Sigh-Fi

Back to news posts today with a few info:

Screenwriter/God Tim Minear is writing a TV remake/adaptation of the 1988 movie Alien Nation which spawned in the 90s a FOX show.

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 said he’s looking forward to incorporating a mix of all the different kinds of series he’s written in the past.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

I’m assuming it’s going to get pitched to SciFi Syfy.

Speaking of, another sci-fi show is coming to ABC, and this one is interesting.
I present to you Defying Gravity.
Starring Ron Livingston, Laura Harris and Christina Cox, this drama is actually internationally produced and is “also set to air on Canada’s CTV, Germany’s ProSieben and the BBC”. The brains behind the show is non other than an ABC alumni, James Parriott, a former exec on both Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty, and Michael Edelstein, from Desperate Housewives.
The show will center around an eight-person team of astronauts travelling through the solar system in a mysterious 6-year mission.

After Lost with Bad Twin in 2006, another ABC show is getting its own tie-in “ARG-like” book: Castle.
Meanwhile, the ratings for HBO’s Hung were pretty huge.
And no I’m not gonna do a lame pun.