Sci Fi Universe's
retrospective on Space: Above and Beyond generated an enormous
amount of reader mail and interest in the now-cancelled show. Although Space involved an intergalactic war with bizarre alien race, the show's creators, Glen Morgan and James Wong, wanted to tell stories that weren't generic science fiction. Instead, Space was really a World War II movie disguised as a science fiction series.
Starring Morgan Weisser, Rodney Rowland and Kristen Cloke, Space was a grunt's perspective of war. It really didn't matter to the show's creators that the war took place in the future and was set against an extraterrestrial opponent. The episodes were less Star Trek and more Sands of Iwo Jima. This interesting hybrid may have disappointed a portion of the science fiction-loving audience, while another group, the more "mainstream" audience, may have been turned off by the show's sci-fi window dressing, leaving it a ratings orphan.
Still, it seems ironic that after Space's cancellation, Independence Day became a huge box-office bonanza for the same studio, and NASA's reporting of the possibility of life on Mars cause a wave of intergalactic-contact and warfare projects to spring up all over Hollywood.
Glen Morgan is disappointed in Space's cancellation, but never expected its performance to match his earlier series, The X-Files. "A show like that comes along once in a decade," he says. Now, Morgan and Wong have returned to The X-Files and will also contribute scripts to Millennium while preparing a new series for next year.
During the first season of The X-Files, where Morgan and Wong were working as co-executive producers, then-network president Lucy Salhany first approached them about doing a series like the one she had supervised at Paramount - a modest little success called Star Trek: The Next Generation. The concept was based on a Starfleet-like military academy. Morgan and Wong demurred, but liked the military angle. So they in turn pitched the idea of a war drama set in space.
Since its debut, Space struggled in its seven o'clock Sunday time slot. Still, demographics for the show were good, and it often outdrew other science fiction offerings, including both Star Trek series.
But perhaps the expense of making the series, combined with the overall anaemic ratings, led to the network's scuttling of several crucial end-of-season episodes which might have made the difference in a renewal.
While there have been rumours of Alien Nation-style movies being made, Morgan isn't optimistic. Others have found ways to compensate for their disappointment.
"It kills him. It hurts me," says Rodney Rowland, who played Cooper Hawkes. "You've just got to tell yourself, `I'm doing it for me.' Being a hit, the fame and the money, it doesn't mean anything in the long-run. It's how you felt, what you did, how hard it was and how much you were scared and how did you rise to the occasion and conquer that. That's what you want to come away with."
He pauses. "There's nothing to feel bad about here."
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