Corona | Coming Attractions

The Alien Nation franchise is getting a third shot at life. After originating as a 1988 feature film that starred James Caan as a bigoted human cop partnered with a new extraterrestrial member of the LAPD (played by Mandy Patinkin), the Fox network broadcast an ongoing series in 1991. The TV show only lasted for a single season but found a solid enough fanbase that five additional TV movies were made throughout the '90s.

Now Sci Fi (which is about to change its name to SyFy next week) is developing a new Alien Nation TV show under the creative guidance of Angel producer/writer Tim Minear. The new show is being produced by Fox 21, one of Fox's television arms, and is being conceived to be more "grounded" than the earlier incarnations of the IP. "They're [SyFy] looking for more grounded sci-fi and close-ended episodes, and at the heart of Alien Nation, it's a cop movie," commented Chris Carlisle, a Fox 21 exec.

Minear is keeping the central theme about immigrants trying to find a way to assimilate into a new culture and the prejudice that goes along with that melting pot experience but he's changing the setting. Instead of taking place in present day L.A. Minear's new Alien Nation will be set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (I sense another sci-fi show that'll shoot in Vancouver) and take place 20 years after the Newcomer aliens arrive on Earth, which means the action is set in the 2020s. When the aliens first landed on our planet there was just a few thousand of them; now their popular has exploded to 3.5 million and the majority live in ghettos in cities.

"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," Minear told Variety about his ideas. "You can touch on racism, terrorism, assimilation, immigration. And there's room for satire."

Since the project is still in the early formative stages the network couldn't say when the new Alien Nation show would be ready for broadcast.