The War of the Worlds series was essentially a continuation of the George Pal 1953 movie. The premise picks up the story some 35 years later, with the Martian war machines crated up and stored in military warehouses and the aliens buried in steel drums and forgotten.

Enter: Dr. Harrison Blackwood, an astrophysicist; Suzanne McCullough, a microbiologist; Norton Drake, a wheelchair-bound radio astronomer; and Colonel Paul Ironhorse, a military man. Neill Fearnley, a director of four episodes of the first season, admits that the very first science fiction book he had ever read was War of the Worlds. "To be a part of [the story], in any fashion, was a lot of fun!" laughs Fearnley.

"In the H.G. Wells story, the aliens all died of a cold virus-a common cold, and then Orson Welles came along and he concocted his premise [updating the location and time of the story to modern-day New Jersey], which was clever, and then the movie came along, and so they decided to fashion (this television series] somewhat after the movie.  The stumbling block was that [the aliens] had died in the film." To do a series based on dead aliens was a difficult chore for the show's creators. Greg Strangis, who assembled War of the Worlds for Paramount Television, says that "the George Pal film really was a homage to the novel, and it was a pretty reasonable adaptation of the radio broadcast. ... I thought, `OK, ... how do we deal with it in the '80s? It's many years later and the aliens are still here.' And that was the jumping-off point. I made every effort to be respectful to the source material and still have the requirements of a continuing series." To make sure that the reviving aliens who were defeated by Earth's bacteria would not be defeated again by the very same germs, Strangis says, "My reasoning was that radiation protected them from the virus. Radiation killed the virus." "They were in hibernation, and they would all come back to life, which was very clever," interjects Fearnley. "I think where the show ran into problems, personally, is the idea they would enter a human body and somehow their molecules combine with a human's molecules. And you could have an alien sitting right there. Again, a clever idea, and given today's technology, if you were to promote the series today, you might get away with it because of morphing. "If we had today's computer morphing effects, the way that Terminator 2 has been done, we might have been able to do some really extraordinary things. But in those days the idea was that [the alien invaders] would be a hole inside of you and come out of you. That doesn't really work emotionally, but worse, technically. For a show filmed in six days, it's virtually impossible to satisfy the demands for excellence that the audience has, and to have them see that as anything but a rough attempt to approximate the effect." Fearnley believes that War of the Worlds was "a very grand idea for a limited budget," and adds, "A lot of people had difficulty on that show. For me, it was great fun. I enjoyed myself thoroughly..... I don't remember bad things about it. It was very very difficult, and the hours were very long and it hurt making it. But it was fun. We had a good time. We tried very hard; we were very sincere about what we were doing. But sometimes it doesn't work out, and it didn't for us on that show for whatever reasons.

