Will Resident Alien Get A Season 3 At Syfy?
In the hit SyFy series "Resident Alien," the town of Patience, Colorado is being overrun by aliens. At first, it was just Harry (Alan Tudyk), an extraterrestrial on a mission who assumed the identity of a town doctor after crash landing on earth. But the series is halfway through its second season by now, and it's becoming a lot harder for Harry to maintain his disguise thanks to the presence of a newly-hatched alien baby and the impending arrival of another species from outer space.
"Resident Alien" ended on a cliffhanger in March, with Harry getting shot just after the baby told him that he's meant to be earth's protector rather than its killer. Luckily, the series will get the chance to continue the story, as it's actually only halfway through its second season: the eight-episode first half is over, but there are still eight more episodes to come beginning in August. And there's even more where that came from.
"Resident Alien" was renewed this week ahead of its midseason premiere, meaning it's already slated to get a third season sometime in the future. According to Deadline, the next season will include 12 episodes, so Harry, Asta (Sara Tomko), Max (Judah Prehn), and all the residents of Patience have plenty of time to avert the potential upcoming apocalypse. A trailer for the second half of season two shows "LOST" actor Terry O'Quinn appearing as an alien tracker who Harry's really determined to stab in the neck with a fork, while other ongoing plots include mayor Ben's (Levi Fiehler) plans to build a ski resort in the town and sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) and deputy Liv's (Elizabeth Bowen) attempts to figure out what the heck is going on.
Harry the alien is sticking around
The combination of small-town drama and sci-fi comedy has made "Resident Alien" a success for SyFy network, with Deadline reporting that it's among the top 15 most-watched cable shows with 2.3 million average viewers. Last year, the series won Best Cable Comedy Series at the Hollywood Critics Association Television Awards, and Tudyk in particular has earned praise for his enthusiastically bizarre performance as a kooky alien pretending to be a human man who learned most of his affectations from "Law & Order" reruns.
The series has already branched off a bit from its source material, the 2012 Dark Horse comic series of the same name by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse. Like the show, the "Resident Alien" comics involve some mystery-solving, some shadowy men in black, and characters like Asta and Dan (Gary Farmer). But the comics feature more standalone mysteries while the series is by now focused mostly on saving the world from total alien domination. "Humanity is a virus, but there are also good humans here," Harry says in the trailer for the new episodes, which is a total 180 from his position when he first arrived. Luckily, with another 20 episodes still to come between seasons two and three, it seems like the town's increasingly comfortable resident alien will be sticking around a while.
"Resident Alien" returns on SyFy and Peacock on August 10, 2022.