| 3rd Rock from the Sun | |
|---|---|
| Format | Sitcom Science fiction |
| Created by | Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner |
| Starring | John Lithgow Kristen Johnston French Stewart Joseph Gordon-Levitt Jane Curtin Simbi Khali Elmarie Wendel Wayne Knight (all, seasons 3–6; recurring previously) |
| Theme music composer | Ben Vaughn (seasons 1–4 and 6) Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (season 5) |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 6 |
| No. of episodes | 139 (List of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Bonnie Turner Terry Turner Marcy Carsey Tom Werner Caryn Mandabach Linwood Boomer (season 1) Bill Martin Mike Schiff(seasons 3–5) David Sacks (seasons 4–5) Bob Kushell Christine Zander (seasons 5–6) David Goetsch Jason Venokur (season 6) |
| Producer(s) | Patrick Kienlen David Goetsch Jason Venokur David M. Israel Jim O'Doherty Andrew Orenstein Michael Glouberman Gregg Mettler (producer) Tim Ryder Aron Abrams Gregory Thompson (co-producer) |
| Location(s) | Rutherford, Ohio (setting) CBS Studio Center, Studio City, Los Angeles, California (filming location)[1] |
| Camera setup | Film; Multi-camera |
| Running time | 22 minutes |
| Production company(s) | The Carsey-Warner Company |
| Distributor | Carsey-Werner Distribution |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | January 9, 1996 – May 22, 2001 |
| External links | |
| Website | |
3rd Rock from the Sun (sometimes referred to as simply 3rd Rock) is an American sitcom that aired from 1996 to 2001 on NBC. The show is about four extraterrestrials who are on an expedition to Earth, which they consider to be a very insignificant planet. The extraterrestrials pose as a human family in order to observe the behavior of human beings.
Contents |
"As many intelligent people know, aliens are all around us. This is a story of a band of four such explorers. In order to blend in, they have assumed human form. This is the High Commander (Dick Solomon). He has assembled an elite team of experts: A decorated military officer (Sally Solomon), a seasoned intelligence specialist (Tommy Solomon) and, well, they had an extra seat (Harry Solomon)."[2]
The premise of the show revolves around an extraterrestrial research expedition attempting to live as a normal human family in the fictional city of Rutherford, Ohio, said to be 52 miles (84 km) outside of Cleveland, where they live in a loft apartment. Humor was principally derived from the aliens' attempts to study human society and, because of their living as humans themselves while on Earth, to understand the human condition. In later episodes, they became more accustomed to Earth and often became more interested in their human lives than in their mission.
Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), the High Commander and leader of the expedition, is the family provider, and takes a position as a physics professor at Pendelton State University. Information officer Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been given the body of a teenager and is forced to enroll in high school (later college), leaving security officer Sally (Kristen Johnston) and communications officer Harry (French Stewart) to spend their lives as thirty somethings hanging out at home and bouncing through short-term jobs.
The family often communicates with their off-world (and usually unseen) boss, the Big Giant Head (William Shatner). His orders are received through Harry, who unexpectedly (and often in inconvenient circumstances) stands up, his arms stiff (acting as the antenna), and proclaims: "Incoming message from the Big Giant Head."
The show derived much humor from the contrast between the outward appearance adopted by each of the aliens and his or her actual, internal nature. Dick, far from being a wise and fatherly figurehead, is arrogant, self-absorbed, petulant, faddish, and often downright foolish. Inside Sally’s glamorous form lives the weapons and security officer: uncouth, swaggering, and macho. Tommy, the oldest of the group, is disguised as a teenager, his wisdom and life experience at odds with the strange and often humiliating life in which his teenage persona and raging hormones cast him. Only the oddball of the group, Harry, seems comfortable with Earth – yet he is the weirdest of them all, particularly when his built-in radio function takes unexpected control over his body, relaying orders from the aliens' home world in an odd, authoritative voice.
Almost all the episodes revolve around the Solomons' difficulty integrating themselves into Earth culture and understanding human customs — often their view of Earth realities is distorted by the fact that almost all of their experience of Earth comes through the media, especially television, rather than firsthand experience.
Details about their alien nature are rarely given and inconsistent, except to reinforce the idea that their former lives were almost barren of emotion and most of the relationships humans have with each other. Their original forms, for example, are described as nonsexual, with reproduction a matter of sending packets of genetic material to each other in the mail. Leaders like The Big Giant Head are unelected and assumed infallible (in fact, it is stated that politicians on their planet are chosen by seeing which one can outrun the giant fireball). The upshot is that living in an Earth culture provides the Solomons with an almost intolerable degree of emotional stimulation and conflict, which they are very ill-equipped to handle.
