Source: Variety
Looks like Battlestar Galactica isn’t the old series to be remade for the Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be renamed “Syfy”). Alien Nation is now getting the reboot treatment!
Tim Minear, who wrote many episodes of Angel and Firefly, and even a couple episodes of The X-Files (the greatest sci-fi TV show ever), will be penning this new take on the original cult movie and TV series from the late 80s.
Variety had this to say when describing what the show would be like:
The new “Alien Nation” would include a mythology that evolves over time and will also touch on some of the issues of the day, such as the immigrant experience and how society integrates an incoming culture.
Minear is currently busy outlining the “Alien Nation” script and mapping out the project’s mythology. The new “Alien Nation” will likely take place in the Pacific Northwest, and will take place about 20 years after the first ship of aliens – who have been banished as slaves – crash lands into Earth.
By the time the show begins, some time in the 2020s, the alien population has multiplied from a few thousand to 3.5 million. And much of the “newcomers” live their own segregated existence, in what Minear compares to the North African ghettos in France.
Minear also had a couple of comments regarding the feel of the new show:’
“It’s genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary,” Minear said. “I love serialized stuff, but this is also a cop franchise. That ‘Starsky and Hutch’/’Lethal Weapon’ buddy cop comedy is absent from TV right now.”
“You can take (the original ‘Alien Nation’) a step forward and really do a show that encompasses the clash of civilizations, and the idea of a ghettoized minority,” he said. “You can touch on racism, terrorism, assimilation, immigration. And there’s room for satire.”
The article goes on to say that this won’t be just a complete rehash of what has come before. They are intending this to be a new and fresh take on the series.
What really has me excited is the idea of a mythology storyline for the series. The X-Files did this in having a storyline about aliens, government cover-ups etc. that was not dealt with every week but rather in just a few episodes per season, having the rest of the episodes be individual stories that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the overall “mythology.” The mythology episodes were what I always looked forward to with every season of The X-Files, so this news gets me very excited for this new take on Alien Nation. The overall concept for this new series seems rather intriguing.
Alien Nation originally was a movie that came out in 1988 that later was developed into a TV series that only lasted one season from 1989-1990. It did, however, spawn five “made-for-TV” movies as well as books and comics. Hopefully this will follow in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica and give us a riveting new sci-fi TV series.
