Boldly Going Nowhere (2008)

Interesting facts

Boldly Going Nowhere is a proposed American science fiction single-camera comedy television series created by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton and Adam Stein that was originally to be aired in 2009 on the Fox network. The series was planned as a parody of the Star Trek franchise in the format of a workplace sitcom; the title was a reference to the famous phrase "To boldly go where no man has gone before" from the opening speech in the first two Star Trek series. A pilot was shot in 2008, but the project was shelved indefinitely.

Development

The initial concept for a comedy on a spaceship was pitched by Adam Stein, then a writers' assistant on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to the Always Sunny co-creators, stars and showrunners Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton and Rob McElhenney in August 2007 when season 3 of the series was being edited. The three began to discuss it seriously during the 2007–08 writers' strike.

The trio announced the upcoming project at SDCC 2008, while promoting season 4 of Sunny, and their plans to have the show on the air in 2009. They hoped to be heavily involved in the first season without playing any of the main roles, and to hire a showrunner to take over after the first six episodes so that they could continue to prioritize their FX show.

Ben Koldyke, who had written, directed and starred in the digital short Jedi Gym parodying Star Wars but was a relative unknown at the time, had approached RCG to get a writer-director position on Boldly Going Nowhere; instead he landed the lead role as the rogue captain and later went on to guest star in season 5 of Always Sunny while former Arrested Development actor Tony Hale was cast as his android companion.

A pilot was shot in October 2008 after post-production on season 4 of Always Sunny had been completed. The episode was directed by Wayne McClammy, and featured appearances by Always Sunny main cast members Kaitlin Olson and Howerton in guest roles as Tracy Brigsby and the inspector Lt Zander Centauri respectively, while Day made a brief cameo.

However, in August 2009, Howerton revealed that the pilot was being rewritten, with Seinfeld writer Larry Charles now involved, to include more science fiction elements like aliens and world building for future episodes. The series underwent sporadic development over the next several years, but no further filming was done.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.