Some of the episodes seemingly derive their comedy from affectionate send-ups of TV and films. For example, in the episode "Father Knows Dick," when Harry finds out he is a transmitter, he "goes off the rails" (complete with red jacket as worn by Jim in Rebel Without a Cause), yells "You're tearing me apart!" and goes off to play "chicken" with a tough guy in a bar (but ends up buying fried chicken from KFC instead). In the episode "Dick's Big Giant Headache," both Dick and the Big Giant Head mention seeing something on the wing of the plane after having traveled by airline, a nod to both John Lithgow and William Shatner having played the same role (one in the original story, and one in a remake) of the passenger who sees a gremlin on the wing in The Twilight Zone. In another episode, a face-slapping session with Dick and Sally pastiches the Chinatown sequence: "She's my daughter; my sister; my daughter." In "When Aliens Camp," the Solomons and Mary go on a disastrous camping trip. Dick is captured by a bunch of boy scouts and instantly turns "native", painting his face and sighing "The horror" in a spoof of Marlon Brando's character in Apocalypse Now. In a tribute to silent movies, one episode shows Sally holding a plank on her shoulder and turning from side to side as Tommy ducks, and Harry gets hit, in reference to The Plank, starring Tommy Cooper. In "Eleven Angry Men and One Dick", Dick is a jury member and while arguing with other members he says "You want the truth? Well, I can't handle the truth", which is a tribute to Jack Nicholson's dialogue in A Few Good Men.
Occasionally references would be made to specific features of the aliens' abilities and of their experiences on their own world, which built up a common mythology for the show. The theme of the idiot savant repeatedly resurfaces, since each member of the family makes up for their extreme naïveté with some special skill owing to their alien nature.
Though Dick's understanding of physics is far weaker than his son Tommy's, it is implied that even his basic scientific knowledge makes advanced Earth physics appear rudimentary, leading to his becoming respected in his field despite his childish behavior. A well-known segment from an episode has him reading a passage from A Brief History of Time and laughing hysterically at Stephen Hawking's description of virtual particles. Even so, Dick is often shown as the member of the family with the least to recommend in terms of his ability, leading them to question his right to command. Sally, for instance, is depicted as not only having an attractive body (she is sometimes described as being Amazonian), but being amazingly physically strong and fit, able to fight and defeat large groups of men much larger than she (even when doing so is unnecessary and culturally inappropriate).
Tommy, similarly, has been trained with the ability of near-instant recall and has an encyclopedic knowledge about Earth society, which unfortunately seems useless in terms of helping him make appropriate decisions, but ensures that he remains a straight-A student.
Harry is most fascinating, since his behavior is bizarre, unstable and borderline mentally disabled even for a Solomon (a condition, it is implied, engendered by the chip in his brain that allows him to communicate with the home planet), yet somehow this mental condition gives him an inexplicable sex appeal for women and makes him the only Solomon with any talent in the arts — Harry often seems to have a knack for all fine arts, including music and theater, and is consistently shown as being an incredibly talented painter, especially as a portraitist and caricaturist, though his inability to verbally articulate his artistic ideas in an intelligent fashion sinks his efforts at making a living through his talent.
One of Dick's driving motivations becomes his desire to master drawing, acting, music, or other pursuits — all of which he fails at miserably because of his lack of understanding of how the clearly less intelligent Harry could possibly possess talents Dick does not.
Each alien became involved in various relationships with humans throughout the course of the series, primarily focusing on Dick's infatuation – at first met with disgust and then, finally, reciprocation – with anthropology professor Dr. Mary Albright (Jane Curtin), who shares an office with him. Much is often made of Mary's angst, insecurity, and neuroses brought on by a lifetime of studying the human condition as well as an unstable relationship with her parents, and the cheerful, childlike naïveté displayed by Dick, the primary factor in him that attracts her.
Sally similarly acquires a long-term boyfriend, Officer Don Orville (Wayne Knight), an overweight and incompetent police officer who becomes attracted to her after several incidents in which he is forced to confront or arrest the Solomons for various crimes. The two generally have conversations while speaking in a manner similar to an old 1930s crime drama.
Tommy manages an on-again/off-again relationship with August Leffler (Shay Astar), a reserved ice queen teenager and later the more bubbly Alissa Strudwick (Larisa Oleynik).
Harry has a relationship with his landlord Mrs. Dubcek's (Elmarie Wendel) daughter Vicki (played by Jan Hooks), in an on-screen relationship that often features overly melodramatic scenes. Harry, despite no apparent skills in the art of seduction, also manages to foil a plot to dissolve the Earth by seducing Mascha (Cindy Crawford), one of a coven of strikingly beautiful Venusians who tried to overthrow the Earth by seducing its men into giving them everything of value.
