Canned TV Show #25: People of Earth

That’s right, people, Canned is back! At least for this post. Who knows how long I’ll keep it going, or if I’ll once again disappear, only to re-emerge some years later, cicada-like, to annoy you with my extraordinarily loud buzzing about canceled TV shows once again.

But for now, let’s just enjoy each other’s company and talk about today’s canceled series, TBS’s People of Earth. Originally premiering in 2016, the series, created by David Jenkins, ran for two seasons, enjoying solid critical reviews, before being dropped by the network. Oddly enough, the show was originally renewed for a third season and, according to Jenkins, the season had been fully written before TBS reversed course and canceled the show after all. Why they did that is a bit of a mystery to me, but alas, we will likely never know what happened to the misfit band of alien “experiencers” at the center of the series.

People of Earth begins with journalist Ozzie Graham (Wyatt Cenac) heading from New York City to the small upstate town of Beacon for a human interest piece about StarCrossed, a group of UFO abductees — though they prefer the term “experiencer” as “abductee” feels a bit victim-blamey. Ozzie claims to have hit a deer on the way into town, which immediately sets off suspicions in the group that his accident is merely a “cover memory” for his own alien encounter. Nobody’s more gung-ho about this possibility than Gerry (Luka Jones), a UFO obsessive who hasn’t actually had an experience of his own. Ozzie is initially skeptical of the whole enterprise, but as stranger memories keep coming back to him, not to mention the talking deer trying to give him life advice, he finds himself pulled towards the possibility of an extraterrestrial encounter.

This might count as a spoiler, but you can probably already guess that these people aren’t just a bunch of kooks; they all had honest to goodness encounters with a trio of aliens attempting to infiltrate human society in order to invade it. They’re led by an uneasy “alliance” of Reptilians (scaly green reptile humanoids), Whites (tall, pale, Scandinavian-looking types), and Greys (the more typical big-headed aliens we’re familiar with), whose bureaucratic incompetence threatens to bring their invasion to a halt. Jenkins and his writers render the alien side of things as an amusingly corporate merger, with its main trio Kurt the Reptilian (Drew Nelson), Don the White (Björn Gustafsson), and Jeff the Grey (Ken Hall) engaging in plenty of very human-like bickering and backstabbing.

On the human front, the series offers us an array of funny and endearing characters, from Cenac’s skeptical Ozzie to Jones’s puppy-dog Gerry, to the other StarCrossed members: former therapist and group leader Gina (the always wonderful Ana Gasteyer); intensely milquetoast Richard (Brian Huskey); romantically jaded Kelly (Alice Wetterlund); taciturn mail carrier Yvonne (Da’Vine Joy Randolph); sweet-but-a-little-batty Margaret (Nancy Lenehan); intense but hurting housewife Chelsea (Tracee Chimo); and probably-still-not-on-this-planet farmer Ennis (Daniel Stewart Sherman, who is sadly written out of the show in season 2, probably to go manage Shamroxx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodge_49). This is very much one of those found-family shows, with the members of StarCrossed serving as each other’s support system both inside and out of the group. From its fairly low-key and grounded beginnings (alien stuff notwithstanding), the show goes further out into the realm of high-concept weirdness as the aliens’ plot moves forward and its human characters get wind of their machinations. The show ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the fates of its core ensemble as well as their alien adversaries up in the air.

And it’s really a shame, because People of Earth is a really enjoyable show. Sure, it’s not anything game-changing, but it’s one of those series where you genuinely enjoy hanging out with the characters as much as you get invested in the more plot-heavy elements. The cast has a great, easy chemistry, with each character getting their moments of development to get into all the ways they were broken even before their experiences. It started to get a bit out-there in the second season as the plot threatened to overwhelm the characters, though season 2 gains the welcome addition of Nasim Pedrad as an FBI agent who becomes embroiled in the group. It’s frustrating that the network would renew the show, allow the writing staff to script the whole thing, then reverse course, but I guess that’s their prerogative. The show was recently added to Hulu, so maybe there’s hope that the show will find an audience on streaming and end up in a sleeper hit kind of situation. Hey, if we can get the Snyder Cut after four years, why not People of Earth?

Luckily, most involved seemed to land on their feet career-wise. Jenkins has a new series in development with HBO Max; Cenac went on to host his own show, the also sadly short-lived Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO; Gasteyer continues to be a legend, popping up here and there; Wetterlund is currently on SYFY’s similarly-toned Resident Alien, along with her POE costar Michael Cassidy, who plays a Reptilian in the guise of a smarmy media mogul; Sherman had a fun role on the tragically short-lived Lodge 49, a show I absolutely loved and should really write about one of these days; Jones went on to play Aidy Bryant’s manchild boyfriend on Shrill; Randolph’s star is still rising, having received praise for her appearance in Dolemite is My Name and her regular role on Hulu’s High Fidelity series. Most of them were hard working TV actors before this show, and continue to be after it’s cancellation.

So, should it be back on the air? Absolutely, if even just to wrap up its story with one final season. As mentioned, it ends on a doozy of a cliffhanger, and while I can’t imagine anything horrible happening to its scrappy band of weirdos, it would be nice to see how they get out of it. Let’s hope Hulu sees fit to bring it back someday.