Angel and Dollhouse’s Tim Minear is working on a new version of Alien Nation for the rebranded Syfy channel.

The original 1988 movie was penned by Farscape’s Rockne S. O’Bannon, with Kenneth Johnson developing the concept for a Fox TV series which Minear describes as science fiction “mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary." The TV series spawned various TV movies.

"It's absolute perfect timing for this type of show," 20th Century Fox TV’s Chris Carlisle told Variety. "They're looking for more grounded sci-fi and close-ended episodes, and at the heart of Alien Nation, it's a cop movie. It's grounded. And it has a tremendous amount of dramatic possibilities and humour."

The latest version of the show will be set in the 2020s, 20 years after an alien ship filled with banished slaves crashlands on Earth. They start to assimilate into Earth society, not always successfully.

Minear notes that “TV as a whole has evolved, and you can explore issues and go deeper with subject matter than you ever could before. On cable, you can play with ambiguity. This is a place I want to be."