Screw it, every time I watch the old Outer Limits I have to adjust my TV.
I do hope you’re joking, Bryan Ekers :dubious::
The original Outer Limits , the one that ran from 1963-65, is famous for its extraordinary feature film quality black and white photography, courtesy of Conrad Hall and Kenneth Peach. Awesome. I can watch it for viewing pleasure even with the sound turned off. 
There are, seriously, on-line sites, groups (Yahoo has one) dedicated to the original Outer Limits. It has a large cult following, not at the Star Trek-
Twilight Zone level, but good sized. The production values are outstanding; and the scripts, many written by Joseph Stefano, are awesome, often off the wall surreal (Don’t Open Till Doomsday, The Invisibles, Fun and Games, The Guests, The Forms Of Things Unknown).
But I digress (somewhat)…
While it wasn’t shot in B&W, the first season of The Walking Dead was recently broadcast in B&W on AMC.
This reminds of a comment my brother once made: he didn’t enjoy watching late '60s shows like Name of the Game or the last season of It Takes a Thief because there were very long scenes with nothing but pretty color photography (e.g., shots of Robert Wagner strolling through the plazas of Venice) and music playing in the background.
OMG! :eek:
Bryan: the control voice specifically warned you to not even attempt to adjust your television set! :o
If you’d just stop fiddling around with it I think you’d really enjoy the show…
I can answer the OP with two words: Styles Change.
No, it orders you not to. This is America! We don’t take orders from TV shows!
The magic lantern was already old, and the Argand lamp that provided a brighter and steadier illumination came in 1780. I have used a clockwork movie camera and hand-cranked cameras and projectors are no problem. However, there is one little fly in the ointment: a medium that was transparent, cheap, and strong enough to work. Y’see, without flexible nitro-cellulose film (celluloid ca 1855, successful photographic film 1889) you would need a leather belt many meters long inset with small, glass plates you had to be careful not to break when you rolled up the belt, a scroll being the most-efficient way to store sequential data mechanically, from papyrus in Egypt to video tape today. And whereas nitro-cellulose film is a fraction of a millimeter thick so lots can be stored on a single, easy to handle reel, a glass and leather belt would be much thicker and could not be rolled nearly as tight, severely limiting the length of a movie at 24fps. And though Euclid and Newton both played with persistence of vision, and Ting Huan built his chao hua chich kuan around 180AD, the first modern mechanisms that used persistence of vision to create the illusion of motion weren’t invented until the 1830s and 40s and then were limited to what images could be fit on round plates or cylinders. Not much plot in a second or two of screen time. And even flipbooks are a surprisingly recent invention, from the 1860s.
One guy did something like what I described. Reynaud, in his Theatre Optique, produced animated shorts that were fairly long. They were hand-painted on glass plates, with the plates mounted in a leather belt and projected onto a fixed background. All of this was technology available many years, even centuries, before Reynaud tied them together, and didn’t even require photography, but note the date on that link: 1892 was only three years before the Lumieres’ first public screenings. Obviously, we needed something more than photography before the movie could be invented. We needed a conceptual leap that didn’t occur until the late 19th century.
As for the OP, the beautiful, rich shadings of the early B&W shows were lost on us because the broadcast, reception, and viewing technologies were, how can I put this? Primitive? Not up to the task? Pathetic? I’ll go with “for shit.” In a lot of places we were lucky to know what show we were watching. The new, cleaned-up versions are gorgeous, but we didn’t get to see that fifty-sixty years ago. And what luxury of time? Most shows were in half-hour slots so Paladin needed to get the telegram in his hotel, go to the site of the action, assess and solve the situation, and get back to Frisco in under 30 minutes. Tough in a kid show, but Have Gun Will Travel was a show written for adults on the more-sophisticated end of the western shoot 'em up bell curve. And succeeded. Pretty impressive stuff.
Sturgeon’s law and time.