it, and his belligerent cousin, Marvin, had been trying to blow up the Earth for fifteen years by the time Martin moved into the garage.