How ‘Childhood’s End’ Finally Made It to TV
They descend from the skies, these huge motherships hovering over the big cities and major metropolitan hot spots of our planet. The aliens piloting these massive UFOs — call them Overlords — initially prefer to remain unseen; eventually, a representative named Karellen will make his presence known. They promise to help humanity achieve a new step in our evolution. Only their platitudes of peace and intergalactic prosperity doesn’t jibe with something we’ve seen earlier: A flash-forward of a lone figure sitting on a couch in the middle of a desolate wasteland, remembering when the Overlords arrived decades earlier. “I’m the last human being,” he declares to a floating orb.
Welcome to Childhood’s End, a three-episode event series that begins tonight on Syfy and finally brings Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated 1953 novel — the Rosetta stone for the “first contact” narratives that have become a staple of modern science fiction — to the screen after decades of false starts. In fact, the author himself tried to adapt his seminal close-encounters work back in the 1960s with Stanley Kubrick, but the pair were unable to secure the rights. (Instead, they decided to work on a story based loosely on Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel”; they’d christen the project 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
Over the years, everyone from folk singer Richie Havens to Boys Don’t Cry filmmaker Kimberly Pierce expressed interest in turning this tale of space invaders with a hidden agenda into a movie; eventually, the rights to the book moved from Sony’s film division to television, at which point the Syfy network jumped at the prospect to make it. Matthew Graham, a writer best known for the British show Life on Mars, signed on, as did producers Akiva Goldsman and Michael De Luca. “I read the book when I was 13 or 14 years old, and it grabbed my imagination on a visceral level,” says Graham. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was always with me, but it was certainly a book I remembered.”
Why did it take so long for Childhood’s End to get made? For starters, there were difficulties in plausibly depicting the novel’s flights of thematic abstraction. As Games of Thrones’ Charles Dance (who plays Karellen) puts it, “We’ve now made so many advancements with CGI and the whole digital thing that the camera can tell the most blatant lies. We can do anything now.” (This is certainly true in regards to Karellen’s appearance, which involved over four hours of applying prosthetics to Dance each day.)
And many of the novel’s themes would, to put it lightly, set off the warning bells for most mainstream studio executives. Syfy’s executive vice-president for original programming Bill McGoldrick puts it bluntly: “It never got made because people were scared of the ending.” (Without spoiling the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the book, it’s enough to remember that the first character proclaims himself to be the last human in existence.) “But modern television is all about breaking those rules.”
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