The Strangerers
The Strangerers is a British television comedy-drama science fiction series written by Rob Grant and was broadcast on Sky One between 15 February and 11 April 2000.
A single series was made with a total of nine episodes. The show ended on a cliffhanger but despite this it ended up being cancelled and a second series was never produced. It has not been released on DVD, nor repeated since its original run.
Background
The show was conceived as Sky One's first original comedy series, developed in the wake of the channel losing the broadcasting rights to Friends, which had moved to Channel 4. Sky invested £300,000 per episode and granted the creators full creative autonomy. Creator and writer Rob Grant initially pitched the show to the BBC, but they declined, having recently acquired the rights to broadcast the similar American sci-fi sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun.Plot
The story centres on two alien agents, Cadet Flynn and Pseudo-Cadet Niven. They are incredibly advanced and evolved vegetables on a fact finding mission to Earth, where they take on human form. Their supervisor is accidentally decapitated shortly after arrival, leaving the cadets to fend for themselves. Through the course of the series the aliens discover the intricacies of basic needs, like the eating ritual, the sleeping ritual and how to purchase things, usually doing so in their own idiosyncratic manner.Their exact whereabouts on Earth is something of a mystery. The society in which they find themselves bears some resemblance to both Britain and America, and there are hints that a totalitarian government is in charge. There are also street gangs parodying those in A Clockwork Orange. Two agents and their apparently psychopathic commander try to capture the aliens. The aliens repeatedly escape, but not without suffering occasional injuries themselves.