Orphan Black Featurette Introduces BBC America’s New Sci-fi Clone Thriller
This article is more than 2 years old
Doctor Who will return with new episodes on March 30th, but the Doctor isn’t the only one bringing sci-fi adventures to BBC America at the end of the month. The long-running British science fiction series will have a new cloning thriller clinging to its coattails, and hopefully it’ll live up to that pairing. Now the BBC has released a new behind-the-scenes look at Orphan Black.
Created by John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps) and Graeme Manson (Cube), Orphan Black follows Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), whose life changes drastically after watching a woman commit suicide…a woman who looks just like her. Stepped into the identity of “Beth,” she soon realizes the mystery goes much deeper than the death of a doppelganger, because Beth wasn’t the only one out there with a striking resemblance to Sarah…
The setup sounds a lot like The CW’s godawful identical twin series Ringer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Thankfully Orphan Black doesn’t have a high bar to hurdle when it comes to outshining that series, and hopefully BBCA’s pairing of the series with Doctor Who will give it a chance to bring in more eyeballs than it otherwise would.
Orphan Black is one of BBC America’s first scripted shows, following up on the likes of period cop drama Copper. It’s the first of the network’s original scripted series to dip a toe into the science fiction drama, but it makes good sense for BBCA. The network has a long history of airing genre shows such as Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Next Generation (for some reason), so if Orphan Black succeeds, that could mean more original science fiction programming, and that’s good for fanboys and girls such as ourselves.
With Ginger Snaps and Cube, Fawcett and Manson were responsible for two solid low-budget genre thrillers that still hold up nicely, so hopefully they’ll knock this one out of the part. You can check out Orphan Black March 30th on BBC America.
