A Brief History of the ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Show

It’s just a passing nugget in a new interview with producer Mark Johnson. But since it’s been 10 years since we first heard about a potential TV show based on the much-loved 1999 cult classic Galaxy Quest, any update at all is worth seizing upon.

Speaking to Deadline, Johnson was asked about the most recent iteration of the project. In 2023, we learned it was still in the works at at Paramount+, the home of Star Trek‘s recent TV renaissance. He couched his response in a way that also covered a TV show based on the recent Oscar-winning drama The Holdovers: “Both are being written, so we’ll see.”

At least he didn’t say “the Galaxy Quest TV show is dead in the water,” which might be what some fans had started to think. The show was first announced a decade ago; a brief Variety article published April 21, 2015, wrote that “Robert Gordon, who co-wrote the DreamWorks feature with David Howard, is in negotiations to work on the TV adaptation, as are original director Dean Parisot and executive producers Mark Johnson and Melissa Bernstein.” No further details were given, but the trade speculated it would be a re-telling of the movie’s story spread out across a season of episodes.

(For the three people who haven’t seen Galaxy Quest, it’s about the washed-up stars of a cult-beloved sci-fi series; aliens, believing the show to be real, recruit the actors to help win a real-life intergalactic conflict.)

A few months later, in August 2015, Entertainment Weekly reported the Galaxy Quest TV show was in development at Amazon.

By 2017, comedian Paul Scheer had come aboard the project. He spoke about it to Slashfilm then and explained a bit more about his vision. “Right now, I just handed in my first script to Amazon, so I’m in that zone. I’m excited about it … The thing I keep on saying about it, without giving too much away—because it’s going to be so long before people get to see it, I don’t want people to get too burnt out on me telling you what it’s about before it gets to that point— but for me, it was really important to do service to a Galaxy Quest story that gives you everything that you want and indoctrinates people who have never seen Galaxy Quest into what the fun of that world is … and also to continue the story of our original characters and have consequences from the first film.”

He also noted that the show would be “mixing two casts. It’s separate kind of adventures that kind of merge, and I’m looking at this first season not as episodic, but as a serialized story. So, the only way I’ve been looking at it is, using everything from the first movie and making the reasons for everything not just—I want to avoid anything that could be viewed as a reboot for reboot’s sake. There are real reasons behind these choices—maybe too much so.”

Talking to the Wrap in 2018, Scheer said it would be a good-natured spoof not just of Star Trek, but also Star Wars and nerdy fandom at large.

“My pitch for Galaxy Quest was, ‘How can we kind of blow this out and pay off things for the fans that love Galaxy Quest, but more importantly—and the thing that I really wanted to do is—appeal to the ‘me’ of now. Who’s the 18-year-old version of me that loved Galaxy Quest now? What would they want to see? Because I think that that is a movie that we haven’t really made yet: the Tropic Thunder in the world of modern-day science fiction … When Galaxy Quest came out, it was a niche thing, Star Trek fandom is a niche thing. Now it is selling out Hall H in Comic-Con, so that’s kind of the impetus for the continuation.”

That all sounded very promising, but after 2018, Galaxy Quest more or less went radio silent. Then in 2023—after covid, but just before the summer of industry strikes—fans got a fresh update.

Variety wrote that the show had shifted to Paramount+, with only Johnson still attached. That article also noted that the original push to adapt the movie had faded after the death of Alan Rickman, but he passed in early 2016—long before Scheer, who is seemingly no longer involved, was talking about his pitch for the show.

Variety’s 2023 story said Paramount+ and Paramount Television Studios were “in the nascent stages of adapting the cult classic comedy film into a television show.” It also noted “there have [since 2015] been various writers attached to the project, though none of their versions have ultimately gone forward.”

Today’s Deadline interview with Johnson notes that Paramount Television Studios is no more, but by Grabthar’s Hammer, the Galaxy Quest TV show is seemingly still holding on. If there are any future developments besides the fact that it’s “being written,” we will certainly keep you posted. Do you think there’s hope for this one—and will it be worth the wait if it ever happens?

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