Review: Resident Alien season 1, episode 1 – “Pilot”
By Chad Porto
Ratings and Industry Grades
Resident Alien debuted Wednesday night on SyFy to a modest number of 1.08 million viewers. While the number may scare some that this show is in trouble, only eight shows since 2014 have debuted on SyFy with a higher number and in most cases by only a few hundred thousand more. Only Dominion, a spin-off of the film Legion, did significantly better at 1.92 million.
39 shows have debuted on SyFy in that time. Of those eight shows that topped Resident Alien in the previous seven years, four, 12 Monkeys, The Expanse, Z Nation, and Van Helsing, got more than two seasons. The other shows, Krypton, Helix, Dominion, and Happy! all debuted with nice numbers and fell off hard heading into their second seasons, none worse than perhaps Helix, who lost nearly over a million average viewers.
That’s going to be the key for Resident Alien; keeping people invested. The show should keep it’s audience through the first season as the show introduces a murder mystery and an alien-B-film plot all in the same episode. Those are strong hooks, with legs, so they should be able to finish out the first season relying on those plot points.
The scores from review sites are doing well. Rotten Tomatoes, though not always a perfect source, has a critic review score of 95% positive and an audience score of 96%.
IMDB has it 8.4 out of 10. Google is tracking it at 94%, and MetaCritic giving it a 70 out of 100.