Sigourney Weaver still very gung-ho for that Galaxy Quest TV show

By William Hughes | March 6, 2021 | 8:39pm

TV Features Sigourney Weaver

Sigourney Weaver still very gung-ho for that Galaxy Quest TV show

Photo: Dreamworks

In the tumultuous and confusing clusterfuckery of life, it can be nice to have a few constants to cling to. The sun rising in the east, the steady grumbling about how things were better “in the past,” the assertion that Galaxy Quest will someday be more than just a fondly remembered one-off Star Trek parody film. Such was the eternal cycle indulged in by star Sigourney Weaver this week, as she told Collider that plans for a Galaxy Quest sequel TV series, once thought scuppered by the death of Alan Rickman, are once more on the move.

Weaver was talking about her upcoming film My Salinger Year, when the topic of the crew of the NSEA Protector once again came up, as it so frequently does among people for whom one Galaxy Quest was somehow not enough. Weaver noted that plans for a Galaxy Quest sequel film were scotched years ago after screenwriter Bob Gordon was irritated by the way Dreamworks reshaped the original film into a children’s movie, but that hopes for a TV continuation are still going strong:

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The movie was so witty, and when they released it, DreamWorks cut a lot of the wittiest scenes because they wanted to put it out as a children’s movie at Christmas. I think that was disappointing for everybody, so he decided not to let them have the second one. However, it was about four years ago, Bob and (producer) Mark Johnson and the whole group, started to develop a series. We lost the wonderful Alan [Rickman] unexpectedly, so that was put in mothballs, but I think they are finally now reviving it.

All of which is still, obviously, pretty vague, but what is Galaxy Quest about, if not the vague hope that the future will hold brave new promise for old and, frankly, exhausted ideas? Weaver is, at least, effusive, even as she acknowledges what losing Rickman might mean for the chemistry of the show’s cast:

It will be the story of the old ancient Galaxy Questers being brought into this series with another young cast. I haven’t read them, so I don’t know the details, but I think that everyone in Galaxy Quest would love to participate because it was such a wonderful experience for us. How they will find someone to play Alan’s part, don’t know, but I think that they have a very good idea of who to do it. He’s irreplaceable, eternally. I think there may be good news on that front, but I haven’t heard about it in these six months, so when it’s gonna happen, I’m not sure.

It’s not 100 percent clear whether Weaver is talking about the same Galaxy Quest TV series that Paul Scheer has been working on for a few years now, and which was supposedly heading toward Amazon circa 2015 before the project reportedly got put on the back-burner.