So, I said I'd talk about some of the cancelled series I started watching. One of these was The Tomorrow People, which I think calls for a little background.
The Tomorrow People first materialised in the 1970s. Created by producer/writer Roger Price, it featured a group of young people (mostly early teens) who had special powers, due to their being part of the next stage of human evolution; Homo superior, and an underground base with a supercomputer called TIM because... reasons. Their powers manifested (broke out) at puberty, and were primarily telepathy, teleportation (called 'jaunting') and telekinesis when the budget allowed, although various other powers were displayed throughout the series, as the plot demanded, some of them quite consistently (one character had a particular affinity with machines), but others at random (in one episode a character brought a dead man back to life, but healing abilities were erratic.)
The series itself was also rather uneven. Early episodes were focused on saving the world plots, but the series had a strong moral message; along with their powers, Tomorrow People had an intrinsic inability to cause harm, and they also struggled to fit into normal society, their secret identity standing in for the almost universal teenage experience of feeling isolated and misunderstood. Later episodes used time travel as a device and revealed a utopian future, in which all of humanity were Homo superior and lived at peace in the Galactic Federation, an interstellar alliance of TPs which was introduced as a current concern in the second series.
Later seasons saw things get sillier. There were still some serious episodes and topics, like the story of a young Russian TP being manipulated by the KGB who was ultimately killed by her handlers, but there was also the one where Peter Davidson wore a bubble-perm wig and tried to kidnap the leader of the Tomorrow People to be his sister's mate, not to mention 'Hitler's Last Secret', which accidentally put forward the lesson that Nazism is wrong because Hitler was a shapeshifting alien, rather than because it is a noxious ideology founded on hate and prejudice. A general trend to use actors for good aliens and costumes for bad also gave an inadvertent air of racism, which sat ill alongside plots in which Caribbean dictators tried to use alien tech to take over the world and Chinese cults practiced child sacrifice.
The series eventually kind of unravelled and ended. Things went quiet.
The first reboot of The Tomorrow People came in the 1990s. Kristian Schmidt off of Neighbours was the stunt casting as 'Adam Newman' (not layering the symbolism there at all), although the future big name was Naomie Harris, and guest stars included Christopher Lee and William Hootkins. There was a lot less about evolution and no Galactic Federation, and overall the characters stumbled into stuff rather than seeking it out as in the original.
Their base was a spaceship that 'called' them somehow, but otherwise the only aliens were the pods in the episode 'The Living Stones'. 'The Ramesses Connection' actually suggested a more mystical universe with a battle between forces of evil (represented by Christopher Lee as an ancient Egyptian) and forces of good (who danced around in plastic raincoats, and not in a sexy way).
The 1990s Tomorrow People was kind of weird, but then so was the original.
Noted producers of Doctor Who audio plays, Big Finish were the next to throw their hats into the ring, beginning with The New Gods in 2001. They followed the continuity - such as it was - of the original series, with a nod to the existence of the 1990s variation, and had original TP John (Nicholas Young) as their central character, along with the original Tomorrow People supercomputer, TIM.
The overall theme of the audio plays seemed to be the nightmarish onset of entropy. Faced by enemy after enemy, the Tomorrow People saw their relationships collapse, their families die, their unassailable moral stance destroyed as TPs were manipulated into killing, and ultimately the entire Galactic Federation crumble under the onslaught of the very first enemy from the original series, the shapeshifting android Jedekiah.
This series ended with the Federation destroyed and Earth invaded, and the planned future episodes - some partly-completed - vanished after an unsuccessful license renewal in 2007, which also saw all the past episodes withdrawn from sale.
Which brings us to the recently-cancelled attempted US remake. In the attempt to find an approach that none of the previous versions had mined, they went with sexy tweenagers with perfect hair. Three character names were recycled - TPs John and Stephen, and Jedekiah, who is recast as Stephen's resentful Sap (Homo sapiens) uncle - and the term 'Tomorrow People' limited to the Utopian movement fostered by Stephen's father and then by John and Cara, the third point on the inevitable love triangle (which in this case is actual at least two, maybe three, interlocking triangles; despite being a whiny git, Stephen has no fewer than three hotties trying to get in his pants, while all the boys go gaga for Cara, despite the presence of many, many attractive women who are more emotionally available, more overtly affectionate and less in a relationship.) The Tomorrow People had the underground base and TIM, and were opposed by Ultra, Jedekiah's shadowy telepath-hunting (and also employing) agency.
