There was already a show. It was called The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer space.
And it exploded!
A thought occurs; if the fictional adventures of the Galaxy Quest crew are used as a guide for the “real” problems of the Galaxy Quest actors… doesn’t that feel like the Brown Hornet segments on Fat Albert? My memories of this are less than fond.
Oh, no! Will this proposal survive Bryan Ekers’s disdain‽ And if so, how‽ Tune in next time, for another exciting post about GALAXY QUEST!
I think that Sigourney Weaver prefers acting on the stage. She probably ends up doing villains because it’s the only sort of film role where you get reasonably top billing but hardly have to spend any time on set.
A tweaked version of that would be that the Tim Allen character figures that he can produce a new show cheaply by using alien technology and locations, such that the actors all think that the things they’re encountering are fancy props and sets, but actually are the real thing. Set the actors out to solve real problems, across the universe, and they end up creating plots on their own, with no script. (Probably with the Producer and a couple aliens helping to guide them.)
A further tweak would be to allow the characters to get taken out in horrible, gruesome ways every once in a while (off screen), and have a revolving door cast of actors instead of a set cast.
Hey, now, I liked Galaxy Quest; this is just speculation on possible problems with adapting the premise to an ongoing series. I can see it working as a dramatic sci-fi series (as presumably the fictional Galaxy Quest was) that deadpan-spoofed Star Trek and other genre sources, and maybe the episodes can be split between the show-within-the-show and what the actors do “offstage”, but it’d take some clever writing to pull it off. On series like 30 Rock and Studio 60, we almost never actually see the show-within-the-show (and on the latter, the few glimpses we caught actually undercut the conceit that the show was some rich cultural touchstone that was being restored to former glory by Whitford and Perry, because frankly the material kinda sucked).
Personally, I’d like to see Galaxy Quest as an almost-entirely sci-fi adventure parody show, with only passing hints that it’s not “real”, i.e. we see a lot of Captain Peter Quincy Taggart, and only occasionally actor Jason Nesmith.
If there is going to be more “actor” stuff than “spaceship crew” stuff, I think I’d appreciate a lot of Fred Kwan, the actor (played by Tony Shalhoub) who was utterly unfazed by the Thermians.
Anyway, I’ll certainly give the show a shot, two or three episodes at least. It would have to be pretty damn awful for me to stop there.
So, what you’re saying is, due to the superior quality of the GALAXY QUEST movie, this proposal magically escaped from your ire, unharmed!
Maybe they could do a whole bunch of cross-over quasi-parodies. Like, maybe, running across a nine-mile-long mining ship with dangerously high radiation levels and a mutating race of ferrets in the hold, or a planet-eating ship shaped like a giant ladybug piloted by a dead guy and a lizard woman from the slightly-grey universe, or a family flying around in a saucer trying to figure out where they are. The possibilities are almost endless, but the parody fodder may not be sufficient for a weekly series.
Hey… hey hey.