Astronaut Molly Woods (Halle Berry) just returned from a 13-month solo mission in space, but she didn’t return alone.
She’s pregnant.
Somebody’s got some ’splainin’ to do!
With
its Oscar-winning-actress-alone-in-outer-space set-up, it would be easy
to dismiss “Extant” (9 p.m. Wednesday, KLAS-TV) as a “Gravity” rip-off.
But that’s where the similarities begin and end.
Executive-produced
by Steven Spielberg, the 13-episode drama takes place in a futuristic
world with driverless cars, high-tech trash cubes and an android son
created by Molly’s husband (Goran Visnjic) through a cutting-edge
process known as humanichs.
Much of Wednesday’s premiere is
devoted to setting up this new society, much of which manages to feel
both inventive and somewhat familiar, so it’s hard to tell what future
episodes will cover.
But, unlike “Under the Dome,” last summer’s
series CBS promised would come with a resolution but dragged out for
another disappointing season, I’d look forward to more years of
“Extant.”
Here’s a look:
Steven Spielberg's Extant was inspired by Doctor Who
The creator of Extant, a new TV drama starring Halle Berry has revealed that
Doctor Who was a big influence on his writing process.
It’s safe to say that Extant has blockbuster credentials. Oscar-winning
actress Halle Berry is appearing in her first TV role since 1991, filmmaking
legend Steven Spielberg is on executive producing duties and it has all the
high-budget space trappings of Bafta smash-hit Gravity. So it’s a little
surprising that a show this big and glossy (and American) takes inspiration
from a rather humbler production on British shores.
“While I was writing the pilot, because I'm a big Doctor Who fan, I had a
Post-it note on the corner of my monitor that said, ‘WWSMD; what would
Steven Moffat do?’” said creator and executive producer Mickey Fisher. “The
answer was always, 'He would just write it better’, so I kind of just kept
trying to do that.”
“The advice you always give to writers is, you know, ‘Write the thing that you
want to watch.’ And so I really just set out to write the show that I would
want to see and it's kind of a reflection of a lot of things that I was
watching at the time, or about things that I was really interested in.”
He added: [Doctor Who] has such a great heart at the centre of it, and I think
that was really important to me. It's not a dystopian world. We want
[Extant] to be something that people could relate to, this story about this
family that people would appreciate.”
Fisher has a background in writing for theatre and independent cinema, but
after reaching the final for a TV pilot competition last spring with Extant
his career has accelerated to the point where he’s working with Spielberg,
arguably the world’s most famous director. As Fisher put it, “I went from
the basement to the penthouse in a matter of weeks.”
His debut series comes with an intriguing premise, following Molly Woods
(Berry), an astronaut who returns home after a long space mission keen to
reconnect with her family. However, all is not as it seems, and Molly’s
experiences in space will ultimately change all of human history.
It’s a high-profile show, but anyone hoping to catch the show on a major
channel may be disappointed. In the UK, Extant is airing solely on the
Video-On-Demand (VOD) service Amazon Prime (in the US it will run on the CBS
network).
The decision follows the lead of fellow VOD service Netflix, whose
award-winning original programmes include House of Cards and Orange is the
New Black, and had sole broadcasting rights for later series of Breaking Bad
in the UK.
Perhaps hoping to follow the success of those drama series, it’s clear the
creators have big ideas about where their series is headed. “It becomes a
story about what is human and about how we're connected to each other, and
to the title of the show, Extant,” says Fisher.
But, he notes, in a world of space travel, conspiracies and robots there will
be plenty of excitement, too. “You want it to be emotionally compelling. But
you also want it to be a great roller coaster ride.”
The first episode of Extant will be available on Amazon Prime Instant Video
from 9.00pm on Thursday July 10.
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An astronaut (Berry) returns home from a year long solo mission in space. She tries to reconnect with her husband and son in their everyday life. Her experiences in space and home lead to events that ultimately will change the course of human history.- Written by Anonymous
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After spending a year in space, where she lived and conducted strange experiments, astronaut Molly Watts (Halle Berry) tries to resume a normal life with her family consisting of her husband, John, a gifted scientist, and Ethan, their son, a boy like no other. He is not their biological son as Molly is infertile. Ethan was designed by his father as the first prototype of a future line of "Humanichs", "human robots". But the return of Molly will have dramatic consequences for the entire planet and the fate of mankind ... - Written by Anonymous
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