Among the challenges they faced was dealing with a very abrupt and jarring Writers Guild Strike in Los Angeles, which affected production severely. Strangis says the writers' strike almost brought the show to a screeching halt. "We started principal photography of the two-hour premiere episode on or about the same time as the writers' strike," he recalls. "There were no scripts being developed. The pilot was completed. The strike was still going. The pilot was delivered. Basically I was out of work until the resolution of the strike. When I came back when the strike was resolved, scripts were apparently being written by strike scabbers. Some of those shows were not in the best of shape, so we put them up on the shelf and scrambled and tried to come up with product in a very short amount of time so we could keep producing." "It affected things badly," says Fearnley, who was in Toronto where the show was filmed. "In a way, you almost had to write your own scripts. They didn't have access to a broad spectrum of people-[just] the few who were working on the show, and those scripts were done under pseudonyms. Who knows who wrote them? The scripts needed a lot of work." Fearnley's comments shed light on several suspicious teleplay credits for the show's first season. On "Epiphany," Sylvia Van Buren was credited. Sylvia Van Buren was Ann Robinson's character from the George Pal film (and in fact Robinson guest-starred in early episodes). "That's right. That was the gag," responds Fearnley to this reminder. "Who wrote that show? I don't know. There were a few others [with pseudonymous screenwriters]. "Whoever wrote those shows-and they weren't really written-I had the right to rewrite. I would start rewriting, and I'd give it back to the producers. I wouldn't get credit for it, but you do it all the time. You say, `Look, this isn't working,' and [the producers] say, `Oh, why?' `Well, for these reasons,' and they say, `You're right!' So the first few scripts were very unwieldy, very difficult, basically not very good." Strangis says the strike polarized the studios and the writers. "Put yourself in the various different positions in terms of the studios. It's very important for us to have and maintain at least a semblance of a business as usual. The creators are very protective from an editorial perspective ... being a writer, I didn't want to do anything that would breach the Writers Guild." As a result, the station owners were concerned about having product. "Everybody wanted the best of all possible worlds, and it's a matter of compromise. I think the show suffered." Ilse Von Glatz, who was one of the three semi-regular villains on the show, recalls, "The first thing I thought with the advent of the strike was that my job was on the line! We kept shooting, but everything was thrown into a panic, especially since this happened so close to the beginning. Everybody became somewhat demoralized because we really didn't know what was going on. Were these scripts, during that time, the real thing or some slapdash thing just thrown together? A sense of cohesiveness was certainly lacking." Of his scripts, Fearnley recalls "Epiphany" as being definitely affected, and possibly "Multitude of Idols," but the last two were in fine shape. "You know," he says, "it improved a lot once the writers [returned]. We tried very hard on a very difficult thing in a short period of time," Fearnley adds. "I think more planning would have delivered a better show. On a show like that, the planning is essential, and I think we rushed into it. And it might be simply that the writers' strike got in our way. You can't do anything without the writers. Who knows? It might have been because of the strike that it came together. "In the end, it was fun. I think it was one of the first times I had the chance to just be creative and not be told what to do. The show was wide open. We were making up the universe as we went along."

Coming back from the strike was harder than starting from scratch, says Strangis. "After the strike, by and large, it was a long process because we were really trying to catch up in terms of material. There was never enough time to develop stories. First, a series requires so much time, and there was none of that available to us. But slowly and surely we found out what things were working and what things weren't.  The one thing everybody forgets is it takes a long time to develop special effects. After writing down something on a page, it takes a while to make it work, and then you have to turn it over to other craftsmen. And it was tough trying to deal with schedules. The show was coming along very nicely."

Lost in the Writers Guild strike was the explanation that as our intrepid team battled the aliens, no one in the world remembered the invasion of 1953-the war that (in the George Pal film) destroyed, among other things, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Los Angeles city hall. The episode "Eye for an Eye" also explored the first invasion in 1938. Actor Philip Akin says, "It was never explained to anyone's satisfaction, ever. Just one of the blips that we had to keep glossing over and use smoke and mirrors to try and shy away from it...".  Further inconsistencies developed because years one and two had different production personnel, whose interpretations were in contrast to each other. "They changed the rules again," declares Fearnley. "And that's okay. Where the problem lies is within the season. If you break the rules, then you get into trouble." Asked if he felt the radical retooling of the show for second season was too much, Fearnley responds, "And did that contribute to the downfall of the show? As a viewer, I think so. As somebody working there, I can't say so because I didn't work on the second season. I don't know all of the reasons for the changes. Some executive somewhere wasn't happy. But as a viewer I preferred, in a funny way, the premise of the second season, where the aliens had accomplished a lot of their ends. The Earth was in dire straits. I liked that. That was kind of interesting. I preferred that apocalyptic, `Max Headroom' kind of approach to the universe."

