RESIDENT ALIEN: Creator Chris Sheridan gives the scoop on Season 3

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 24th, 2024 / 05:06 PM

Judah Prehn as Max Hawthorne, Alan Tudyk as Alien Harry in RESIDENT ALIEN - Season 3 - "Here Comes My Baby" | ©2024 Syfy/James Dittiger

Season 3 of RESIDENT ALIEN airs Wednesday nights on Syfy and streams on Peacock, with previous seasons available on Netflix. Extraterrestrial Harry (Alan Tudyk) has just discovered that the love of his life, Blue Avian alien Heather (Edi Patterson), has given his DNA to the hostile Grey aliens. Harry is miserable and angry, and maybe not as focused as his human friend Asta (Sara Tomko) and his ally General Wright (Linda Hamilton) would like him to be on the immediate problem of saving the Earth from the Greys.

Chris Sheridan developed RESIDENT ALIEN for television based on the graphic novels by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse. He has been executive producer and showrunner on the TV series since it began. His previous credits include FAMILY GUY, YES DEAR, and TITUS.

When NBC/Universal has a press day for the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California, Sheridan steps into the garden for a one-on-one discussion.

RESIDENT ALIEN creator Chris Sheridan at the NBCUniversal Winter Press Tour - 2024 | ©2024 Syfy/Todd Williamson

In Season 1, Harry started out insisting that people on his planet have no emotions, but he later talks about feeling sad that his mate had died. Sheridan says this isn’t a paradox. “That was in [Season 1] Episode 4. He already had a consciousness by Episode 4 of that first season that he was starting to feel emotions. I think he started putting it together in Episode 3, when he was talking about fear. By the time we got to 4, he does remember he misses his wife. It’s not a feeling he felt at the time, but now he’s in a human body, he has a different feeling towards it, and Asta says to him, ‘That’s really sad,’ and he says, ‘It is now.’ That line was supposed to mean, ‘It wasn’t then. But now that I’m in this body, and I can feel things, now it’s sad, when it never was before.’ So, without saying a lot, he’s experiencing the feeling of this new sadness that was never in him before.”

Sheridan affirms that he believes extraterrestrials are real, and that the U.S. government’s recent tacit acknowledgement of UFOs suggests confirmation. Has this affected how he writes RESIDENT ALIEN at all, or is the show completely on its own trajectory?

Sheridan considers his reply. “Even though people might not believe in aliens, they know what’s out there, and there are a lot of people that do believe in aliens. And for the people that do believe, I want it to feel authentic to them. So, for instance, when we were coming up with the spaceships and what the UFOs looked like, there was a lot of push from the design standpoint to try to do something different and special, but I wanted it to look like what people say UFOs look like, so we designed more of a flying saucer-type thing. And actually, the one we used, I took off of an actual experiencer. [Dark Horse Comics company founder] Mike Richardson had an experience, and I designed our UFO off of exactly how he said it looked when he was a kid. So, I try to be as authentic as possible to what people who’ve experienced it [have described].”

RESIDENT ALIEN - Season 3 key art | ©2024 Syfy

How does Sheridan work with the writers’ room on structuring the seasons? Do they chart how much time they’re spending on each character and/or subplot?

“Yeah. What we used to do is have index cards on the wall of all the episodes, and you get a sense of the time you’re spending.” The COVID pandemic required the creative team to work remotely. “It’s different in Zoom. We actually have a program we use for that in Zoom, where everyone can go on the computer and see where we’re at on the cards. But mostly, it’s just having an awareness, and you go through the scripts, and you just have a feeling as a writer that we’ve been away from this story too long, or we’re playing this story too often, and you can sort of pick and choose what you want to use. You get a better sense once you shoot it, once you’re in editing, what plays well. Sometimes things don’t play well, because we’re sort of bored with it, we’ve seen it too much. You can pull back on some of those scenes. So, it’s an ongoing process of trying to balance all of it.”

Alan Tudyk as Alien Harry in RESIDENT ALIEN - Season 3 - "Here Comes My Baby" | ©2024 Syfy/James Dittiger

Given that RESIDENT ALIEN frequently introduces new and different aliens, spacecraft, tech and more, how fun or difficult is creating those?

“Coming up with different aliens, different ships, different alien weapons is not difficult. It’s actually a lot of fun. What’s difficult is finding a way to pay for it. So, for instance, this year, we have a really big alien build with Edi Patterson’s character Heather, who plays the Blue Avian. That is a very complex, expensive build for prosthetics, the outfit she wears. You have a certain budget you have to work with, so if we’re going to do any alien outside of that, they’re probably going to have to be a lot simpler than that. You can’t do too many of those in one season. So, you just have to balance the budget a little bit, and pick your moments to really lean into something that’s different and bigger.”

Between Seasons 1 and 2, RESIDENT ALIEN’s lead special effects makeup designer Bill Terezakis passed away, Sheridan relates. “That was very sad, a huge, huge loss. [Special effects makeup designer] Cayley Giene and some of her team had worked with Bill, so we looked at some people, and Cayley really had a lock on the characters. Ashley [Forshaw], who works with her, came along with her, and the whole team knew what they were doing, and they’ve been fantastic. We miss Bill terribly, but Cayley has really done a great job filling his shoes. Cayley even designed the Blue Avian costume this year, and they’re fantastic on set, they’re fantastic with the actors, they move very quickly, they have been really great.”

A Baby Alien in RESIDENT ALIEN - Season 3 - "Here Comes My Baby" | ©2024 Syfy/James Dittiger

And what would Sheridan most like viewers to know about RESIDENT ALIEN Season 3?

“I would mostly love people to know about Season 3 that we really are leaning into the alien stuff more than we have in the past. We keep all the great character stuff, all the humor, but we lay onto it more alien characters, more alien threats, and explore some of the tropes of the alien abduction world, and again, as we always do, try to make it as authentic as possible. So, more aliens in Season 3.”

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