Show Idea – The Starlost

Yes, this will be a remake of the CTV series from the Seventies. But unlike our other show ideas, this one is not in the public domain or under the protection of a Creative Commons license! So don’t start thinking you can run off and produce an episode of the series just like that. This show will require a negotiation phase with the series creator, Harlan Ellison, and whichever company hold the rights to the existing series.

When faced with the upcoming cataclysmic end of their world, the inhabitants of planet Earth build a giant space Ark, capable of preserving a sample of Earth’s population during their long journey towards a new home in another solar system. The Ark is subdivided into many pressure domes, each inhabited by a subset of Earth’s former population split along racial, geographical, political and religious lines.

Ark vessel art by Scamp
Ark vessel art by Scamp

A hundred years into the trip, the Ark itself suffers from a major “incident”. The great ship is crippled, its technical crew either dead or incapacitated, and the domes are sealed tight, effectively isolating the communities from one another.

Four hundred years and many generations later, the inhabitants of the Ark have forgotten about the world they live in, and are unaware of the final death blow that awaits them.

The Ark’s only hope of survival is a trio of young people from the community of Cypress Corners, a strict and highly religious farming community that has shun most forms of modern technology for generations. Can this unlikely group learn the truth about the world they live in and possibly save it before it’s too late?

The goal of this show is to allow Canadian expatriates from around the world to participate in the filming of a regular Canadian television series. Despite the CTV’s catastrophic rendition of the series back in the seventies, the basic premise of the storyline is still very solid even to this day. And the setting of the series, a ship composed of multiple domes each one representing a different culture from the planet Earth, makes it possible to shoot each episode in a different part of the world, faithfully recreating the world of the Ark for the television series.

We can bring back The Starlost to Canadian television and do it right. Vancouver, B.C. has already been the home of many major science fiction franchises for many years now, clearly demonstrating that Canadians can now produce high quality science fiction television shows, filled with high quality special effects, yet still fulfilling the need for an extremely strong and highly engaging storyline.

If this ambitious Canadian project sees the light of day, we’ll rescue The Starlost from its Canadian made catastrophe, correct the mistakes of the past, and possibly create some great Canadian science fiction television the world might eagerly want to watch.

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