Overview
The show primarily followed the lives of three orphaned children: Mel, Josh and Lucy Barker, and their new foster parents Brian and Sophie Johnson. The children soon discover that the Johnsons are in fact aliens from the planet Valux, who crash-landed on Earth when Brian tampered with the controls of their spaceship. As shown by the opening credits, the house they live in is actually a morphed form of their spaceship. They also have the ability to morph into other people. Brian and Sophie start out with a very limited and muddled knowledge of life on Earth, and the children must do their best to help them acclimatise. No one outside the family must ever learn that they are aliens, or they will be taken away for scientific testing, and the Barkers will lose another set of parents. The humour in the programme is surreal and sometimes gently subversive. Whilst being a children's show, it occasionally makes reference to rather mature matters, high-brow culture, and complex scientific thinking; and because of this it has also gained a considerable following of older viewers outside of its intended age range.
Read more about this topic: My Parents Are Aliens