Development
Originally conceived by Frank Lupo in 1987 with the title Invader, NBC ordered a four-hour mini-series for broadcast on May 8, 1988 with a budget of $7.5 million. Shooting took 41 days on locations in Los Angeles and Australia.
Producers John Ashley and Frank Lupo decided to alter the program's concept to cope with the comparatively smaller budget of the weekly series. "Things definitely change fast when a mini-series or movie becomes a weekly series," said Ashley. "It's great when you've got four hours, $7.5 million and the talents of Rick Baker and John Dykstra to play around with. But what happens when you're suddenly cut to a million per episode budget, don't have the talents of Baker or Dykstra and have to take the mini-series concept to the next level while turning out an hour a week? What happens is that you make changes."
It was decided to focus the show on the relationship between Jack and Ta'Ra, on Ta'Ra's special abilities and to reject a "monster of the week" approach. Ta'Ra, who was later revealed to be from a distant planet called Zeton, chooses to stay on Earth posing as Jack's cousin. The show strayed from its science-fiction origins with supernatural stories featuring telekinesis and telepathy.
"In the early episodes, we felt we had pulled our reins in too far. We discovered that many people were expecting an alien every week, because of the mini-series, and were being disappointed," said Ashley in an interview with Starlog during filming of the eighth episode. "What we were giving them just wasn't working. So, we took a step back and looked at what elements made the mini-series work and made the later episodes along the lines of where the show should have gone. We went back to basics. We brought the creature from the mini-series back for a two-part episode, gave Ta'Ra some additional powers and made the show more science fictional in nature."
The changes were not enough to draw audience members back, and Something Is Out There was finally cancelled.
Read more about this topic: Something Is Out There
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