Some humor comes from the fact that at some point in the show most of the character relationships have been mixed up — a strange attraction is briefly shown between Mary and Tommy because of their similar passion for the social sciences and the study of humanity, in which Tommy chooses to step aside and let Dick pursue her instead. Nina (Simbi Khali), Dick's assistant who primarily serves as his straight man and comic foil, is seen briefly having a fling with Harry. Mrs. Dubcek also, who is at first merely a source of comic relief, her own bizarre foibles and imperceptibly causing her to be a terrible role model for proper human behavior to the Solomons, is revealed to have had a fling with Harry.
Initially, the only reference to the aliens' true forms is a comment made in the first episode, when upon discovering that human heads cannot swivel to 180 degrees, Dick queries: "How do they lick their backs?". As time went on, the show began to intersperse concrete references to the aliens' nature and their home world which played a role in affecting the show's plot. They usually described their original bodies as "gelatinous purple tubes" that lacked sex organs or most of the forms of physical definition that humans possess. In fact, when Sally asks why she had to be the woman, Dick reminds her why, telling her "it's because you lost." Evidently, individuals in their species are so near-identical to each other that the Solomons were unaware of the concept of race or ethnicity, and had never invented one for themselves, leading them to attempt to choose one (a source of humor since the Solomons all appear quite white), eventually deciding that they are Jewish because of their surname, which they had taken from the side of a truck; and in one episode, they said that they come from Peru in South America.
Occasionally, the Solomons would encounter or think they encountered other extraterrestrials — the most long-lasting such gag being the Solomons' belief that Jell-O is an offshoot of a hostile, amorphous, carnivorous species they have often encountered, prompting them to go into hysterics whenever they see it served and attempt to destroy it. Their first brief encounter with snow was believed to have been attacks from a swarm of albino brain chiggers.
The name of the Solomons' home planet (if they indeed have one) is never revealed throughout the course of the series; in the show's dialogue, it is referred to as simply "The Home Planet." It is located in a barred spiral galaxy on the Cepheus-Draco border. Major twists in the plot, often shown in the various season finales, tended to involve contact with the home planet, involving their superiors' ongoing disapproval at the Solomons' antics and their becoming a laughingstock among their peers.
3rd Rock maintained a constant ensemble cast, the four main characters: Dick, Sally, Tommy, Harry. Several other main characters who left or joined the show through its original run supplemented these four, and numerous guest stars and one-time characters supplemented all of them. The three male aliens' names are a play on the phrase "Tom, Dick and Harry" which is a placeholder for multiple unspecified people. (When Don eventually notices this, they look uncomfortable and Tommy says "Well, it's not like it's a deliberate attempt on our part to seem average," which is of course exactly what it is.)
The show's opening theme music was composed by Ben Vaughn, and is a 1950s-style rock-and-roll instrumental piece; the theme was extended slightly in season three, when Simbi Khali, Elmarie Wendel and Wayne Knight were officially made series regulars and added to the opening credits. Alternate versions of the theme were used during the course of the show's run. For Christmas episodes, jingle bells were added to the theme. For the season six two-part episode "Dick'll Take Manhattan", a modern jazz underline version of the theme was used. The only major change to the theme was in season five, when the original Ben Vaughn version was replaced by a big band cover of the theme, performed by the group Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and was only used during that season.
The opening title sequence, which was produced by the London graphic design firm SVC Television, opens with computerized shots of planets and celestial bodies, some either with the planets dancing or moving in warp speed. It opens and closes with a shot of Earth (which at the open is where the show's title logo appears, after a sunburst appears on the side of Earth). For the episode "Dick'll Take Manhattan" only, the typeface of the cast and creators' names was altered.
There were a total of six seasons and 139 episodes in the series. The first and last seasons were 20 episodes each, and the second through fifth seasons had between 22 and 27 episodes each.
