Bryan Fuller working on adaptation of The Lotus Caves for Syfy

By Sean O'Neal | August 12, 2010 | 5:27pm

Aux Features TV

After seeing Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and Wonderfalls all meet their untimely ends, television won’t have creator Bryan Fuller to kick around anymore. Or rather, network and pay-cable won’t, as this time Fuller is working on a project for Syfy, so it’s highly likely he’ll be allowed to crank out seasons indefinitely just as long as he clears the ratings bar set by Warehouse 13, Eureka, et al. Fuller’s latest exercise sounds like a cross between his latter-day fantasy and his earlier sci-fi work on shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager: It’s an adaptation of 1969 novel The Lotus Caves by John Christopher (a pen name of Samuel Youd), which is set within a dome-enclosed colony on the moon in the year 2068, where two teenage boys stumble upon the seemingly idyllic underground domain of a “super-intelligent plant-like being,” whose insidious exercise in mind control teaches them the importance of free will. Or they smoke it and get crazy high. Definitely one of those two things.

The story had been previously optioned for a feature-film version due this year or the next, but that seems to have stalled. Given its penchant for developing shows as miniseries or movies first, that’s likely the route Syfy will take here, with Fuller reportedly already working on a script with his Pushing Daisies collaborator Jim Grey. In other news, Syfy is still a stupid name for a network, particularly if it's just going to keep commissioning sci-fi series like this.