NYCC 2019: Syfy Premieres Resident Alien Pilot Starring Alan Tudyk

Alan Tudyk premiered the pilot of Resident Alien at New York Comic Con this year.

Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, the absolutely hilarious pilot follows the mysterious mission on Earth of an alien, played by Tudyk, who inadvertently crash-lands in the snowy Colorado mountains. With his ship damaged, he makes his way to a lonely lakeside cabin occupied by a vacationing Doctor Harry Vanderspeigle, also played by Tudyk! The alien promptly murders the doctor and assumes his identity. The scene is reminiscent of something out of a horror movie, but punctuated by a smooth and relaxing melody playing in the background. It perfectly sums up the tone of the pilot and presumably the rest of the series. As a comedy-drama, we follow the alien around this small Colorado town in a sort of fish-out-of-water story, and like the comic, it’s filled to the brim with observational humor revolving around an out-of-this-world alien mingling with the local townsfolk.

Resident Alien’s writer and producer Chris Sheridan was also on hand during the panel to discuss the process of adapting the comic to the screen. In the comic, the reader saw the alien for who he was all the time, but for TV, explained Sheridan, Harry will be in his human form in the majority of scenes, since both time and money were limiting factors. (It’s quite expensive to have someone wear that facial prosthetic all the time, and it took four hours in the makeup chair to put it on!)

Sheridan also had to create additional backstories for the characters and the town. This first season is ten episodes long and roughly based on the story arc of the first two issues of the comic, so a lot of world building and character building had to occur on top of what’s present in the source material:

“I tried to create a full, three-dimensional backstory for all the characters.…Ideally, I figured if I could pull the alien out of the story and create storylines for all these characters and a storyline for the town and tried to create a world, that even if the alien didn’t show up, this could be a show unto itself. And then, adding a layer of the alien on top of it is a great way to explore the different pieces of humanity.”

Resident Alien premieres on Syfy in 2020.