Of the cast of characters assembled for the series, Fearnley enjoyed the four-person team consisting of a scientist, a military man, a communications expert and a biologist. But, he says, "Richard Chaves and Philip Akin were not as well served as they could have been. Those characters had handicaps placed upon them. "They put [actor Philip Akin] in a chair in a basement in front of a computer screen, and they didn't give him much of an opportunity. ... I mean, here was a character who's dynamic and filling the screen and yet we only cut to him every two seconds when we go to the TV screen. We had to get him involved in the story! He's tremendous! Very few shows had had people physically handicapped before, so nobody knew what to do, and we said, `Why not put him in a truck? Give him a facility. Get him outside and make him human. Get him away from the screen and office and into the world.' I think that was a big bonus, but I don't think the character was served as well as it could have been. He's a terrific actor. I don't take credit for [the van idea], but after a lot of discussions, we were able to do that." Philip Akin maintains, "Neill was responsible for Norton getting out and about. However, subsequent directors and the producers began, I felt, to feel it was too much of a hassle. In retrospect, it was as if they loved the idea of the wheelchair but not the reality [of working with it]." Fearnley points out that to include a disabled character in the show was a challenging and daring move on the part of the creators. "It's a melting pot," he reflects. "Somebody's saying [in casting the lead characters of this show], `Well, let's include in our group all of the different social aspects of America that we can think of and put that mix together,' and somebody gets the idea, `We'll put one guy in a wheelchair..." That requires a conscious decision. ... And War of the Worlds was one of the first shows where somebody at least made the effort to portray somebody functioning in society who had a physical handicap ... and made him one of the best characters of the whole show." Working with a wheelchair gave Akin opportunities to innovate and incorporate some personal skills into the show. "I am quite a physical person and actor. I train in Aikido, Kung Fu and Tai Chi as well as being an avid bicyclist, so the wheelchair forced me to work in many different ways than what I was used to. I couldn't use the physical stuff that I'm so fond of using. It was a bit of a stretch to try not to use my legs, thus I started to use a strap to tie my legs together so that it would be a constant reminder not to move. It did cause some problems on the set as they kept designing `Norton things' that were better suited to a leg-user and not a wheelchair user. A case in point was the alarm buzzer in the `Second Wave' script. They had it set on the floor, and the director could not see the problem or the incongruity of a floor switch for a wheelie. In one other case, I found it impossible to loop any of my lines standing up. It all had to be done seated as that position changed my breath and vocal patterns." Regarding other characters of the show, Fearnley says that Col. Ironhorse could have done a lot more, too. Yet he believes that the show's focus was more on Blackwood and Ironhorse than on some of the other characters and says there should have been a better balance. "It was all very politically correct, too. We had everything from the very right wing to the very left wing." Playing one of the three alien advocates like a German terrorist was Ilse Von Glatz's ticket to the show. She confesses War of the Worlds "was not a show that I would watch on TV myself. Dormant aliens brought back to life ... to wreak havoc on the world-come on! You must understand, actors are not necessarily concerned with concept. Nobody ever really explained (to me] what the concept really was. You go in there, do the job as best as you can-usually totally uninformed. I had absolutely no idea what was going on at the audition. Some terrorist thing, I was told. `Look stern. Dress in black.' I was handed a couple of pages of script that made no rhyme or reason. I guess I have the look they wanted, and [the fact] that I could play a German terrorist, with a German accent, got me the job. "We had pretty good ratings for the first few shows. We were all pretty hyped. The PR machine was working at full tilt. Richard Comar, Michael Rudder and I got our photos in full fright makeup, on the front page of the entertainment section of USA Today. But by the time I was just doing ADR (looping dialogue) in the studio, I was so far removed from the whole thing. I would only find out sporadically how things were going." At first, says Von Glatz, "we bad guys had the upper hand and were actually visible to the audience. To be quite honest, I don't think they should have ever allowed us-the triumvirate, the Advocates-to become unrecognizable. ... The audience, believe me, love to cheer on the villains too! They're usually more interesting. I knew we were `disintegrating,' but surely they could have come up with some miracle cure for us." As resident aliens on the first season, Von Glatz, Rudder and Comar never really interacted with the main cast. As a result, says Von Glatz, "Richard, Michael and I, as we always appeared together, became quite the team. Working so closely, I really got to love those guys. Making jokes, clowning around, trying to make sense of the script, sweating under all that makeup ... the filmmaking experience really boiled down to the camaraderie we shared. "For the time that I was there, I can only laud the production values. The work, the sets, a location at the Quarry in the first three episodes, were anything but low-budget. The set for the aliens in the studio was unbelievable. I was stunned when I first saw this immense cave that was to become our `home.' Shooting for TV is always rushed, but I was never aware of any `lowbudgetness' for the time I was actually on the set." As for her character, "I must say that my role never really developed," laments Von Glatz. "The most work I did was at the beginning as far as character was concerned. That's when I played Urick the terrorist. After that, as aliens, we were directed to be as monotone and unemotional as possible. The challenge was restricted to the limitations imposed by the prosthetics, the costume." Remembering audience reactions to her character, Ilse laughs: "Ha! I got one fan letter from a visually impaired fellow who thought I `looked' really hot as a terrorist. He requested a full length photo." She also remembers, "One day Richard and Michael and I headed off in the car during lunch break. No big deal, except that we were in full horror makeup and costume. Caused quite a few traffic jams!" In summary, says Von Glatz, "I can't say that I really had that much to do. For the most part we were instructed to act half dead and monotone. The real challenge came in the ADR studios. You're handed scripts in which you don't know what's going on and tape dialogue. It really works!"

