Sci-Fi Storm

Syfy is getting into late-night original animation programming with Alien News Desk, a series that will cover up-to-the-minute news and commentary about the universe’s most baffling species – the inscrutable Humans of Planet Earth.

The 12-episode series will feature the voices of Will Forte and Saturday Night Live‘s Heidi Gardner, and is executive produced by the Saturday Night Live team of Lorne Michaels, Erik Kenward and Dennis McNicholas, Joel Kuwahara and Scott Greenberg from Bento Box Entertainment, and Andrew Singer from Broadway Video. Scott Gairdner (Moonbeam City) and Broadway Video’s Katy Jenson will co-executive produce. McNicholas will act as showrunner.

“The expansion into original animation and late night marks the next step in the evolution of SYFY, and builds on the successes we’ve had bringing new, younger viewers to the network,” said Chris McCumber, President, Entertainment Networks for NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. “Tackling news, politics and entertainment from the perspective of alien newscasters completely puzzled by our human ways, Alien News Desk is a fun, irreverent way to put a uniquely ‘SYFY’ spin on the late night current affairs genre.”

This reminds me of then-Sci-Fi Channel’s first ever original scripted program, FTL Newsfeed, a 30-60 second “micro short” series of news segments broadcast from 150 years in the future, and ran for four years and over a thousand episodes from 1992-1996, with the launch of the channel. To my knowledge, however, it has never been rebroadcast or released in any medium since then.

The Magicians return on January 23rd, and we…can’t…wait…