Behind the Scenes
Dark Skies 25th Anniversary
The cult-hit Dark Skies TV series had a subversive on-air storyline matched only by its off-air intrigue with real Men-in-Black.
Twenty-five years ago this fall, I was in Washington, D.C. producing the pilot of the NBC primetime television series Dark Skies. During some freezing November weather, my co-creator Brent Friedman and I watched director Tobe Hooper shoot key scenes from our pilot script, “The Awakening,” in front of the White House, Capitol Hill, and even the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
All of it was in service of a TV concept we’d cooked up the year before that said an extraterrestrial species known as the Hive planned to take the Earth away from humans by placing themselves into our populations before we could even recognize the danger.
The spin we put on that ball is that the series took place in the 1960s and every episode would twist actual history with legitimate UFO events, and we would use actual historical figures and name names.
Teasing our audience was not for us. We had zero interest in placing our characters on the outside looking in. Our opening scene was U-2 pilot Gary Powers encountering a massive UFO at 65,000 feet over the Soviet Union. We…
