The Syfy Channel is rebooting another classic series, with a brand new Alien Nation. No doubt hoping to pull down BSG numbers, they've even brought in Tim "Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse" Minear to write the new series.
The original 80s feature gave birth to a Fox series that focused on the lives of a bunch of newly landed, spotty headed aliens and their integration into human society. Specifically, it was a buddy cop show between alien detective George Francisco and his human partner Matthew Sikes.
Minear explained to Variety how he's going to bring back this buddy-cop classic:
It's genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary. 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.
The reboot will most likely take place in the Pacific Northwest, 20 years after the UFO crashes onto our planet. So the aliens have had some time to assimilate to Earthling life. The trades claim that the alien population will have grown to about 3.5 million and most of the others will have their own segregated habitat in something similar to the "North African ghettos in France."
So now you can all stop clamoring about District 9 simply being a copy of Alien Nation, because we're actually going to have an updated copy of Alien Nation. Will alien intolerance replace the post 9/11 themes that were created from shows like Battlestar Galactica? But more importantly will audiences care about the plight of an alien?
[Variety]