Problems began when Fox was unable to sell the show to the networks and decided to produce it for syndication. With the show not being in prime time, Fox started trying to find ways of cutting the budget, moving production to Toronto – there was also a writers' strike in the US at that time, which did not help. Most of the Toronto production team had never done television drama. As the filming went on, Ellison grew increasingly disenchanted with the budget cuts, details that were changed, and what he characterized as the progressive dumbing down of the story. Ellison's dissatisfaction extended to the new title of the pilot episode; he had called it "Phoenix Without Ashes" but it was changed to "Voyage of Discovery".
Before the beginning of production, Ellison had invoked a clause in his contract to force the producers to use his alternate registered writer's name of "Cordwainer Bird" on the end credits. This was a signal to anyone who knew him to show how disgusted he was with the whole business (see Alan Smithee for the motion picture industry equivalent).
The show aired to uniformly bad reviews. Sixteen episodes had been made, but Fox decided not to pick up the options for the remainder of the series after seeing how badly it was doing in the ratings. Bova, increasingly frustrated as his advice was ignored, saw the first show when it was broadcast and immediately quit. He asked the producers to take his name off the credits of all the shows, but unfortunately did not have a clause like Ellison's in his contract, so he remained credited.
TV scriptwriter Norman Klenman stated that he was called in to work on The Starlost because the production team were unable to deal with Ellison. Klenman claims he rewrote the pilot script, hired the writers for the series, chose the themes of the episodes and wrote four and heavily rewrote eight more episodes.
On March 31, 1974, Ellison received a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay for the original script (the pilot script as originally written, not the version that was eventually filmed). A novelization of this script by Edward Bryant, Phoenix Without Ashes, was published in 1975; this contained a lengthy foreword by Ellison describing what had gone on in production.
Bova, in an editorial in Analog Science Fiction (June 1974) and in interviews in fanzines, made it clear how disgruntled he had been as science adviser. In 1975, he published a novel entitled The Starcrossed, depicting a scientist taken on as a science adviser for a terrible science fiction series.
