“If you’re going to do Alien Nation,” says Stern, “you’d better do it the right way, same as with Battlestar. We’ve been talking to a number of writers since I got here about Alien Nation. What’s the right approach? How do you do it so it feels relevant? And Tim Minear came in with a great approach to it, that really felt like it didn’t just tell the same story again, and it was still really true to what Alien Nation was about.”
As to Minear’s approach, Stern notes that it’s similar to what Ron Moore and David Eick did with their reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. “Take what’s great about that franchise, which was obviously the relationship between these two different people and these two different cultures, and find a way to make it relevant to the things we care about today. Is it going to be darker? I don’t know what the tone is going to be yet, honestly. Tim is not a dark writer, he comes from a very different place. He wants it to be more than just frivolous and silly. It’s going to have to attack a lot of the same themes that the original series and movie did. But it really has to feel like there’s something new there, like this isn’t the same old. I wish I could give you more specifics, but we really just had that first pitch meeting with him where he said, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and we said, ‘That sounds fantastic. Let’s do it.’ Now it’s really about him pulling it together.”
For the full interview, click HERE.