If you're not familiar with the name Kenneth Johnson, we're almost certain you've seen his work on TV. Johnson's imprint on the television landscape is so deep that TV viewers are still feeling the effects of his work today, whether they know it or not. Back in the '80s, Johnson created such landmark shows as The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, V, and Alien Nation, one of the most social conscious sci-fi shows to ever hit the airwaves. Although the Alien Nation TV series only lasted for one season in 1989, despite garnering a huge cult following in the process, the series managed to spawn five TV movies - Dark Horizon (1994), Body and Soul (1995), Millennium (1996), The Enemy Within (1996), and The Udara Legacy (1997). Now, just over a decade since the last Alien Nation movie aired, FOX is releasing the Alien Nation: Ultimate Movie Collection on DVD as a three disc set, which hits store shelves on April 15, 2008 and features all five TV movies complete with commentaries, interviews, and many more retrospective featurettes.

Leading up to the "Ultimate" Alien Nation DVD release, The Deadbolt was only too happy to travel back in time with legendary Alien Nation TV creator Kenneth Johnson to learn how the series got off the ground, why it only lasted one season, and how the five movies came to be so many years later.

As a bonus, Johnson also filled us in on the status of his long-developed resurrection of V, which might be hitting the big screen at some point in the future, and why the amazingly cool and popular '70s series Cliffhangers never came back to air. If you happened to catch it back in the day, Cliffhangers featured one of the best Dracula characters ever with a white fanged Michael Nouri.

THE DEADBOLT: Given all of the crazy stuff that's going on in the world, Alien Nation seems more relevant today than it ever was.

KENNETH JOHNSON: No, you don’t think so - immigration is not an issue anymore [laughs]. I think you’re absolutely right. I’ve been back to Fox a couple of times saying, "Hey guys, wouldn’t it make sense to bring this back to life?" And they don’t quite get it. But then again, I’ve always been a little bit ahead of the curve one way or another.

THE DEADBOLT: Especially with this show.

JOHNSON: And again, you’re right. It absolutely is something that’s in the headlines every day, something that’s a contentious issue, and something that is a flash point from every side of the fence. I was in Florida over the weekend doing a book signing for my V The Second Generation novel and a friend of mine who lives in Florida was telling me that when she flew into Miami the last time, it doesn’t say "Welcome to Miami" now, it says "Buenvenidos". So it’s like, "Wait a minute. Am I going back to America or what’s up here?" On the one hand, of course, we are a nation of immigrants. But on the other hand, it’s a hot button issue. No question about it.

THE DEADBOLT: Back in the late '80s, Alien Nation was a really unique entity in how it tackled so many real world issues. What was the overall approach to the show's social commentary before the series went to air?

JOHNSON: Well, what happened was: my friend Harris Cattleman was head of 20th Century Fox Television at the time, an old friend and we had done some work together before, and he called me and said, "Hey Kenny, we got this movie coming out called Alien Nation that we think there could be a series in." And as soon as I heard the title I thought, "Oh no! Harris, please, I don’t want to do any more alien stuff." I mean, you create the Bionic Woman, you create The Incredible Hulk and then you do V and pretty soon you’re the sci-fi guy who does alien stuff. I just didn’t really want to do it and I only looked at the movie out of courtesy to an old friend. I wasn’t that enamored with the movie. I felt it had a great premise that sort of went awry and sort of turned. I always characterize it as sort of Miami Vice with Coneheads and I just felt that they had missed this golden opportunity and I wasn’t really that interested. Then I got to this one scene where the alien cop waved goodbye to his family as he went off to work one morning and there was only one shot of his family in the movie, this little alien woman and her two little alien kids. When I saw that it was like a bell went off and I said, "Wait a minute, I see what this is." I went back to Fox and said, "You think you’ve got Lethal Weapon with aliens." And they said, "Yeah, yeah" I said, "No. What you’ve got is In the Heat of the Night. Let me do a piece about what it’s like to be the world’s newest minority, to be the latest people off of the bus from below the border, the dregs of society, to be the ones everybody looks down on and has a bad word about. That’s a show that’s not only interesting to me, but it’s a show that’s got legs. It’s a show that’s got the ability to just go on and on." And they asked, "Do you really think so?" And I said, "Not only do I think so, I’m wild to do it."

And that comes from the fact that I was raised in a very bigoted, very anti-Semitic household. I was an only child and there was not a day that went by - and these were not white trash parents that I had. They were middle-class parents who thought they were upper-middle-class - that I did not hear some racial slur, epithet, some hate word about some other group other than them, and it was something I instinctively knew was not right. In South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein wrote what is still one of my all time favorite songs, which is "You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you’re six or seven or eight to hate all the people your relatives hate." And I had friends that were Jewish. I had friends that were black and friends of other colors and they were like me. So when I had the opportunity to do a piece that was about intolerance, prejudice, racial profiling, and racial prejudice, and do it under the guise of this other venue, I thought, "Boy, I can really do something with this."

And I’ll tell you real quick - one of my favorite fan letters came from a black doctor in Detroit who said, "When I saw your show was coming on the air, I really got angry. Why are they doing another show about stupid aliens? Why don’t they do a show about the black experience? And then I watched your show and realized it was about the black experience." It was great because we got awards from the Asian American community and the Hispanic American community. The gay and lesbian community thought it was about them. The New York Board of Jewish Education, which services about 600 schools in the New York/New Jersey area, asked us to please send them every episode of the show so that they could use it as a teaching aid in their classroom. All of us who were involved with the show thought, "Cool," because not only were we doing a show that was fun and funny, it was a thoughtful kind of piece that was just so incredibly rewarding to do, other than just sort of clap trap television. And we tried to make every episode be about something. We wouldn’t sit down and try to plot out a show. We’d say, "What’s the theme of the show? Let’s say, maybe the theme is greed or obsession, or lust?" And then we would see how that theme would resonate through the whole thing.

THE DEADBOLT: How difficult was it to get all of the cast back together for the TV movies?

JOHNSON: Are you kidding? When we heard the series was canceled after only one full season, it was like hearing that an 18-year-old friend had been killed in an auto accident. And I remember when Peter Chernin called me, he was then head of Fox TV and now he’s the CEO of Fox International, and he said that Barry Diller really wanted to go with comedies and he thought he could get bigger ratings with comedies. Not only did they not get bigger ratings, but they went so far in the tank that they had to give back Monday night to the affiliate stations, because Fox network had nothing to put on. Peter got up in front of the Television Critics Association the next year and publicly apologized, saying, "Canceling Alien Nation was the biggest mistake we ever made." And I was on the phone that afternoon going, "So, Peter?" And it took me two years of beating my head against the wall to get him to say, "Okay, we’ll let you make another Alien Nation TV movie. How about that?" And everybody came running back, the whole cast, and a lot of the crew who were not working on something else. It was a gift from the gods. We all came back together. And if I called them all right now and said, "Hey, I got another Alien Nation movie," or "We’re going to go back and do the series again, you wanna come?", they’d be like, "Get out of the way, where do I sign up?"

On the DVD there’s a - what I called a family gathering. The whole cast has stayed together, stayed friends and close, and every couple of years Suzie, my wife, and I have a little barbeque in the summer and we all just get back together. And I asked them last year, "Would you guys mind if I ran a video camera?" So I got them together in our living room, the whole cast, and I had four video cameras rolling and we just put it together and it’s just them talking about the fun we had doing a show that was not only so many laughs all of the time and the joy we had working together, but was also about something that had some underlying substance and societal value to it. I mean, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Back in Time with Alien Nation Creator Kenneth Johnson Page 2