| Season | Episodes | Originally aired | DVD release date | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season premiere | Season finale | Region 1 | Region 2 | Region 4 | |||
| 1 | 20 | January 9, 1996 | May 21, 1996 | July 26, 2005[3] | May 17, 2004 | November 9, 2005 | |
| 2 | 26 | September 22, 1996 | May 18, 1997 | October 25, 2005[4] | June 21, 2004 | November 9, 2005 | |
| 3 | 27 | September 24, 1997 | May 20, 1998 | February 21, 2006[5] | August 30, 2004 | February 8, 2006 | |
| 4 | 24 | September 23, 1998 | May 25, 1999 | May 2, 2006[6] | October 25, 2004 | July 6, 2006 | |
| 5 | 22 | September 21, 1999 | May 23, 2000 | August 15, 2006[7] | January 24, 2005 | February 7, 2007 | |
| 6 | 20 | October 24, 2000 | May 22, 2001 | October 14, 2006[8] | June 10, 2002 | February 7, 2007 | |
Out of 139 episodes of the series, 108 episodes contain "Dick" in the title (in reference to John Lithgow's character). While some of the episode titles with "Dick" in it are innocent (i.e., "Tom, Dick and Mary", "Dick Is From Mars, Sally Is From Venus"), others are more risque and often are double entendres (i.e., "Sensitive Dick", "A Dick Replacement", "Frozen Dick", "Shall We Dick"), due to the fact that the word "Dick" is both a short form of Richard and a slang term for penis. One episode from season six used an abbreviation for a title, "B.D.O.C.", since the full title ("Big Dick on Campus") was deemed too risque.
In the United States, the series is distributed for syndication by Carsey-Warner Distribution, and entered broadcast syndication in September 2000 where it continued until the fall of 2004. The series continues to air in select large markets, but is not in wide distribution. ABC Family aired reruns between 2002 and 2006. Reruns of the series aired on TV Land from 2008 through 2010. In the fall of 2010, ReelzChannel began airing the series. This series re-run is now also aired on Malaysia's national broadcast TV channel RTM's TV2 in the 12:30am time slot on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. In the UK, cable network Virgin Media currently has 40 episodes from seasons 1 and 2 available 'on demand' from the Comedy Central menu option. In Ireland, 3e run re-runs of the show during the late night slot after Conan at 12.30 am. In March 2011 Netflix made the complete series available on their "Instant Watch" and can now be watched at anytime for paying subscribers. In the fall of 2011, Canada's TVTROPOLIS cable channel began airing the show, and featured a long weekend marathon run of episodes.
In Region 1, Anchor Bay Entertainment released all 6 seasons of 3rd Rock from the Sun on DVD for the very first time in 2005-2006.[9][10][11][12][13][14] Seasons 1&2 contain the edited, syndicated versions of the episodes instead of the original broadcast versions. As of 2010, these releases have been discontinued and are out of print.
On May 4, 2011, Mill Creek Entertainment announced that they had acquired the rights to re-release the series on DVD in Region 1.[15] Season 1 and 2 are scheduled to be re-released on September 13, 2011. These are the unedited, original broadcast versions of the episodes.[16][17]
In Region 2, Network DVD released all 6 seasons on DVD in the UK. All 6 releases contain unedited versions of the episodes.
In Region 4, Magna Home Entertainment released all 6 seasons on DVD in Australia between 2005-2007. These releases have been discontinued and are now out of print.
On November 15, 2010, Beyond Home Entertainment re-released all 6 six seasons on DVD in Region 4.[18][19][20][21][22][23] The complete collection was also released three days later, on November 18.[24]
As of February 2011 all 6 seasons are available through Netflix Instant service.
Seasons 1 and 2 are available to download in the UK through iTunes.
| Season | Rank | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 22[25] | |
| 2 | 28[26] | |
| 3 | 44[27] | |
| 4 | 77[28] | |
| 5 | 82[29] | |
| 6 | 89[30] | |
In 1997, 3rd Rock won the most Emmy Awards (five from eight nominations) for a television series:
John Lithgow received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for each year the show was broadcast, winning the Emmy in 1996, 1997, and 1999. Accepting the 1999 award he said "Many wonderful things have happened to me in my life, but the two best are 3rd Rock and my family."[31]
A tie-in book, 3rd Rock from the Sun: The Official Report, was released in 1997. It is essentially a report of the Solomon's findings during their stay on Earth. Primarily a source of humor, the book includes such features as "What to do if you encounter Jell-O", a fan biography of Katie Couric written by Harry, and Sally's version of a Cosmo quiz. Portions of the book are included in the booklets inside each season set of the series.
Despite the report's being set within the fictional world of 3rd Rock, there is a foreword written by John Lithgow himself in which he explains how he was abducted by the 3rd Rock producers and forced to work on their production. There is a Post-it note attached to the foreword, apparently written by Dick Solomon, stating that he doesn't know why the foreword is there, but that Lithgow is an Earth actor who appeared in "some helicopter movie".
| Preceded by The X-Files 1997 |
3rd Rock from the Sun Super Bowl lead-out program 1998 |
Succeeded by The Simpsons and Family Guy 1999 Super Bowl |
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