Aliens in America TV Show is one of the best new comedies on television. That may sound like hyperbole, since this is a story about its star, but it also happens to be true. While it’s also true that there are not an abundance of great new comedies this fall, Aliens would stand out no matter how strong the competition. It’s the story of Justin Tolchuk, a small town teenager who finds himself a hopeless social misfit at his high school. In an effort to “import” a friend for him, his mother signs up to house an exchange student.
That student, Raja, happens to be a Pakistani Muslim - an even bigger outsider in Justin’s small town, thus making him even more of an outcast. However, the two boys end up forming a strong friendship and what looked like a social disaster ends up being perhaps the best thing to happen to Justin. The show has a touch of Wonder Years, a bit of Freaks and Geeks and maybe even a little of the dearly departed Arrested Development. Any comedy that can somehow work 9/11 into a joke, and NOT have it be offensive - is onto something good.
Dan Byrd and Adhir Kalyan
It was some time ago that actor Dan Byrd was first cast as Justin Tolchuk. As far as he can remember, he was the first person cast on the series - which ultimately didn’t get picked up. Thinking the project was dead, as so often happens with television pilots, the actor was moving on to other things when he got the call that The CW - the new network formed out of the ashes of The WB and UPN, were picking up Aliens in America.
“The time we started shooting the pilot to the time we started shooting the actual TV series was almost exactly a year,” Byrd said. “There was at least six months of just assuming nothing was going to happen with it. It hadn’t really been put to rest officially, but I just assumed it wasn’t going any further. So it was a really nice surprise when they decided to pick it up for fall.”
This meant heading to Vancouver, Canada where the production is located. As many actors relocated to Canada will tell you, it creates a closer bond between the cast and crew. Nobody can really go back to their normal lives, because they’re not living at home. Instead they’re essentially stuck together in a foreign country (well, sort of, it is only Canada). Upon making the move, Byrd decided to let life mimic fiction by moving in with his co-star, Adhir Kalyan.
“You’re spending so much time together professionally and then you’re at home with this person too,” Byrd said. ” It’s a lot of face time we have with each other, but I think ultimately it’s helped us form a really strong bond that eventually will end up bleeding into what’s happening on screen.”
While Justin is an awkward teenager almost constantly under siege at school, Byrd says his experience wasn’t quite like that. In fact, he actually left high school to pursue actor just before his senior year. “I can definitely relate to lots of things that Justin has to go through,” Byrd said. “But my high school experience was a little stilted compared to this one.”
With Justin being a junior, Dan has been able to pick up where he left off a few years before. In a way, it’s allowing him to finish the high school experience on television. “There’s been a lot of living vicariously in this whole project,” Byrd said. “We’ve done a homecoming episode and there’s stuff that you think of immediately when you think of high school, and a lot of it I wasn’t able to experience - so it’s nice to be able to do that on some level.”
While Byrd is still young, he’s amassed an impressive list of credits even prior to his role on Aliens in America. As an actor with experience, he found some of the elements of Justin’s character to be uniquely challenging. “The biggest challenge for me is defining somebody who is not really definable at this point in his life. Justin is still kind of a shell of a person and not set in any way in particular. So there’s a balance in creating a character who has an identity, but who hasn’t really found it yet.”
Byrd also saw the nature of a being a regular on a TV series as a challenge. “The thing is, with a movie you get to see a beginning, a middle and an end. You can create the arc and you know what transitions this person is going through. You know where you start and where you end and you figure out how you get there in-between. But in a TV show you’re learning as you go along. A new episode comes and I find out something different about this character. So you have to be more fluid and open to whatever they throw at you.”
When we talked, Dan was shooting the twelfth episode of the season, but had only seen the first handful. “The scripts have been really consistently good and funny. It’s really great writing overall, so hopefully we’re doing it justice and everything on the page is coming off on screen too.” He did mention that his favorite episode that he’s seen so far was the fourth (regular) episode, “Homecoming.”
There was another project that Byrd was involved with that is just about as different from Aliens in America as it gets, and that’s the re-make of The Hills Have Eyes. Byrd was one of only a handful of characters in that movie that could possibly have found their way to a sequel, but he says they never talked to him about it. “I don’t think I knew they were making a sequel until I saw a preview for it on TV. I had no involvement whatsoever. I think it’s a completely different storyline about army guys that get sabotaged by all new mutants or what not. I don’t think they were going to continue the storyline with the family, I think that chapter is pretty much closed.”
With his mutant fighting days behind him, Byrd and the rest of the cast of Aliens in America are currently waiting to see if The CW will order a full season of the comedy. With decent ratings and lots of love from critics, its chances are looking better with each episode that airs.
