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A few weeks ago, Mark Bernardin at io9 asked: “Why doesn’t Syfy or AMC or HBO roll the dice and make a Starship Troopers miniseries, one with all the production value and attention to detail of The Pacific or Battlestar Galactica?” Replace Syfy with Showtime and substitute “Starship Troopers miniseries” with “a cinematic science-fiction show” and you have yourself a real question. While I love Battlestar Galactica and am leaning toward loving Caprica, Syfy is not exactly reliable in terms of content (e.g. WWE) or quality (e.g. Sharktopus). Why haven’t HBO, Showtime, or AMC made a serious SF show? Maybe they just aren’t getting enough good pitches. Allow me to propose a fix for the situation.

HBO, Showtime, and AMC represent the best of cinematic TV. All three have been making bank and winning oodles of awards with a very simple formula that is extremely difficult to pull off: take a genre (Gangsters, Western, Horror), complicate the cliches, focus on the rule breakers, and tell a story that is unresolved at the end of every episode. In addition to simply having a bigger budget and more liberty with violence, sex, and language, shows on HBO, Showtime, and AMC are almost always better written, filmed, and acted than anything else on television. SF as a genre is no more limiting than period dramas (The Tudors, Mad Men, Rome), which also require extensive costumes, elaborate sets, and an extra level of commitment from the actors. All SF does is move the timeline forward instead of backward. There is, however, one binding flaw of great SF currently on television. All the best SF shows are set in space. A savvy exec might say, “We don’t need another Star Trek or Battlestar or Stargate — where is the human drama? Furthermore, where is the chance to talk about our society, our cities, our life? Space is too alien.” Not to mention how Goody Two-Shoes most of the protagonists are. I mean, Star Trek is a utopia. Where is the grit?

 

For SF to earn its place among shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men, it needs to get dark. Thus, I present three options. The networks may battle over them as they see fit.

Deus Ex Machina

Core Idea: Rogue agent in cyberpunk world trying to uncover multi-layer conspiracy.
Think of it as: The Prisoner plus The Bourne Trilogy plus Blade Runner starring a hard-boiled cyborg heroine.
Big Question: How many broken laws, hearts, and bones does it take to get to the truth?

Video games make terrible movies, but they might make spectacular television. This logic holds doubly true when the game being adapted is Deus Ex, perhaps one of (if not the) best video games of all time. A huge part of that reputation comes from the game’s story. Half cyberpunk opus, half paranoid thriller, the plot of Deus Ex is like the X-Files meets Gravity’s Rainbow meets Rule By Secrecy meets Neuromancer. By the end of the story, you’re still not sure who, if anyone, was “good” and you’re almost more in the dark than when you started. If there was ever a plot that could hope to rival the WTF OMG moments of Lost, it’s definitely Deus Ex. Compound the absurdly complex plot with nearly every group of conspirators on the books (FEMA, MJ12, Templars, Illuminati, Freemasons) and a cyberpunk society where A.I.s roam the internet, illicit nanotech and biomods are sold behind bars and death by a police mech’s laser is as likely as your next meal, and you have one hell of a back drop for whatever story you might want to tell.

Deus Ex would follow Alex Denton, a black ops UN security force agent. Denton is an army unto herself — nano-augmented and given carte blanche to maintain order by the UN, she is brutal, efficient, and all but unstoppable. The year is approximately 2045 and the UN has become a functioning world government, attempting to keep order as society decays thanks to sporadic outbreaks of the Gray Plague (imagine HIV mixed with ebola and leprosy). Elite and stoic, Denton’s only real enjoyment of life come from putting down juntas that aren’t UN puppets, catching hackers with their pants down, and the above-the-law privileges her job provides. When dealing with a potential bio-bomb terrorist, Denton unwittingly discovers that not only is the Gray Plague a manufactured and controlled weapon, her fellow UN agent Gunther Hermann has been the trigger man for every outbreak. Disturbed but ultimately taking a “not-my-problem” view of the situation, Denton returns to the UNSF offices but is met with bullets and EMP attacks. Mid-battle, a voice crackles over her data-link. Referring to itself as Daedalus, it helps her escape by disabling security systems, protecting her wired mind from hacks and directing her to a safe house. Her privileges, luxuries, and power gone, Denton becomes a rogue agent in a lawless world. But she has old connections, and one man, Tracer Tong, might have the information she needs to get revenge. Denton’s personal vendetta and the shadow governments trying to stamp her out of existence force her to make her way through the labyrinth of the wired underworld looking for Tracer Tong and answers to questions she doesn’t know.

Transmetropolitan

Core Idea: The City, a late 21st Century city filled with technology, filth, and corruption, through the eyes of Spider Jerusalem, the only journalist who can bare to look at it.

Think of it as: The Wire and Treme in 2099 as narrated by Hunter S. Thompson.

Big Question: Time, technology, and life all advance, but is it progress?

