Previewing The Man Who Fell to Earth

We see shows move from time to time, mostly because of cancelations and other places willing to continue it. But I do not remember a time when two shows got traded like professional sports players.  But that happened in the case of Halo and The Man Who Fell to Earth.  Okay, it was less of a trade and more like a cooperate overlord ordering a more high profile project to attack subscribers to their newly rebranded streaming serves and was nice to send back a different IP back in return.

 

Halo premiered last on Paramount+ to a mixed bag; it was met with a resounding meh by critics and the loudest voices on the internet but it was the most watched premiere in the history of the streamer.   Now it is time for the other half of the trade, The Man Who Fell to Earth to premiere and it is, well, not any worse than Halo, but I am not sure if it is much better.

 

The show is based on a 1963 Walter Tevis book of the same name that has already has been turned into a movie starring David Bowie released in 1976 (full disclosure notice: I have not read the book or read the movie; though I thought I had seen a remake, but it turns out that I was thinking of the similarly titled movie with a similar premise, The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves).  Bill Nighly plays Thomas Jerome Newton; the same character as Bowie, but it not the main character of the new show.  The Man Who Fell to Earth does honor David Bowie by naming each episode in the first season after one his songs.

 

The show does follow a new man who falls to Earth decades after the original played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.  He can spit gold, has four stomachs, and will vomit copious amounts of water if exposed to even small doses of radiation.  He quickly finds Naomie Harris a brilliant scientist who now works cleaning up stuff to support her daughter and sick father to reluctant help him.

 

Watching Ejiofor try to be human, it is hard not to think of Alan Tudyk on Resident Alien, another extraterrestrial who is not great at talking like a normal person and is unable to pick up on the most obvious social.  Though, to be fair, Tudyk did get a head start by watching months of Law and Order reruns before interacting with anyone else.  This show does tease that Ejiofor will eventually learn to act more human with an opening scene where he is doing his best tech billionaire speech.  But the first couple episodes are just Ejiofor being the most extreme case of fish out of water.

 

The show does pick up with the introduction of the Flood siblings (Rob Delaney and Sonya Cassidy) in the third episode.  They are the contentious heirs of a tech company that has ties to Newton.  Jimmi Simpson also shows up as a CIA agent who is on the hunt for both aliens.  While The Man Who Fell to Earth does have the slight edge in the trade for Halo, at the end of the day, this feels like a lackluster trade of a fifth starter for a catcher between two teams barely in the playoff hunt.

 

The Man Who Fell to Earth airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.