When it comes to guest-starring in War of the Worlds, John Colicos, a respected actor famous as Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, remembers his appearance on "The Prodigal Son" very fondly. "It was a marvelous part," he says, "and in fact, one of the best science fiction parts ever created! [It was] one of the best science fiction scripts I think I've ever read. Greg Strangis, the producer, thought so highly of it that he put me up for an award, which unfortunately I did not get, as best performer in a guest role for a series. Colicos describes his character on "Prodigal Son" as a "half-alien, half human sort of character. It was a character who was in constant conflict with himself, whether he would let the human side or the alien side of himself take over." Did the character regard himself as human or alien? "That's the conflict," replies Colicos. "That's what we were trying to develop." He adds, "You would never know from week to week; was he an enemy or was he a human or was he trying to bridge the gap?" The character was to continue in the series, but the show went into a different direction. Colicos regards the loss of the character and the show as unfortunate. "Had it gone in the direction that Greg Strangis wanted to, I think it would have filled a marvellous void because there is a great audience out there for good intellectual science fiction. Unfortunately, producers thought otherwise, and they wanted blood and gore and that usual stuff you find on television, so it was cancelled."

Philip Akin believes his character on the show "was a strong individual with ideas and a great sense of humour and less of a compu-droid. I feel that within the parameters that I had to work in, I was pleased to go as far with him as I was able to. However, the full growth of the character was never realized. In that first year, he still remained somewhat stunted. By the end of the season there was progress, but still he was left somewhat stillborn. "In the last episode [of the first season] there was a great opportunity to have Norton healed. However, the producers backed away from the option that had been provided to them by the writers." Instead, at the start of the second season, Norton Drake and Col. Ironhorse were killed ("The Second Wave") as part of a radical facelift for the whole series, now under the guidance of a new producer, Frank Mancuso. The aliens were executed in this episode by new aliens, the Morthren, who took over attempting their own invasion of Earth. Of his departure, Akin says, "I thought the script was inconsistent and pathetic even for the genre. There were better, classier ways for people to leave than what they did. I have no real knowledge of why two of the most popular characters were killed off. I never got any other explanation except that the new producers wanted to go in another direction."

