Don't know whether to cheer or facepalm
Reprinted from Digital Spy:
'Alien Nation' resurrected for US TV
Thursday, July 2 2009, 21:51 BST
By Tim Parks
Sci-fi movie Alien Nation will return to television with Tim Minear attached to pen the series.
The Firefly and Angel scribe is developing a new take on the 1988 James Caan and Mandy Patinkin vehicle, in which a human cop partnered with another from outer space after aliens attempted to assimilate into human society.
The film was also made into a 1989 short-lived programme on the Fox Network, while the reboot will appear on the Sci Fi Channel.
"It's genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary," Minear told Variety. "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."
He added: "Twenty years (after Alien Nation), TV as a whole has evolved, and you can explore issues and go deeper with subject matter than you ever could before. On cable, you can play with ambiguity. This is a place I want to be."
The new series will be set in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the 2020s, and will pick up 20 years after the aliens first landed on Earth.
This could be arse or it could be brilliant. Strangely, I'm much less sceptical/more optimistic about it than I am about Proyas taking on Tripods...
'Alien Nation' resurrected for US TV
Thursday, July 2 2009, 21:51 BST
By Tim Parks
Sci-fi movie Alien Nation will return to television with Tim Minear attached to pen the series.
The Firefly and Angel scribe is developing a new take on the 1988 James Caan and Mandy Patinkin vehicle, in which a human cop partnered with another from outer space after aliens attempted to assimilate into human society.
The film was also made into a 1989 short-lived programme on the Fox Network, while the reboot will appear on the Sci Fi Channel.
"It's genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary," Minear told Variety. "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."
He added: "Twenty years (after Alien Nation), TV as a whole has evolved, and you can explore issues and go deeper with subject matter than you ever could before. On cable, you can play with ambiguity. This is a place I want to be."
The new series will be set in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the 2020s, and will pick up 20 years after the aliens first landed on Earth.
This could be arse or it could be brilliant. Strangely, I'm much less sceptical/more optimistic about it than I am about Proyas taking on Tripods...