Currently binge watching Monsters, The Hitchhiker, Tales from the Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and the 80s Alfred Hitchcock reboot and it has me missing anthology series. Saw a lot in the 80s/90s. Anyone have a favorite?
If I had to pick just one I guess mine would be the original TZ but I have a soft spot for the 80s version. One Step Beyond is an old but good one. Nightmare Cafe was a good but very short lived series.
This is incorrect and a real bugbear of mine because what you're calling erroneous is the original definition of filler for American TV, before anime was ever heard of here. As you point out it it's confusing because the anime term "filler" is entirely different from the other commonly used term, but the non-anime version came first. It just meant an episode that doesn't move the overall main plot forward.
The vast majority, like 98%+, of TV shows 15 years ago and further back didn't have an overall plot at all. Serialized television is a very new thing. Name a popular show of any genre from 2010 all the way back to the 1940s and you have a greater than 99 out of 100 chance that it was an episodic show. Meaning it didn't have an big overarching plot. Each episode was it's own standalone story. If the term filler existed before it's use in anime, so few people used it for such free shows it's functionally irrelevant. The term became popularized because of its use in anime, but then got twisted from there. The anime definition is the correct one because it's the one that actually applies the extreme majority of the time, and it's how the extreme majority of people who use the term at all(even if wrongly) heard of it.