ALIEN NATION remake series coming

When Variety reports that the SCI FI Channel's planning an Alien Nation reboot series, my first instinct is to assume it will be crappy. (Click the image at left to buy the original Alien Nation - The Complete Series.) Then I hear that the project will be overseen by Tim Minear, the talented writer who has worked on such genre favorites as Angel, Firefly and The X-Files, and that gets my hopes up that we could have something special here.

But then I hear what the SCI FI Channel's planning, and in 10 seconds I lose about 40 percent of my enthusiasm.

"It's absolute perfect timing for this type of show," Fox exec Chris Carlisle tells the paper. "They're looking for more grounded sci-fi and close-ended episodes, and at the heart of Alien Nation, it's a cop movie. It's grounded. And it has a tremendous amount of dramatic possibilities and humor."

In other words, this show will absolute not be aimed at the dorkwads (that would be you and me) who made cult hits of complex, serial modern genre TV shows like Buffy, The X-Files, Lost and SCI FI's own Battlestar Galactica remake series. As much as audiences have proven they love twisty, ongoing storylines, networks hate shows like that because they're harder to sell into syndication. Galactica began as a serialized drama but show runner Ronald D. Moore soon faced heavy network interference, leading to a cluster of iffy stand-alone episodes that lost the show a good portion of its audience and arguably shortened the series' run by a season or two.

The original Alien Nation TV series holds up remarkably well, but it is quite dated in some respects, and the constant resetting of the status quo is one of the things that hasn't aged well. Alien Nation was good despite the lack of a major, ongoing mythology, not because of it.

"(The new show is) genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary," Minear says. "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."

Is this really how Minear sees the show? Is his biggest ambition here to do Starsky and Hutch with bumpy foreheads? Maybe. But I like to think he's just singing the song the execs want to hear, and midway through the first season a lot of the tired procedural stuff will fall away as something more interesting develops. Because otherwise, Alien Nation will be exactly the kind of thing that gets the SCI FI honchos horny - Stand alone episodes of a cop show with a slight genre twist, without any expensive sets or costumes, probably filmed in Vancouver using cheap local labor.

And it will last a season or two at most, then it will be canceled and justly forgotten. Then the SCI FI will put even less effort into its next series. And after that fails, they'll just give up and finally become the wrestling and Ghost Hunters network they've longed to be for so long.

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