Space is a bad place for people to stay alive in; it’s one of the main reasons we don’t live there. (Also, the commute’s an absolute pain in the ass.) And while it’s a fun enough destination to visit in our imaginations, if we’re being honest, our imaginations are pretty much shot at this point. And so we beseech Hollywood: Could you do us a solid and let us maybe imagine some famous people living there, instead?
Luckily, Fox has taken our incredibly lazy brains’ best interests to heart, announcing today Stars On Mars, a new reality competition series in which people at a “Fox reality show” level of famous get together to do fake space missions. (Presumably minus the bit where they float off, untethered, into the inky blackness of the void, screaming for what will, for them, feel like an eternity before the air runs out.) And also, William Shatner is hosting it, because he’s the first person who loads in when our brains try to think of a “Space guy”!
The series will see several famouses living together in a “space station,” competing in various space simulator-style challenges; from the description, it sounds like the show will be using a weekly elimination format, so, hey: Maybe we will get some of that Gravity-style/forcibly jettisoned horror after all!
A Fox exec issued a statement about the show today, noting that, “Watching celebrities take giant leaps out of their comfort zone and step into the” unexpected will no doubt be truly transformational and comical.” And speaking of that “comical” side of things, here’s a press statement attributed to Shatner; feel free to join us in the mental exercise of deciding whether it’s more sad if he did actually write it, or didn’t: “Thanks to lower gravity on Mars, you’ll weigh 62% less. Bad news: the air is unbreathable, so if you’re from LA, it’ll remind you of home.” Sadly, “Shatner” did not go on to talk down the merits of space plane food, or the problems of having to spend time with your mother-in-law… in space!
No word yet on who the contestants will be on the show’s first season; the series debuts in June.
