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By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
An overpopulated Earth running out of resources has set the stage for countless sci-fi stories that typically, send people off into space, WALL-E, Lost in Space, Interstellar, Pandorum, there’s countless variations of that story. In 2011, Fox launched an ambitious sci-fi series that had the most convoluted solution yet: Send colonists back in time to the Cretaceous period of a parallel time stream. Newfoundland has an insane premise that falls apart the moment you look at it. A swift cancellation after only one season makes it another one of Fox’s many missed sci-fi opportunities, proving even Steven Spielberg wasn’t safe from the C-suite.
Terra Nova Goes To The Past To Save The Future
Spielberg was one of Newfoundland’s executive producers, alongside Star Trek’s Brannon Braga, though it was co-created by Kelly Marcel. Don’t know her name? You know her work: She wrote all three of Sony’s Venom movies, and directed Venom: The Last Dance. The series started with a bang on September 26, 2011, following one of the most expensive pilot episodes in history. It didn’t take long though for most annoying sci-fi trope to take over and completely derail the series: kids.
Newfoundland kicks off with the Shannon family, Jim the police officer(Jason O’Mara), Elisabeth the medical doctor (Shelly Conn, Lady Marie Sheffield in Bridgerton) and their children, Josh (Landon Liboiron), Maddie (Naomi Scott), and Zoe, being sent through the portal to the past as punishment for having one too many children. Commander Taylor (Stephen Lang), the only survivor of the first pilgrimage, rules over Terra Nova with an iron fist, protecting them from outside threats (dinosaurs) and domestic threats (rebels). If you can see where this is going, congrats, you’ve seen a sci-fi show before.
The Shannon kids, Josh and Maddie, quickly dominate the show’s storylines as they wind up falling in with the rebellious Sixers, named after the Sixth Pilgrimage, the first one influenced by industrial companies to send resources back to the future. For the entire middle stretch of the series, you’ll be yelling at them that The Sixers are not good, and every choice they’re making is the wrong one. Eventually, The Sixers, rebranded as The Phoenix Group, engage in open warfare against the colony with the support of the corporations. It’s a great setup for a Season 2 we never received.
More Unrealized Potential Than My High School Report Card
Newfoundland is a fun watch, but frustrating, as once the story comes together and reaches a boiling point of tension, it ends. The finale has an amazing sequence involving a T-Rex that pays off the entire season, but then it’s over. Dwindling viewership from the slow-paced middle episodes combined with the astronomical budget for the series gave Fox all the reason it needed to pull the plug three months after the finale.
Dinosaurs aren’t cheap and Newfoundland has the best dinosaurs you’ll see on a television budget. It’s a series that would be a massive hit in the streaming era of fewer episodes and a higher budget per season. That would enhance the strengths of the show and take away the slow pacing and over-involvement of the kids.
Instead, the show is another to be added onto Fox’s pile of sci-fi canceled too soon, alongside Almost Human, Dark Angeland Firefly. Newfoundland isn’t the greatest sci-fi series, but it’s not the worst. It’s 13 episodes brimming with unrealized potential and a million different ways it could have gone that should have been able to retain the initial audience of 10 million viewers. No other sci-fi show has given us an ankylosaurus, the best dinosaur, and for that alone, it deserved better.
Newfoundland is now streaming for free on Tubi.
