Earlier this week, RHI Entertainment release a trailer for their new SyFy channel miniseries, Riverworld, staring Tahmoh Penikett (Dollhouse), Laura Vandervoort (Smallville), Mark Deklin (Life on Mars), Peter Wingfield (Highlander) and Alan Cumming (X-Men 2).
Riverworld focuses on a journalist named Matt (Penikett) and his fiancée Jessie (Vandervoort), who were both killed in an explosion, but soon awake to find themselves on some strange planet covered with rivers. The planet is populated by everyone from earth who has died. They soon team up with Mark Twain and other resurrected souls to travel upstream in an attempt to find what who or what is behind this.
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This will mark the second time SyFy has attempted to develop a project based on the Riverworld books by Philip José Farmer. In 2003 SyFy (then Sci-Fi) aired a feature-length backdoor series pilot for Riverworld. The airing didn’t garner a large enough audience to continue production on a the series. Hopefully, they’ll do better this time around.
I’ve been hot and cold with SyFy and their miniseries “events.” With last year’s Tin Men failing to impress and SyFy ditching any efforts to produce a series from the amazing 2006 miniseries/backdoor pilot The Lost Room, I’ve thrown my arms up in the air.
Check out the trailer below.
Sure, the trailer looks great, the story sounds interesting and for the first time, I don’t mind Tahmoh Penikett’s acting style. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get my hopes up. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times and I’ll cry while singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. You wouldn’t want to see that happen, now would you?
What do you think of the trailer? Will you be tuning in next year? What did you think of Tin Man, The Lost Room? Do SyFy miniseries events always deliver?
Riverworld will air on SyFy in 2010
Source: YouTube [via: Sci Fi Wire]
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12 Comments
I knew about the film they did a few years ago,
But I didnt know about this new effort .
I might check this out .
But I thought Flash Gordon was going to be good too!
Tin Man was really Good, looking forward to Alice later this year. Riverworld has already been done earlier, hopefully this one isn’t as confusing and boring as the last.
This looks pretty good…I’ll check it out. Actually, anything that shows Tahmoh Penikett half naked is alright with me and this probably means that he will finally be free of Dollhouse if Riverworld does indeed go to series. That would be great because Dollhouse kinda blows and the ratings are even worse than last year so, yay! we will still be able to watch Tahmoh Penikett on television. Now, if they could just have Grace Park do a guest appearance….
At least they emerge from the water with their clothes on this time! This looks better than the 2003 version. Just have to wait and see.
@ T
Confusing? What was confusing?
There were people plucked out of their time and placed in this new land.Maybe the confusion comes from the lack of why they got there,which probably would’ve been explained if they would have made it into a regular series.I was actually really looking forward to seeing it as a series,but I guess the execs had different plans.
I’m probably not going to even bother with this one mainly because I don’t get SyFy through my cable provider.That,and the same thing is probably going to happen with this one that happened to the last one.
Looks interesting. I’ll probably check it out.
Tin Man had real potential and I was really looking forward to watching it but when I started it just felt cobbled together. Some good bits but overall a disappointment.
I’ll definitely giver Riverworld a chance though and as I’ve never read the books I might be pleasantly surprised, or I’ll be joining in the chorus – ” Turn around bright eyes…”
I don’t get SyFy or I’d watch it just to see Peter Wingfield.
A correction to a statement in the article:
In 2003 SyFy (then Sci-Fi) aired a feature-length backdoor series pilot for Riverworld. The airing didn’t garner a large enough audience to continue production on a the series.
This is not true. After the pilot was filmed in 2001/2002, sci-fi decided to kill the series long before it ever aired. The pilot sat on the shelf for over a year before they decided to air it in March 2003. Then…
SCI FI Sets Ratings Record: the scifi channel had it’s best ratings quarter ever. Thanks in part to Riverworld; “The two-hour original film Riverworld averaged a 2.2 rating, exceeding the time period average by 86 percent and becoming the most-watched original movie SCI FI has ever aired on a Saturday night (2.74 million viewers).
Which explains why they are willing to try it again. Hopefully they will stick with it and make a series out of it this time.
I LOVED the books, but the last Riverworld series WAS pretty gay, with bad acting and really bad writing. I’ve hoped for like 20 years that they’d make a good movie or series based on the books! Maybe they’ll get it right this time!
it was unbelievable and the actors were great-especially the guy who played Mark Twain” and
of course Peter Wingfield. I will definitely keep my eyes open for this one on Syfy.
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