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Is George R.R. Martin’s New HBO Project Secretly About Rod Serling?
Because he doesn’t have enough to do, what with finishing The Winds of Winter and publicly defending his public appearance schedule, George R.R. Martin is now linked to a brand new TV project, one that seems to be paying homage to the early days of television, and the light-hearted sci-fi yarns that captured the author’s imagination as a boy. In development with HBO, the prospective series is called Captain Cosmos. What really excites this genre fan are hints at what it really might be about: what if Martin is putting together a names-changed homage to the great Rod Serling?
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According the The Hollywood Reporter, the series will be about a, “young science fiction writer living in 1949 at the dawn of television.” But where is this idea coming from? Who else was a young television writer around 1949, one with an interest in the genre? The obvious answer is Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Before he launched the timeless anthology series (and became a household name) in 1959, Serling wrote for all-but-forgotten shows like Appointment With Adventure and Kraft Television Theatre. Serling also fought with corporate censorship throughout his career, which seems to align with news that Captain Cosmos deals with a writer, “penning stories no one else dared to write.”
Now, this isn’t to say Captain Cosmos will necessarily be a Serling biopic. There are certainly other candidates to base such a character upon—cantankerous genre legend Harlan Ellison also wrote for television in the early ’50s ’60s, notably for The Outer Limits. Likewise, Serling’s early Twilight Zone collaborator Richard Matheson could also be an inspiration. It’s also worth mentioning that both Ellison and Matheson were equally famous for writing for television and writing books, something that is rarely the case today. Plus, because Captain Cosmos sounds like it will deal with outer space, it’s perhaps relevant that both Matheson and Ellison wrote for the original Star Trek.
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Could Captain Cosmos end up being the Downton Abbey of sci-fi TV dramas, showing us a fictional representation of how our present genre culture came to be? It’s anyone’s guess at this point (well, save Martin’s, and he’s busy writing). In any case, The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t think the author will have to commit too much time to the series: for now, he’s overseeing it, but the show itself is being written by Micahel Cassutt, best known for SyFy’s Z Nation.
We’re all practiced hands at waiting around for George R.R. Martin to finish things, and it looks like his knack for turning out compelling serial stories with a fantastical spin isn’t going away any time soon. What will Captain Cosmos really be about? Only the future—and the past?—will tell.