The Burning Zone is an American science fiction drama television series created by Coleman Luck that originally aired for one season on United Paramount Network (UPN) from September 3, 1996 to May 20, 1997.

[2][6][7] Comparisons were drawn to television films, B movies, and news headlines,[2][6][7] and the Chicago Tribune's Allan Johnson summed up The Burning Zone as a "mutant-disease-of-the-week series".

[3] Marcase works closely with Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), who specialized in molecular genetics and pathology during her time at the World Health Organization.

Science fiction writers Roger Fulton and John Gregory Betancourt wrote that the program had "so many transformations in its brief 19-episode run that no viewer who saw the first show would recognize the last".

[5] According to John Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle, The Burning Zone was one of the eight shows ordered for the 1996–97 television season that could be "classified as science fiction or at least very strange".

[2][6][14] In the 1999 book Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place, journalist Rob Owen described The Burning Zone as part of a 1996 trend of "X-Files rejects" that included Dark Skies and Millennium.

[6][15] The Burning Zone was broadcast on Tuesday nights at 9 pm EST,[6][16] airing with the sitcoms Moesha and Homeboys in Outer Space.

[8][18] In a University of California, Los Angeles report, senior fellow Harlan Lebo wrote that The Burning Zone is one of two shows, along with The Sentinel, in the 1996–97 television season that received complaints for its use of violence.

Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly called the show "stiff, pretentious blarney" and an "unhealthy hugger-mugger", and cited its dialogue as one of its weaknesses.

[24] During a negative review of the special effects, Caryn James wrote that the "supposedly new microbe-imaging system look[ed] like the inside of a multicolored lava lamp".

[3] Scott D. Pierce panned the show's storylines for going "into the realm of ridiculous fantasy", and negatively compared the characters and dialogue to those of a soap opera.

In his review of the pilot, Johnson criticized Morgan's beard for making him appear "like he spent more time at college kegger parties than studying germs".

[6] Caryn James praised the episodes for containing "the loopy delights of a cut-rate, over-the-top horror movie", but questioned their intended tone due to the actors' serious portrayals of their characters.