ER's Noah Wyle is fighting a war against aliens intent on crushing humanity in Falling Skies. Terra Nova star Jason O'Mara is a colonist escaping a future environmental extinction by travelling with his family back to the time of the dinos. Superpowered series Alphas boasts a team of uncaped crusaders fighting crime. And on Torchwood this season, extraterrestrials could be behind a worldwide miracle that threatens to become apocalyptic.
Yes, there's a sci-fi invasion hitting the small screen. In the past two or three seasons, vampires, zombies and teen werewolves have been the big winners in the television genre wars as once-dominant science-fiction was all but abducted from TV. But in the next few months, major series (including two shows helmed by Steven Spielberg) suggest a light at the end of the proverbial dark and mysterious tunnel.
Why the downturn in the first place? You could blame the genre's success: As long-running hits such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Stargate wrapped up, the studios were in a race to peddle the "next Lost" – but failed to deliver the goods. Shows aimed at cult audiences, for example, such as Dollhouse, Caprica and Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles were all cancelled prematurely because of their cult-sized ratings. Hyped network series such as FlashForward, The Event and V failed to catch on. The U.S.-based Sci-Fi Channel even softened its genre affiliation with a name change to SyFy.
"Effectively," says Russell T. Davies, who created the sci-fi series Torchwood, returning to television this summer, "there had been a glut."
The Lost formula of a series-long story – however successful among hard-core fans – was also a hurdle for the genre. The show's complexity was appealing to some, but a turn-off to others. An executive producer of Terra Nova (one of Spielberg's current TV projects) recently assured TV critics: "This has nothing to do with Lost," while his network boss, Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly, promised "you won't need a study guide to follow it."
What's ahead, then, could be considered a revamp of sci-fi, starting with Torchwood.
Unlike Lost, Torchwood – a BBC spinoff (and anagram) of Doctor Who about an institute set up by Queen Victoria to defend the British Empire from aliens – tells a single story each season. "People like to think there's going to be a beginning and ending to things, rather than being led on for seven seasons. You can lose interest," says the show's star, John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness). "When you look at things like Lost, sometimes as a viewer we watched and thought, 'Y'know, they just made this up.' "
Torchwood also offers adult-oriented "psychological sci-fi," which goes deeper than "spaceships and aliens." This season, dubbed Miracle Day, is focused on what might happen if we stopped dying, but still aged, got sick, felt pain and needed to eat. "A lot of it is fuelled by 2008, when we practically saw our entire economy collapse," series originator Davies says. "If that week had gone any worse, we'd now be living in caves fighting each other with bones. We like to think we're a great stable empire, and we're clearly not. …
"A lot of science-fiction will use the word metaphor – that their spaceship is a metaphor for human society," he continues. " Torchwood takes that word out. This is showing what real humans are capable of."
A similar grim realism grounds the first of Spielberg's series to hit the air. On Falling Skies, co-created with Saving Private Ryan screenwriter Robert Rodat, Wyle is a military history prof-turned-resistance fighter in a sort of extension of Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds. But while that Tom Cruise film focused on the initial invasion, Falling Skies begins six months after a devastating alien attack leaves most of the population dead, the military scattered and our technology useless.
While there are plenty of icky aliens – ranging from slimy monsters to slug-like parasites that use mind control on children – the show is also a mission-based war drama with broad appeal.
Spielberg's other sci-fi gamble, Terra Nova, launching this September, tells the story of a family from a dystopian future who joins a pilgrimage to the dinosaur era to start civilization anew. As Michael McNamara, who chronicles sci-fi/fantasy subcultures on the just-launched Canadian docu-series Fanboy Confessional, puts it: "It's got all the classic elements of a great popular sci-fi pitch, doesn't it? Swiss Family Robinson build a homestead in Jurassic Park."
But the show has also been beset by high costs – the pilot reportedly topped $15-million (U.S.) – production delays and staff turnover, so Fox is banking on Spielberg while trying to navigate sci-fi's recent decline. Network executives wary of the limitations of the "sci-fi" label, for instance, are calling the series an "epic family drama" and looking beyond the hard-core crowd that is being targeted by a straightforward genre show such as SyFy's Alphas, which was originally going to air on ABC before it balked.
"[ Terra Nova] is made for a massively broad audience," executive producer Alex Graves insists. "It's for everybody … from my kids to the gamer to my dad."
Whether the latest wave of sci-fi will drown all those sexy bloodsuckers or push back the tide of reality television remains a cliff-hanger, but for fans' sake, here's hoping.
"We need strong well-constructed moral fables with imagination and depth," McNamara says, "and we ain't going to get that from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Shows like that are like empty calories from a fast-food joint. If you want value, long shelf-life, mass appeal and loyalty, you have to be willing to dig deeper to places where good sci-fi lives."
Special to The Globe and Mail