Richard Chaves, who played Col. Ironhorse, says that like Akin, he was anguished at the decision to kill his character. "I [had] gone through the whole gambit, the whole spectrum of emotions. I was hurt. I couldn't understand and it blew me away. At first I was very upset, and very angry, and I didn't understand. And one of the things that fuelled that negative reaction was that everybody kept telling me, `Richard, you're the greatest.' Everyone kept telling me my fan mail was like five-to-one." Series star Jared Martin provides an insight to the thought processes leading to the death of Ironhorse. "His character was sort of painted into a corner, and they couldn't deal with a sort of crisp, neatly pressed military person in the world which the show was going into," he remarks. "[That was] very much a Blade Runner, 1984 world as opposed to a brightly lit, by-the-book, military-operation kind of world. They wanted to introduce a character-more of a roguish, offbeat, Mad Max character-and the Ironhorse character was just not going to work. It was a real tough decision. I know that Frank Mancuso spent many late nights thinking about it. He was killing off, arguably, the most popular cast member, which you don't do lightly." Filming the scenes was very emotional for Chaves. "My last night of filming was very strange, and the first time I recounted what happened was to Peter Bloch Hanson, the guy who did the Starlog interview. And Peter isn't just a professional press person that I have worked with; he's a friend. He asked me what the last night was like, and I started telling him about it. The next thing I knew, I got real emotional and I fell apart. It was very, very difficult. It was a long, long night, and the most poignant moment of the entire time was when I took off my uniform for the last time and said goodbye to a very, very dear friend." But as time went on, Chaves says, he steered himself to the positives. "I knew something better would come along." Whatever shortcomings the show had for Philip Akin, being associated with War of the Worlds was worthwhile for him overall because of the impact his role made on the people who watched the show. "I have received lots of fabulous and caring mail from many people. At one conference a lady came up to me and told me of her friend's class of disabled kids who loved the show because Norton was so independent and capable. It was that kind of response that made it all quite special."

One cast member who continued into the second season was Lynda Mason Green, as microbiologist Suzanne McCullough. "When we first started working on War of the Worlds, I was very happy with the script," she says. "I liked the writing, the characters, the idea. I saw lots of potential for Suzanne. She was a woman who interested me. I liked her and looked forward to being a part of her evolution and the challenge of playing a successful scientist who was also a single mother. "For me, the best part of the [two-hour premiere episode] script was its humour. I felt that the tone and the wit that had been established by Greg Strangis in that script was a lot of fun. At times, `wit' slammed into `camp' but I, as a viewer, have always appreciated a series that had its tongue firmly implanted in its cheek and resisted taking itself too seriously. I looked forward to a lot of the same in future episodes." Green was concerned that the updated approach to the Pal adaptation of the Wells novel would not have the strong foundations for a long run. "Audiences these days have very sophisticated tastes, and expectations of SF drama are high. After Close Encounters and Star Trek and its subsequent generations, it's become hard to sell the `evil rubber suit Martian' without a healthy dose of humour. Since that seemed to be integral to the show at the beginning, I felt optimistic about our future." She was troubled, however, when the humour she appreciated became the first casualty of the writers' strike. "It seems in retrospect that we never quite got back on track after that, even after the strike was finally resolved. Writing seems to be a fragile process in need of a lot of TLC. I admit that it was a disappointment for me that we never seemed to get to that wonderful point where everything begins to pulse with the same rhythm." Further, Green recalls, "I was stunned to hear that we would be losing two important cast members. I had become friends with Phil Akin and was especially disappointed that he would not be back." However, she says, "By the end of the first season, we knew that we would have a new producer if there was to be a second season. Frank Mancuso, Jr., who became the new producer, had some very exciting changes to make. I liked what I heard so much that I could hardly wait to get back to work. "As the second season progressed, the style and the look that had been designed by Frank was maintained by our wonderful creative staff and their crews. The scripts also took on a more intense, darker, more dangerous tone and texture as well. We were now to become a Blade Runner-esque action/drama. The show bore so little resemblance to the first season that it was hard to relate the two. I personally preferred it. Mostly it gave me an opportunity to get out of the lab and to develop the relationship with Debi [played by young actress Rachel Blanchard] much more. Almost everything about the new season was much more interesting for Suzanne and therefore for me as well." One of the most important improvements for Green was changing the nature of the adversaries. "The aliens became more humanoid. Denis Forest and Catherine Disher were wonderfully arch Nazi-esque aliens. They updated the threat, made the aliens much more intelligent and consequently much scarier. I thought they were great. Julian Riching and Pat Phillips were also strong new members of the alien cast. "I was also glad to have Adrian Paul come aboard (as Kincaid]. His character was much more of the romantic action-adventure hero, a rogue warrior. We needed him in the second season, especially since we were now out of our element and the environment had completely changed. We were forced onto Kincaid's turf. It was an easy adjustment."

Discussing audience response to the drastic changes between seasons, Green says, "We were effectively two completely different shows connected by a thread of consistency that was barely more than a rumour. We lost a lot of fans that had been attached to the conservatism of the first season. The second year was much darker, oppressive, anarchic, and the `good guys' did not always win. Many of the more enthusiastic fans of the first season did not make the transition." On the other hand, "many did like it better, and we apparently gained a lot of new fans as they discovered the show." Green was unable to offer any concrete reasons for the show's demise. "Cast is rarely privy to such information until someone says, `The show is over. Your check is in the mail!' I assume we didn't have enough support in the syndication market, that our support at Paramount waned, that audiences were confused by the radical shift between seasons that was never really explained adequately. It's pure speculation on my part. I would have been happy to do one more season, but I think we took it as far as we could under the circumstances, and it was time to move on." Jared Martin says he's proud of the second season of War of the Worlds, which he called "immeasurably better." In a 1989 interview during the second season, while he was looping dialogue, Martin said that the show was "more consistent, it has a point of view and we seem to have taken that last ounce of effort that makes something extra good. "I think the show last year was perceived as an attempt to reach different kinds of audiences. We kind of went hat-in-hand to the audience and went, `Look at us! Won't you please watch our show and like it?' This year, we're building the show first, and we're making a statement. If we collect an audience, that's fine. Last year, I think we were concerned too much with demographics. This year, because of our executive producer, Frank Mancuso, Jr., our attitude is, `Let's swing for the fences on this one.' And if we fail, fine. If we get cancelled, life goes on, but if we don't and we're going to have a hit that makes us more concerned with the show ... and indeed it's already kind of paid with a good review in Variety." The radical format change between seasons one and two served to "open it up," Martin said. "Our show is based on the almost-tomorrow; therefore the things that we do are more recognizable and have to be based on reality. The more you base a show on reality, the more it starts swinging to a cops-and-robbers type of action-adventure show. We're trying to leverage out the concept of the show.... We're dealing in more pure science fiction terms. It's not just the good guys versus the bad guys from outer space [any longer]. That would get stale. "We're more urban-based this season," he continued. "What seems to be happening in the world is happening in the cities. There's Beirut, New York, you name it. We've moved into the city. What's happening in the cities are the real problems of the advancing world, how do we deal with them? We can make a statement and score some points if we stay in an urban environment." With the Morthren setting up shop on Earth and taking over where the Advocates failed, the second season's "new" aliens provided a deadlier threat to the world. Jared Martin said, "The strings are being pulled by the aliens. It's been personalized and we get to see more of their point of view. Why they're here and what they're about. They are not just stock villains in vacuum cleaner suits like they were last year, so the show is moving to the tune of the alien agenda, and this represents a shift other than us chasing them. [This time around] they are chasing us. We're living underground and are in more desperate circumstances, which makes for a more interesting show. "How do 250 or so aliens take over the earth? They don't have the weaponry at this point, they are cut off from their planet, [but] they [do have] superior intelligence and technology. How do they do it? They attack several nerve centres of the socioeconomic, political aspects of the earth. Basically, they are here to disrupt, destroy and take over. "The stewardship of Earth has been marred by all sorts of ecological disasters; nuclear explosions and constant warfare. We just don't get on with each other and we're not really taking care of this planet very well. I mean, there's an underlying ecological message to this series, which has to be well decorated with action-adventure or else people just wouldn't tune in." It's there if you look for it, he said. Martin also believed that with proper care, the show would be further exposed to audiences via overseas sales, cassettes, and syndication reruns. And in fact, the Sci-Fi Channel promptly picked up War of the Worlds when the station first went on the air in the fall of 1992. "It's a timeless thing," insisted Martin. "Most science fiction is. It's not going to fade as quickly as a lot of action-adventure, sitcom or dramatic shows might." Martin waxed romantic at the notion of the show going for five years. "Well, I'd like to. I like the character. I like the people [I work with], I like the set-up, and in terms of my acting this is my signature series. Right now I'm very involved with it and I'd hate to think that we will close down at the end of this [second] year." Unfortunately for Martin, the War of the Worlds did just that.