What is the strangest series you have ever heard of? It could be a bizarre concept like Heil Honey, I’m Home!, a sitcom where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun turn out to be alive and are neighbors of a Jewish couple. Or perhaps My Mother, The Car, in which a woman, upon dying, becomes her son’s family car, a bit like Knight Rider but with humor (and love). Or, for example, have you heard of Manimal, the series about a professor who could turn into animals to help the police solve crimes? Well, all of them pale in comparison to the oddity we are going to show you today.
They come from another world!
The list of bizarre shows is inevitable, from Mr. Smith, where a talking orangutan becomes a genius, to Teen Angel, where a teenager dies from eating a hamburger that was six months expired and returns to Earth as an angel to protect his best friend. Well, none of them will seem as strange as Aliens in the Family, a comedy that seems to have come from the intergalactic television of Rick and Morty and that, despite everything, had an incredible team behind it that could have turned it into a cult series if it had premiered today.
True to its title, Aliens in the Family introduces us to a single father, Doug, who meets a single mother, Cookie. What’s the problem? She is an alien with alien children, and now they have to try to live a normal life on Earth after their parents get married. Of course, the family consists of one boy and two human teenagers and three aliens who have no choice but to coexist. It may seem bizarre and you might wonder who greenlit such nonsense… until you see who is behind it.
Aliens in the Family is a creation of Jim Henson’s company, which was sold in a package along with the more interesting Muppets Tonight, which did last two seasons. What was the problem? That ABC wanted the Muppets, but not this other strange series, and they didn’t give it a chance: after airing two episodes in its TGIF format (a couple of hours of comedy every Friday night), they quickly pulled it and let it die four months later on Saturday mornings. And of course, it was never heard from again.
That said, those who saw it at the time as adults now remember it as little more than an aberration and a senselessness as original as it was failed, with humor similar to that of Family Guy (which would start three years later). In fact, although it wasn’t being sought, even at that time it was compared to Martian Chronicles, which had premiered just a couple of months earlier and did indeed go down in history (with no less than 6 seasons and 139 episodes).
The series would be absolutely lost if it weren’t for the work of the Internet Archive, which has it well preserved. And it has hardly been re-aired, there is no physical edition and streaming services seem to have the slightest interest in it. Who knows? What if we are looking at a cult series? Spoiler: it only takes watching a couple of videos to realize that, no matter how much Jim Henson is behind it, this is a horror.