Starman

This show picks up 14 years after the movie left off. The alien returns to earth to find the woman he had met during the movie and the child he had fathered. He finds the son, now a teenager, and together they search for the mother, while being hounded by a government agent. In the movie, the woman helped Starman (who apparantly had no corporal form of his own and assumes the body of a photographer who has just died in a helicopter accident in the show) learn about earth customs; in the tv show, the son does the same.

All in all, I thought this was a decent television show and a worthy companion to one of my favorite movies of all time.

I just finished watching the Starman series again. I loved this show as a teenager when it first came out. However, I now realize a lot of the actual storyline and meaning of it was lost on my youth. In watching the show again, I see how well Robert Hays brought to life the character of the alien wrapped in the body of Paul Forrester.

The interactions between Paul the Alien and Paul Forrester and his old friends, family, or acquaintances are priceless. Each Paul has a different feel to him, the way he stands, the way he moves, or the way he reacts to different things. We truly believe that Paul the Alien is experiencing some things for the first time. However, it's not overkill either.

This is a great show that probably deserved at least another season. It seems like all the good science fiction shows are cut too short.

This TV show to the movie wasn't bad at all. It wasn't stellar, but it was fairly interesting, and sometimes cool. I used to be very pumped to watch this show back in 1986 when I was in 3rd grade. Here's the gist of the TV series---The Alien returns to Earth and takes up a new human form, this time the body of a dead photographer named Paul Forrester. Paul/The Alien then finds his son Scott. Though how his son aged 14 years in 2 years is beyond me. The movie took place in 1984, this TV series took place in 1986, so the age difference in the kid always baffled me. For a while I thought the kid just aged quickly, being half alien and all. But it was clear that the TV series ignored some key elements of the movie and constantly says the Alien's first visit as happening "14 years ago", aka 1972, not 1984.

Anyway, this was a good show. Though why Paul/The Alien was always searching for Jenny/His wife was confusing to me. So you find the mom and then what? I don't remember all the details of the series, but I do know that it ended on a boring note. They find the mother, and the show ended bam like that. After just one year. Very depressing. I thought this series had a lot more potential, but it never lived up to it. "Starman" basically worked like "The Incredible Hulk", with Paul/The Alien and his son Scott going from town to town looking for Jenny and helping out some strange goobers along the ways.

By the way, I heard Sci-Fi Channel has started airing this series at night on the weekends. Check your local listings.

I liked the way that people would expect Starman to be a jerk (because the guy who's body he copied was kind of a jerk), but he would end up inspiring hope in everyone. I was impressed with how he handled his captor, George Fox, in the next to last episode.

In the motion picture, I always felt that it was wrong for Starman to get Jennie Hayden pregnant and just leave her. The TV series sort of helped to redeem that.

It made sense that, as an alien, he had a completely fresh perspective on things, and thus was a very creative photographer.

The stories were all set in the southwest U.S. The scene of Starman first emerging in Paul's body was cool.

A unique show that appeals to lovers of peace & social justice. I remember seeing a bumper sticker after it was cancelled: "Starman will return in a moment." The show was something new under the sun.

"Starman" was a good, quality series. I loved this show back in 1986, and I became so used to the Robert Hays version of Starman that I remember when I looked up the 1984 Jeff Bridges/Karen Allen movie, I had a hard time accepting Bridges as Starman. And I wasn't as blown away by Bridges performance as others seem to have been. Bridges's was actually nominated for an Academy Award in acting in that 1984 John Carpenter film.

Robert Hays does an excellent job bringing the Starman back to life. Starman isn't as uncomfortable with his human body as he was in the film, and Hays brings a great gentleness and warmth to the character. Hays doesn't try and copy Bridges, but he brings a different but similar take on the Starman character. Like Bridges, Hays plays the character as if he has an IQ of 60, but at the same time possesses the genius of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi, and Stephen Hawking combined. But thankfully Hays doesn't do the annoying bird like head movements Bridges does, and he doesn't speak with the motor neuron time delay that Bridges did in the film. You can believe that this is the same alien from the movie, but one that has learned things from his first time on Earth. He's still innocent and naive, but he's been around the block a bit more. In the pilot, Hays briefly played Paul Forrester, the photographer Starman cloned to use as a human body. There was a great contrast in the performances of Forrester and Starman as Forrester. So if Bridges could be nominated for an Oscar, why couldn't Hays have been nominated for any Emmy?

I also prefered the TV series to the movie because the show was far more funny and lighthearted then the dreary and depressing movie. I think a lot of this has to do with the addition of Starman's 14 year old son Scott Hayden, played wonderfully by Christopher Daniel Barnes. In the movie, Starman gives Jenny the sphere and tells her "the baby will know what to do with". We get this sense that the baby will be born a genius and be just like Starman, a weird alien. But Scott is just a typical human kid that has a hard time accepting he is half alien. Back then, Barnes was was known as "C.B. Barnes", who for a while was a very low level teen heartthrob. In the 1990s Barnes got some mild fame playing Greg Brady in the "Brady Bunch" movies and doing the voice of Spider-Man in the Spidey animated series.

Sure the John Carpenter/Jeff Bridges movie had some funny moments, but I felt that the movie was really depressing and gloomy. It was just this gigantic tragic road love story with such sad, sad, SAD music. The TV series has Scott Hayden to let the air out of it all and there are some hilarious exchanges here between Scott, his father and the people they come across in their quest for Jenny Hayden. I highly recommend this funny, warm and intelligently written series. It was a shame that ABC gave this series the shaft after just 1 year and 22 episodes. They never gave the show any good time slots anyway. They were always yanking "Starman" around on different nights, and always putting the series up against the heavyweights of the day like "Dynasty" or something like that. Yes Sci-Fi channel IS airing "Starman". It comes on Sunday/Monday morning at 2 AM Eastern/1 AM Central.