WTF is up with our collective unconscious, gang?

[capri0mni]

Threshold: Columbia Broadcasting Service
Surface: National Broadcasting Service
Invasion American Broadcasting Service

All three are brand-new series, and are premiering within days of each other. All three seem to have the same premise -- nasty aliens from outerspace are taking over Earth in secret.

If one of big networks aired a new series, and it turned into a huge hit, I'd expect others to copy it as quick as they could. But these are all coming out at the same time, so you can't really say this is the usual case of Hollywood's unoriginality syndrome.

And when was the last time a mainstream network decided to touch any science fiction with anything less than an eleven-and-a-half foot pole (Fox and UPN have for years, but they started that tradition long before either were considered "mainstream")? Hasn't sci-fi long been considered "risky" and "for wierdos"? So, what's up? Why take a risk now? Was there something in the water at a television scriptwriters' convention a couple of years ago? And why do all the aliens have to be evil and threatening? Whatever happened to My Favorite Martian and Mork and Mindy? And did you notice that every sentance in this paragraph is a question?

If the aliens turn out to be metaphors for Muslim terrorists, I will be greatly disapointed in the obviousness of it all...

And one more thing, on a slight tangent: I wouldn't be surprised if Lost will turn out to be something like H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Comments

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

For once I'd like to meet an alien force that wasn't a metaphor for something in our society. Daleks and hundreds of other aliens based on Nazis and all that...:P

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I think that's because talking about the Nazis as "one of us" hits too close to home for many people -- threatens to overturn rocks in our own psyches. And I don't know anyone who really wants to see the squirmy creepie-crawlies in their own heads. At least the metaphor lets us at least think about these issues ("Alien Nation" was all about racism and how stupid it is)

But yeah. I'd like to see aliens as "just these guys with a different perspective, yo" too.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

I think the reason the networks are jumping on the SF bandwagon is because of the success of shows like Lost and Medium, as unrelated as they are. Which is kind of cool, since it's been years (since X Files, really) since networks besides SciFi had genre shows on in prime time. I say hooray!

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah... but I don't want my aliens to be nasty and evil.. I mean, talk about a throwback to Invasion of the Bodysnatchers!

I think my second and third favorite sci-fi shows were Alien Nation and Max Headroom -- both based on movies, and both cancelled way before their time. My first favorite is Doctor Who, natch.

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

I want to see aliens as people, not as metaphors for some aspect of us. I've been told I should watch Alien Nation for that. Star Trek waffles back and forth between 'let's all try to understand each other' and 'these people are too unemotional and these people are too violent but humans are just right!'

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Alien Nation was fantastic! Unfortunately, the young Fox network ran out of money to continue the series, and it ended on a cliffhanger (though there was a tv movie special after a while, to wrap things up).

The premise was that an alien slave ship crashed in the Mojabe Desert, and all the slaves escaped and became refugees on Earth. And we Earthlings had no choice but to try and live with them. They got jobs and homes in our communities, and our kids went to school together. There was also some angst about the few Overseers who were around, trying to recapture the slaves, but yeah... The whole series was a thinly veiled discussion of racism and fear of "the other," but the characters themselves were fully-fleshed individuals.

The human protagonist was a police detective, and the alien protagonist was his partner, and the plots of the individual stories were always a spin on the standard cop-buddy show.

And yeah, I agree with you on Star Trek -- I caught a snippet from the last season of "Enterprise" where the aliens admitted that even though they were super-advanced and intelligent, they had so much to learn from humans, and should stop abusing them for their amusement, because humans had soul.

I couldn't help thinking: "Jeez! Way to mary-sue our species ad-nauseum!"

[pedanther]

But these are all coming out at the same time, so you can't really say this is the usual case of Hollywood's unoriginality syndrome.

Sounds exactly like the usual case of Hollywood's unoriginality syndrome to me - see this article for many examples.

(Sorry for the belated reply - wanted to find the examples first.)