Comic-Con 2010: Falling Skies – It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

 One of the more subtly promoted, under-the-radar projects at this year’s Comic-Con won’t even air for another year, but turns out to be produced by one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

TNT’s upcoming series, Falling Skies, isn’t slated to premiere until next summer, but with a name like Steven Spielberg credited as an executive producer, it’s easy to understand why the buzz is beginning so early, and the creative forces behind the show are  eager to elicite curiosity in potential viewers. Expectations are sure to be high for the gritty, post-apocalyptic survival tale of a community of Massachusetts residents who band together after an alien invasion wipes out most of the human population. DreamWorks Television is producing the ambitious series, starring ER vet Noah Wyle and Terminator Salvation’s Moon Bloodgood as a history professor and pediatrician, respectively, who help form a civilian resistance against the intruding invaders in an attempt to save what’s left of the human race. The pilot kicks off six months after a scourge of extraterrestrials attack Earth and annihilate the world’s military infrastructure and power grid, leaving the remaining members of humanity to plot their own defense strategy and implement instinctive survival tactics amidst the decimated rubble of modern society.

During Friday’s surprisingly modest press conference, Wyle, in particular, expressed unabashed confidence in the show’s potential and explained his initial skepticism toward the project. “After I hung up my lab coat [from ER], I thought I’d stay away from TV for a while,” Wyle admitted, understandably ready at the time for a new direction in his career after 15 seasons on the NBC drama. However, he said, reading the script for Falling Skies piqued the same sixth-sense feeling of future promise he felt when he first considered ER. Regarding his Falling Skies character, Tom Mason, Wyle said he “saw this vast arc ahead of him,” within a creatively challenging framework of a show that “should open itself to great storytelling,” all similar feelings he said he had when first introduced to his alter ego, Dr. John Carter.

While the backdrop for Falling Skies paints a heavy, War of the Worlds-esque science fiction influence, Wyle’s comments help illustrate executive producer and writer Mark Verheiden’s (Battlestar Galactica) point that the focus of the show lies within the “heart and humanity” of the survivors’ trials and tribulations. Even though the catastrophic event in Falling Skies that propels the human race toward extinction is an alien invasion, Wyle assured present reporters that “these aren’t morality tales cloaked in science fiction.” Rather, he likened the tone of Falling Skies to the 2006 film Children of Men, which painted a similar “post-apocalyptic landscape” in the aftermath of devastating ruin.

Indeed, Verheiden discussed how the themes of the first season will focus on human relationships in the wake of disaster rather than allow the show to devolve into a shallow creature-feature showcasing the aliens – not that we aren’t going to see them at all. In fact, Wyle declared viewers will catch regular peaks of the foreign critters, through the characters on the show facing their foes on a “daily” basis. “So far they’ve been CG,” Wyle said when asked about the aliens’ onscreen appearance. “But we’re building,” he added, saying animatronics and other methods of creating the vindictive visitors’ aesthetics will be applied in the future. As far as the specific intent behind their malevolent attack, Wyle and Bloodgood both pled the fifth, stating they had been “sworn to secrecy” about the aliens’ objective for targeting Earth so maliciously. Using Battlestar Galactica’s villanous Cylons and their ominous tagline as an allegory, Verheiden was coy about the subject, only opting to say that the aliens in Falling Skies do, indeed, “have a plan.”

Although Wyle has previously starred in TNT’s good-natured The Librarian series of TV movies (think Indiana Jones lite), the science fiction and action components of his resume are otherwise limited. Not so with Bloodgood, who has experience working within storylines so similar, one must wonder if Verheiden had also drawn inspiration for Falling Skies from the Terminator paradigm. “I will probably always be drawn to that genre,” she said, also citing her work in NBC’s sadly short-lived Journeyman as further preparation for Falling Skies. Despite references to rather bleak end-of-the-world narratives in television and film, Verheiden said, “thematically, each episode will contain some element of levity,” helping to break up the doomsday archetype. Between this and Wyle’s theory that his character’s former profession as a history teacher parallels the survivors’ journey as a new American Revolution, Verheiden says the message lying within the dark overtone of Falling Skies is designed to give the same thing to both the viewers and the characters: a sense of hope.

For more Poptimal coverage of Comic-Con 2010, click here.

Photos courtesy of TNT and IMDbPro