By Grabthar’s hammer, by the Sons of Warvan, you shall be adapted for television! After a seeming failure to launch, Amazon’s Galaxy Quest TV series is spooling up their FTL engines to make the leap back into pre-production. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the TV show—based on the 1999 cult classic sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest—has hired actor, writer, and comedian Paul Scheer (The League, Veep) to take over as writer on the series from the original film’s writer, Robert Gordon. As the host of a podcast all about cult classic movies, How Did This Get Made?, Scheer seems uniquely well suited to carry on the spirit of the original film, and transform it into a longer, serialized story.
With an all-star ensemble cast including Sigourney Weaver, Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, Enrico Colantoni, and Justin Long, Galaxy Quest felt like a love letter to fandom, especially fans of Star Trek. It told the story of stars of a once-popular sci-fi series, who eke out a living from working Autograph Alley at comic-cons across the country, wh0 suddenly find themselves beamed aboard a real version of the ship from their show and embroiled in an intergalactic conflict that’s all too real.
First announced in 2015, Galaxy Quest has had a rocky road on its mission to become a TV show due to conflicting production schedules and unexpected tragedy. After Alan Rickman passed away in January 2016, Amazon halted plans to adapt the film to a TV series out of respect for their departed colleague. When Sam Rockwell appeared on the Nerdist Podcast last April, he broke the news to Chris Hardwick:
“They were gonna do a [Galaxy Quest] sequel on Amazon, and we were ready to sign up for it…and you know, Alan Rickman passed away and then Tim Allen wasn’t available. He has a show, and everybody’s schedule was all weird…It was gonna shoot like right now…And how do you fill that void of Alan Rickman? That’s a hard void to fill.”
With the recent cancellation of Tim Allen’s ABC sitcom Last Man Standing, it appears the star could now have availability for a new Galaxy Quest project. As for how they’ll address the absence of an icon like Rickman, only time and Paul Scheer will tell.
What do you want from a Galaxy Quest TV series? Let us know in the comments below!
Image: DreamWorks Pictures
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@DanCasey).
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