By the end of the first and only series, several of the telepaths (the generic term, although they retain the 'three Ts' of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation) have been surgically altered to remove the prime barrier which prevents them killing (although they can use brutal levels of sub-lethal force with abandon), and Stephen is able to stop and occasionally rewind time.
The Tomorrow People has been through a lot of variations. The original was sombre, yet hopeful, but descended into silliness; allegedly as a result of executive meddling as ITV couldn't sell a serious children's SF series and wanted more wacky antics. The remake had some ambitious ideas, but was plagued by budgetary limitations. The audio plays were honestly a little too grimdark, although I would have been interested to see where they went in series 6 and 7.
And then the 2013 remake came along, with its generic sexy tween shenanigans and slick psychic combat. Its sin, I think, was in trying too hard to be accepted, which as the successor to a series which was basically about the teenage experience of not fitting in, is kind of ironic.
 |
| One of the original Tomorrow People was black. In 1976, this was pretty huge. |
The series itself was also rather uneven. Early episodes were focused on saving the world plots, but the series had a strong moral message; along with their powers, Tomorrow People had an intrinsic inability to cause harm, and they also struggled to fit into normal society, their secret identity standing in for the almost universal teenage experience of feeling isolated and misunderstood. Later episodes used time travel as a device and revealed a utopian future, in which all of humanity were Homo superior and lived at peace in the Galactic Federation, an interstellar alliance of TPs which was introduced as a current concern in the second series.
Later seasons saw things get sillier. There were still some serious episodes and topics, like the story of a young Russian TP being manipulated by the KGB who was ultimately killed by her handlers, but there was also the one where Peter Davidson wore a bubble-perm wig and tried to kidnap the leader of the Tomorrow People to be his sister's mate, not to mention 'Hitler's Last Secret', which accidentally put forward the lesson that Nazism is wrong because Hitler was a shapeshifting alien, rather than because it is a noxious ideology founded on hate and prejudice. A general trend to use actors for good aliens and costumes for bad also gave an inadvertent air of racism, which sat ill alongside plots in which Caribbean dictators tried to use alien tech to take over the world and Chinese cults practiced child sacrifice.
The series eventually kind of unravelled and ended. Things went quiet.
 |
| The one in the middle is future Moneypenny Naomi Harris, and remembering this show made it even more uncomfortable than it was already watching her be raped and murdered on stage in Frankenstein. |
Their base was a spaceship that 'called' them somehow, but otherwise the only aliens were the pods in the episode 'The Living Stones'. 'The Ramesses Connection' actually suggested a more mystical universe with a battle between forces of evil (represented by Christopher Lee as an ancient Egyptian) and forces of good (who danced around in plastic raincoats, and not in a sexy way).
The 1990s Tomorrow People was kind of weird, but then so was the original.
 |
| Older and darker. |
The overall theme of the audio plays seemed to be the nightmarish onset of entropy. Faced by enemy after enemy, the Tomorrow People saw their relationships collapse, their families die, their unassailable moral stance destroyed as TPs were manipulated into killing, and ultimately the entire Galactic Federation crumble under the onslaught of the very first enemy from the original series, the shapeshifting android Jedekiah.
This series ended with the Federation destroyed and Earth invaded, and the planned future episodes - some partly-completed - vanished after an unsuccessful license renewal in 2007, which also saw all the past episodes withdrawn from sale.
 |
| The Tomorrow People, sponsored by sassy hair-care products. No, seriously; it really was. |
By the end of the first and only series, several of the telepaths (the generic term, although they retain the 'three Ts' of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation) have been surgically altered to remove the prime barrier which prevents them killing (although they can use brutal levels of sub-lethal force with abandon), and Stephen is able to stop and occasionally rewind time.
The Tomorrow People has been through a lot of variations. The original was sombre, yet hopeful, but descended into silliness; allegedly as a result of executive meddling as ITV couldn't sell a serious children's SF series and wanted more wacky antics. The remake had some ambitious ideas, but was plagued by budgetary limitations. The audio plays were honestly a little too grimdark, although I would have been interested to see where they went in series 6 and 7.
And then the 2013 remake came along, with its generic sexy tween shenanigans and slick psychic combat. Its sin, I think, was in trying too hard to be accepted, which as the successor to a series which was basically about the teenage experience of not fitting in, is kind of ironic.
No comments:
Post a Comment