misbegotten
SOMETHING IS OUT THERE was originally a two-part, four hour mini-series that aired on NBC in May 1988. Joe Cortese played LA cop Jack Breslin, who was investigating a series of bizarre murders, in which the victims had been ripped apart in seconds by a lightning-fast, super-strong killer, who was still able to remove internal organs with surgical precision. He eventually discovered the culprit was a shape-changing alien criminal, who was stealing the organs in order to study the inner-workings of the human body and perfect it's mimicry of homo sapiens (in it's natural form, the creature resembled a large insect). Breslin tracked down the monster with help from a female humanoid alien called Ta'ra (Maryam d'Ado), the sole surviving crew member of the prison ship from which the shapeshifter had escaped.The mini-series was a massive ratings hit, and NBC commissioned a weekly series to debut that Fall - less than five months away. I remember reading an interview in STARLOG magazine with the series' producer Frank Lupo, in which he explained that he decided not to proceed with a 'monster of the week' approach in the regular series, in the belief that the audience would soon tire of such a format. Although he didn't say so in the interview, it's also entirely possible that with such a short lead-in time, Lupo thought that the quantity of special effects needed for a monster-heavy show would take up too much time and money. He may also have been mindful of the fate of the quintessential 'monster hunter' show KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, which had lasted only a single season a decade earlier (Lupo was certainly aware of KOLCHAK - he also produced the 1988 horror series WEREWOLF in which a key recurring character was named Janos Skorzeny, after the vampire villain in the original NIGHT STALKER TV movie).The SOMETHING IS OUT THERE mini-series had ended with Ta'ra stranded on Earth, and the premise of the weekly series had her sharing Jack's apartment, posing as his cousin, and aiding him in investigating strange and unusual crimes. The only other regular character (also carried over from the mini-series) was Jack's immediate superior Victor, played by Gregory Sierra, who knew about Ta'ra's true origins but had agreed to keep the secret. He turned a blind eye to Ta'ra's unofficial assistance of Jack, and actually assigned Breslin cases where he thought Ta'ra's alien knowledge & abilities (such as superhuman agility and being able to read minds) would come in useful.Despite the self-imposed veto regarding monsters, the weekly series still contained plenty of familiar sci-fi and horror standards. Jack and Ta'ra tackled cases involving UFO sightings, psychic abilities, secret genetic experiments, a demonic ventriloquist's dummy, government conspiracies, Men in Black, bodysnatchers, good/bad twins, alien artifacts, and a serial killer who turned his victims into waxwork exhibits.To their credit, the scriptwriters mostly avoided the temptation to have Ta'ra reveal a useful & convenient superpower every time she and Jack found themselves in a dangerous situation. That said, there is a very silly scene in the episode 'A Hearse Of A Different Colour' where Ta'ra is kidnapped and thrown into a closet. Ripping an electrical cable from the wall and holding it to her head, she is somehow able to transmit her thoughts so they are displayed on a video screen at a location where she knows Breslin is waiting for her (!!). Ratings for the series started out strong, but rapidly fell away. In the STARLOG interview, Lupo said that he soon realised that monsters were precisely what fans of the mini-series wanted to see. In response, eighth episode 'The Keeper' took the show in a new direction, with Jack and Ta'ra not only battling against the vanguard of an alien invasion, but also including a subplot designed to bring about the return of the shapeshifter from the mini-series.Sadly, American audiences never got to see 'The Keeper', as NBC cancelled the show and pulled it from the schedules with only six episodes having been aired. The entire run of eight episodes was subsequently screened in the US in reruns on channels such as Sci-Fi. In the UK, Sky (now Sky One) showed both the mini-series and the series in late 1991. Apart from an edited version of the mini-series (shortened to 163 minutes) that was released on VHS, at the time of writing SOMETHING IS OUT THERE has never been made available in any format.Amongst the various shows that belong to the 'paranormal investigator/monster hunter' sub-genre (numerous examples jumped on the X-FILES bandwagon in the Nineties and early Noughties), by common consent KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER remains the defining classic against which all others are judged. In my humble opinion, SOMETHING IS OUT THERE is the only series that comes close to capturing the spirit and atmosphere of KOLCHAK. In it's own way, it's as much a revival of KOLCHAK as the official NIGHT STALKER remake of 2005 was.
David Lane
I remember seeing the pilot of this short-lived series as a 13-year old and thinking it was the scariest thing I'd ever seen made-for-tv. Later I saw one of the other 7 episodes or so on the Sci-fi channel, and was entertained by the macabre and sinister tone of it. Granted, my tastes in films and television have markedly changed since then, so who knows how I'd view it now. It's difficult to find though and, for some reason,was a complete flop with the general public.My guess is that the storylines of each episode (involving supernatural evil) were much better than the storyline of the whole series - that being a male human cop teaming with an alien cop in beautiful female human form. I guess this angle didn't grasp TV's audience, and therefore overshadowed some good sci-fi/horror entertainment.