Just as it baffles me that there are a grand total of zero video game adaptations for television, the near complete absence of comic book adaptions for the boob tube is difficult to comprehend. Comics are, by nature, serial. Yet, despite the similarity between the genres, studios insist on compressing rich, complex comic book story arcs into an hour and a half, then crossing their fingers and hoping for a sequel. Instead, let’s make one into a miniseries. Transmet and the filthy misadventures of gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem is the perfect place to start. Patrick Stewart’s production company was interested in this property and Stewart himself wrote an introduction to Vol. 5 Lonely City, but thus far nothing has happened. Let’s grease the gears, shall we?

Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis, follows Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson for the 22nd Century. After five years living in paranoid isolation on a mountain, Spider’s book contracts are due. To write, he needs his fingers around the seedy, black, artificial heart of the city so that he can squeeze the tar and plaque from its arteries onto the blank pages in front of him. Spider’s column is “I Hate It Here” and its popularity is directly related to Spider’s level of misanthropy. He’s the only writer angry enough to seek the truth and insane enough to print it. His bodyguard, Channon, and his assistant, Yelena, both as debauched and deranged as their surly boss, help Spider get into trouble and right back out of it. The show, like the comic, would follow Spider’s return to the city, starting out in a disgusting apartment in the worst part of town writing about the filth and decay around him. In the comic, Spider is promoted to a new apartment as his popularity grows. The formula for the show is built right in: at the beginning of each season, Spider moves into a new apartment. In step with his rise through society, Spider’s gaze moves from the filth and corruption in the gutters of the City up to the filth and corruption of the city’s and country’s highest offices.

Cyborgs, hybrids, uploaded nano-clouds, bowel disruptors, neuro-implants, cryonics, A.I., vat-grown meat, and a smorgasbord of transhumanist tech bursts from the background in every panel of the comic and sits at the heart of every story line. The show would be no different. Transmet would be an anthropological window into the City, a thriving transhuman society, the same way The Wire and Treme artfully let us into the soul of Baltimore and New Orleans.

Transmetropolitan is not a dystopia, nor a utopia, nor a caricature or a sugar-coating. It is, in my mind, the fullest portrayal of what a futuristic society might actually be like — as broken and magnificent as the one in which we currently live. And with Patrick Stewart at the helm, how could it miss?

Mass Effect

Core Idea: Humanity has just survived the Contact War with Citadel Space. We’ve earned the right to live, now we need to earn respect, trust, and power.

Think of it as: How humans went from Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek.

Big Question: What makes humanity special? What would we add to galactic civilization?

Alright, so I couldn’t very well propose a trio of SF television without getting at least one good space-based pitch in there. Again, I turn to a beloved video game with a vast SF universe — this time Mass Effect. In Mass Effect, humans are the low dogs on the totem pole, trying to earn respect among the more advanced races in Citadel Space. Facing prejudice, turf wars, and general derision wherever they go, humans have to justify themselves at every step.

But the human perspective wouldn’t be the only side we would be shown. The license to touch on uncomfortable issues would allow Mass Effect to go where Babylon 5 and Star Trek never really managed to: show the entry, rise, and constant negotiation of humanity’s position within the ranks of galactic civilization and the necessary sacrifices. The central premise of Mass Effect’s universe is that humans are late to the intergalactic game, but early in relative terms of their progress as a single civilization. Unlike the other galactic species, humans discovered intergalactic technology before achieving genetic homogeneity. Because of what is seen as extreme physical and genetic diversity and rudimentary technology, humans are considered a young, under-evolved race. Having proved its worth in the First Contact war with the Turians, humans are allowed into Citadel Space, but remain a ridiculed and dismissed race. In short, Mass Effect could take the questions of humanity’s worth raised by Q in Star Trek and examine them, without the camp, in rich, season-long story arcs: a perfect fit for spacefaring SF on cinematic television.

In addition to showing the human side of the struggle, Mass Effect could give us real, fully-drawn alien protagonists. Just as Battlestar Galactica let us see who the Cylons were and how they thought, Mass Effect would show the audience why the Citadel Council doesn’t welcome our species with open arms. Whole story arcs could follow how the Asari Council Envoy to Humanity both attempts to understand humans and to explain them to the Council; or the adventures of a Turian military commander forced by the council to train humans in Citadel military law. Instead of merely being told the Citadel is made up of multiple races and then, somehow when we finally see it, the members are almost entirely humanoid (I’m looking at you, Federation of Planets and Galactic Republic), there could be as many aliens as there should be. With the budget of one of the big time cable channels, space opera could finally have the makeup and SFX budget to pull off a galactic government populated primarily by non-humanoids. The diverse crew of the original games, both in terms of race and species, would give show creators precedent to cast few, if any human characters with white male actors. What better way for HBO or AMC to make their SF mark?

Three great SF shows, three awesome cable channels that pull off excellent cinematic TV, and a wide open market in which to execute them. Caprica, let alone Syfy, shouldn’t be carrying the weight of using SF to explore the human condition on the small screen. AMC and Showtime, you want to bring HBO down a peg or two? Get the nerds on board. Looking for your next hit series, HBO? Don’t be afraid of the future.