Paramount has been hard at work as of late attempting to get into the lucrative television business, mining their library for potential TV series’ based on popular movies they’ve released in the last 20 years. So far we’ve all heard about the ‘Minority Report’ series heading to Fox, the ‘School of Rock’ series going to Nickelodeon, a ‘Shooter’ series going to USA, and a ‘Shutter Island’ series slated for HBO, but it seems now they are moving forward to turn sci-fi cult-classic ‘Galaxy Quest‘ into a series.

In order to help bridge the gap between the film and the series, Paramount has attached the original writer for the movie, Robert Gordan, with original director Dean Parisot and original producer Mark Johnson (known nowadays for his work producing ‘Breaking Bad’) to return as executive producers. The real question is whether or not the franchise could work without the remarkable cast of the original movie, as the chemistry between Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, Daryl Mitchell, Enrico Colantoni, and Justin Long (‘Galaxy Quest’ was actually Long’s feature film debut) was impeccable. The wrong cast and the series will feel out-dated, unfunny, and truly sad.

For anyone not in the known, ‘Galaxy Quest’ was Paramount’s 1999 send-up of ‘Star Trek’ and the original cast of that show, showcasing an aging group of actors tormented by the fact that they haven’t been able to move beyond the science-fiction roles they had played decades earlier, especially Alan Rickman’s character, who started off his career as a stage actor. The group is beamed aboard a real spaceship by aliens who mistook their TV adventures as “historical records,” and the “crew” must work together to defeat the space-villain intent on destroying the aliens who built the spaceship. It is a cult-classic, its comedy mined from the tropes of classic science-fictions shows like ‘Star Trek,’ and all carried quite aptly by the great writing and brilliant cast.

What are your thoughts on ‘Galaxy Quest’ coming to television? Share your comments below!

Source: Deadline