RALEIGH – I knew that getting a DVR would cause me no end of grief. I knew it would suck precious free time out of my days, confiscate needed sleep time from my nights, and encroach steadily into every corner of my house as must-have documentaries, movie musicals, and Scooby Doo episodes followed their inevitable path from my cable box to recording device to shelf after glorious shelf.

But little did I know that my new DVR service would free me of my prejudices.

No, I’m still no fan of big government, small minds, or the stultifying boredom that is professional baseball. Some enmities are lasting and well-earned. What DVR did do, however, is show me the error of my ways when it comes to science-fiction TV snobbery.

As a kid, I was a loyal fan of the original Twilight Zone. It came on the local public TV station late at night, lending a sense of forbidden creepiness to a series that was often already plenty creepy. I loved the stark production values, the twist endings, and even Rod Serling’s sometimes-corny prologues and epilogues. I had my favorites, such as the first season’s “One for the Angels” and the third season’s “Little Girl Lost.” But I could find something to appreciate in virtually every episode of the long-running series.

Which really wasn’t that hard back when there were only four or five channels to choose from, including countless hours of insipid schlock.

Later, as a young adult, I discovered the original Outer Limits through late-name reruns, cable marathons, and a local video store. Longer, grittier, and sometimes just plain goofier than the Twilight Zone, the show still grabbed my attention. At its heights, as in Harlan Ellison’s classic “Demon With A Glass Hand” and the gripping “A Feasibility Study,” The Outer Limits represented some of the best-produced and most-thoughtful programming in the history of television. And when it got silly – complete with bulbous-headed aliens and pointless chase scenes through the same Southern California forest – the show still entertained.

So when I changed telecom service providers and got DVR, I obviously had to set it up to record Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes. A rediscovery of their charms was in order. Only, I didn’t yet know the ins and outs of programming the system. I ended up not just with my intended black-and-white gems but also with dozens of hours of programs I had not intended to find – the updated Twilight Zone series from the 1980s and the Showtime/Sci Fi Channel Outer Limits series from the 1990s.

In general, I’m not much of a fan of remakes and re-dos. Folks ought to come up with their own ideas, or at least use a previous work only as a point of departure – much as the excellent Deep Space Nine did in the Star Trek franchise.

So I’d never thought much of the newer Zone and Limits shows. It was an uninformed opinion. Now that I’ve been watching them, care of the Chiller and SyFy channels respectively, I can say that I was completely wrong.

Some of the episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone deserve to be on the TV greatest-hits list. One of my favorites, the hysterical “Dealer’s Choice,” was directed by the soon-to-be-famous Wes Craven and starred the likes of Morgan Freeman, Garrett Morris, M. Emmet Walsh, and Dan Hedaya (the preposterously alluring ex-husband of Carla Tortelli from Cheers).

Another episode with a similar theme – a funny face-off with the Devil – features math professor Sherman Hensley getting the better of the devilish Ron Glass. At the start of “I of Newton,” Hensley is trying to solve a difficult math problem. “I’d sell my soul to get this thing right,” he says. Poof! Glass appears. The only way Hensley can change his fate is to give the Devil an impossible task. “Get lost!” he commands the all-powerful, all-knowing Lord of Evil – who, of course, can’t. Poof! He’s gone. “Well, that guy wasn’t any help at all,” Hensley mutters in his best George Jefferson style.

Great stuff.

As for the 1990s Outer Limits, it’s uneven but sometimes very, very good. In both cases, some of the best episodes are adaptations of short stories by the giants of the genre. “The Human Factor” updates a story by the late A.E. van Vogt. “The Star” is a beautiful retelling of an Arthur C. Clarke story about the discovery of a dead planet that orbited the Star of Bethlehem. “Inconstant Moon” is a Larry Niven teleplay. And the very weird “A Matter of Minutes” is based on a Theodore Sturgeon story from 1941.

So I’ve learned my lesson – don’t assume that a new take on a classic idea will fail. Now if I could just find a magical watch that could stop time so my DVR viewing won’t cut into my valuable game-playing time …

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation