TV Gets Scarier This Fall With ‘Dark Skies’ Nbc Gives A Paranoid Twist To Recent History With Its New Sci-Fi Series

I always knew the aliens were coming. I just didn’t expect them to land in the middle of the Olympics.

That’s where NBC has been sneakily selling its coming Saturday night science-fiction series “Dark Skies” - smack in the middle of its splashy Olympics coverage, when our adrenalin-pumped attention is super high.

As if we need further proof that NBC’s monster promotion machine is killer-clever - remember “The Beast” ride? - the Peacock Network tied “Dark Skies” to blockbuster alien flick “Independence Day.” On video, we see a grisly looking dead alien. On audio, we hear “On Independence Day, we thought we saved the world. We were wrong.”

And that’s an underestimation of alien powers that “Dark Skies” aims to set right - since its producers know we’re all pretty ‘90s-style fearful of all those unseen forces swirling around out there to begin with.

“We’re reinterpreting history - from a very paranoid point of view,” James Parriott, executive producer of “Dark Skies,” said recently at an NBC party. “Dark Skies” was created by Bryce Zabel and Brent V. Friedman. It premieres Sept. 21.

” ‘Dark Skies’ is alternate history,” Parriott said. “It’s the whole conspiracy thing that grew up out of the Roswell cover-up (of alleged UFO sightings in New Mexico) in 1947 into the ‘60s and the Kennedy assassination.

The ‘60s saw the emergence of the baby boomers as a force and the emergence of counterculture and counterknowledge. All of us (producers) who work on the show are boomers, so we said, ‘OK, let’s start with the Kennedy assassination and relive what comes afterward.’ “

Styled as a thriller, ‘60s-set “Dark Skies” stars Eric Close (“Sisters”) as John Loengard, an idealistic congressional aide on the rise, and Megan Ward (“Party of Five”) as his career-minded domestic partner Kimberly Sayers. Their future seems blissful until John stumbles on evidence of an alien touchdown in the United States. Soon rogue FBI-like group Majestic-12, headed by Col. Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh), takes John under its wing, recruiting him to root out humans whose brains have been invaded by aliens known as the Hive.

And we mean really invaded. Shown close-up, these alien ganglions, as Parriott calls them, look like miniature “Beasts,” squidlike, unsquishable and deadly.

Naturally, good guy John wants to spill all this alien intelligence to the American public.

Naturally, secretive Majestic-12 is not pleased. So John and Kimberly go on the lam. Our perky lovers want to tell President Kennedy all - but JFK is felled in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

So John and Kimberly keep on running - right through a paranoid flip-side of the ‘60s.

“The first episode (after the two-hour pilot Sept. 21) will brush against the Kennedy funeral, as sort of a completion of the pilot,” Parriott said.

“The next episode happens a couple of months later. It’s about the space program. The Ranger was a moon probe they sent up to send back TV pictures from the moon to show where landing sites were for the coming Apollo program. The first six missions, six in a row, failed. But did they really fail, or were we not aware of what was being photographed? Could there have been men on the first Saturn rocket that was tested? Was there a ‘dark’ space program that we weren’t aware of?

“And our third episode plays with a real event. It deals with the Beatles’ arrival in New York and (their appearance on) the Ed Sullivan broadcast. Something may have happened there.”

With stranger things to come. If “Dark Skies” lasts four seasons - a tall order in this cut-throat, prime-time environment - it will bring its characters into present time in 1999, Zabel said here recently.

Our alien addiction is deep - just ask anyone in a supermarket checkout line. Yet despite our tabloid lust for aliens, despite our alien abductions and alien autopsies, our “X-Files” obsession, our crush on those cute inept aliens on NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Dark Skies” and, to a lesser extent, UPN’s killer-virus drama “The Burning Zone,” are the only new seriously sci-fi shows on network TV this fall.

Several new series have picked up the paranoid spirit of “The X-Files.” They’ve tried to copy its psychology but not its paranormalcy. Airing at 8 p.m. Saturdays, “Dark Skies” is the launchpad for Paranoia Night on NBC. “Skies” is followed at 9 by fantasy chase show “The Pretender,” about a rogue supergenius (Michael T. Weiss) who practices any profession he chooses as he runs from a secret Majestic-12-like mind research group.

At 10 Saturdays, “The Profiler” tracks forensic psychologist Sam Waters (Ally Walker) who gets in criminal minds just like ex-FBI agent Frank Black (Lance Henriksen). Black tracks serial killers by getting inside their emotions on the new Fox series “Millennium,” from “X-Files” creator Chris Carter (9 p.m. Fridays).

And more brain strain. CBS tweaks our craniums with “Moloney” (9 p.m. Thursdays), starring Peter Strauss as an LAPD psychiatrist who catches perps by peeking in their minds. Plus Fox returns last season’s time-traveling “Sliders” at 8 p.m. Fridays.

With Paranoid Saturday, NBC hopes to tease older viewers from CBS’s aging “Dr. Quinn”/”Walker, Texas Ranger” lineup and lure younger viewers from Fox, rental videos or simply not staying home.