Pilot Season – War of the Worlds (1988)

    What an odd duck of a television show. There have been numerous adaptations of the source material over the years, the two most famous at the time this was produced being the infamous 1938 radio broadcast and the 1953 movie adaptation. Normally a first-run syndication show such as this would be a loose adaptation or sequel to the original book which would presumably be cheaper. Interestingly due to various copyright extensions the rights to the book had not yet entered the public domain. Instead this is in fact a direct sequel to the film version to the point where footage from the original is actually incorporated into the episodes themselves, an oddly ambitious move.

    The questions over rights issues begin to resolve themselves when you realize that the effort behind this series originated with that film’s producer George Pal and one of the involved production companies was Paramount Domestic Television, Paramount having made the 1953 film adaptation. This also presumably explains a scene in the second half of the pilot where the main characters enter a secret military warehouse and it’s framed and shot almost identically to the warehouse from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ another Paramount property.

    Paramount was also one of the studios behind the push for first-run syndication in the first place, being involved in shows we’ve already touched upon such as ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series’ and ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation.’ They were clearly leveraging the intellectual properties they already owned into television series and ‘War of the Worlds’ would seem to be a natural fit. This is also the same era where they tried to launch their own affiliates network, UPN, which would fight a bitter war of attrition with Warner Brothers’ WB network, eventually resulting in the existence of The CW which we all know and love today and the absorption of all things Paramount into the hive-mind that is CBS.

I admit that's a pretty great show logo.

    On the whole this is not a badly put together show with one huge, glaring exception that runs right down the center like a crack in a window, which we will circle back around to. The basic premise, to steal a line from ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ is: “Well, everyone knows that the aliens died at the end of ‘War of the Worlds.’ What this show presupposes is: maybe they didn’t?” Instead of dying the aliens went into suspended animation. The government, mistaking this for death, stored the alien bodies in steel drums and hid them away in military installations.

    The pilot opens with non-denominational terrorists (the kind the thieves in ‘Die Hard’ were just pretending to be) seizing control of a military compound in the middle of nowhere in order to gain access to a communications satellite they plan to use to broadcast their demands to the world. I’m not sure how much of this is actually nonsensical and how much of it is semi-realistic based on the telecommunications technology of the time. There are explosions and squibs and there is some budget here but it’s still television in 1988 and it rather painfully shows. I will say the editing in this sequence stood out as particularly choppy.

    After seizing control of the base the terrorists begin to make preparations for their broadcast. In all of the fighting some of the barrels were damaged and several aliens take the opportunity to emerge, although of course never on camera. It’s never really explained how this attack led directly to their escape, there’s some hand-waving about how the military was also storing nuclear material at the site which killed off the bacteria keeping the aliens in suspended animation but why they chose now to escape is never addressed, maybe the noise woke them. The terrorists being to be picked off by aliens who are always just off-screen and portrayed by three-fingered rubbery appendages that enter frame and drag the terrorists out of sight with far more strength than I recall them showing in the film.

    Intercut with all of this is various scenes at a college campus introducing us to our eventual protagonists, consisting of a quirky scientist studying deep-space transmissions looking for signs of extraterrestrial life and his colleagues. This is when that crack in the window first really starts to show. After the aliens take control of the base they send a transmission back to presumably Mars (actually not-Mars, they end up discovering they’ve actually from a planet much father out since by that time we had a much clearer idea of the surface of Mars) asking for assistance which our scientist heroes intercept. We will ignore that this isn’t how any of this works and just roll with it. He and his newly hired microbiologist colleague (again just go with these vague scientific specialties, it’s necessary for the development of anti-alien biological weapons later) hop into a car and head on over to the source of the transmission where they run into the military following up after the terrorist attack. They talk themselves onto the base where the scientist sees a metal drum clearly opened from the inside, nearly has a panic attack, and basically runs back to the university.

    And here is where the premise of the show splits the window right down the middle. As he’s reflecting on a picture of his child self with his parents we have a flashback to scenes from the actual film version of ‘War of the Worlds’ and through framing it’s clear that he witnessed his parents being killed in the invasion. After the flashback his colleague stomps into the office and resigns over his behavior. He explains he freaked out because the alien invasion is happening again and she scoffs, saying he’s crazy to think it’s aliens.

    Which ... what? In the universe of this television show there was an actual massive alien invasion 35 years before and everyone acts like it’s news to them. To draw a distasteful analogy this is like the entire United States forgetting the Oklahoma City bombing because it happened so long ago. If this was some kind of plot point, if it was addressed in some way as a global conspiracy or governmental cover-up that all the news organizations agreed to or just some kind of explanation was offered it likely wouldn’t be enough but it would at least be something but for the entire rest of the pilot it’s unclear from moment to moment if a character does or does not believe in aliens or an invasion or not. Some of them acknowledge that we were invaded but seem utterly nonchalant to the idea that it could happen again, some seem to have never heard of it, and characters can change their entire stances on the issue seemingly at random from scene to scene. It’s also addressed as a purely American problem when I’m pretty sure the rest of the world would be pretty darn paranoid about aliens from that point on as well.

    As reasonably solid as the rest of the show is I’m afraid that central failing rather wrecks the whole thing for me. I can understand wanting to be a direct sequel to the movie, that’s a great hook for a show. I can also understand the budget constraints of a tv show restricting the amount of alien action on screen, far easier to make it a low-key invasion stretched out over time. The problem is that those two things are fundamentally incompatible with each other and the show makes little to no effort to paper over this central flaw.

    The show did last long enough to be renewed for a second season, at which point the show-runners were replaced by Frank Mancuso Jr., producer behind ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series.' Two of the main characters were killed and replaced by a single, presumably cooler character and the basic premise of fighting against a reborn alien invasion was jettisoned in favor of jumping forward in time to feature a human resistance faction fighting against a completely different alien race who replaced the original aliens from the original premise and had since conquered the Earth. It was canceled roughly halfway through this retooled series although they did produce more episodes to give the show something of a conclusion.

    The characters on the show are fine, they’re quirky and distinctive and the actors have a decent enough interplay that something could’ve grown out of this over the course of a show. It may have just been for the pilot but there was clearly a budget on-screen and the idea of exploring those iconic aliens from the film is a good way to garner interest. There’s even a single shot near the end where I got the briefest of chills, when a group of the aliens have managed to acquire some of their old ships and start right back up where they left off in the invasion. The sight of those saucers with the ray-gun stalks and the laser sound effects was actually pretty effective. There are far more ‘secret invasion’ shows than I would’ve thought and it’s hard to get noticed as something special. The central hook of this show really could’ve done something but it doesn’t seem like they fully rose to the occasion, and then whatever they were doing right got spiked right into the ground by that second season. If it really sounds appealing the entire series is available on DVD for a pretty reasonable price. CBS apparently wants that intellectual property money.