‘Solar Opposites’: Aliens Land in the Suburbs in Justin Roiland’s New Animated Hulu Show
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While each streaming service is each staking claims to their slice of the adult animation world, Hulu’s entry, “Solar Opposites,” has kept plenty of its details close to the vest. On Friday at a Comic-Con panel, series co-creators and “Rick and Morty” vets Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan expanded on the vague “alien family comedy” description that’s followed the show since its series order last summer.
“It’s a group of aliens and their home planet gets destroyed by an asteroid and a bunch of them flee. We follow one particular escape pod of aliens that end up landing on earth. It really is an immigrant story, but it’s from the perspective of aliens. They’re kind of unfamiliar with everything,” Roiland told the gathered crowd at Comic-Con’s Indigo Ballroom. “They don’t understand human culture. They don’t know what’s real and what’s fake.”
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The central unit on the show is made up of two contrasting pairs of aliens, all living under the same roof (the one that their pod first crash-landed into). Even after a period of adjusting to some of the basic tenets of human suburban life, one half of the “family” is entranced by human culture, while the other tries to hue closer to the customs of the land they came from.
Regardless, it seems like each of these individual aliens is equally susceptible to wreaking havoc among everyday life in their neighborhood.
“They have the best of intentions and there’s a lot of misunderstanding. But the show is very violent, with unintentional deaths. The characters are very sweet and nice, but they tend to kill a lot of people accidentally,” Roiland said.
The fifth and final piece of this main family puzzle is the Pupa, a sentient multifunctional organism that the other four aliens still haven’t been able to crack.
“The Pupa is basically a hybrid between a baby, a pet, and also a living hard drive that stores all of their home world’s information in its DNA. None of them know how to unlock the information or how the Pupa works. They all know the Pupa eventually will change and that something’s going to happen,” Roiland said.
The panel also offered information on some previously unannounced cast members, including Tiffany Haddish (as the ship’s onboard AI), Alfred Molina, Christina Hendricks, Andy Daly, Alan Tudyk, and (cryptically) Thomas Middleditch.
When the show premieres on Hulu, all eight episodes of the show’s initial season will be available at once. The co-creators explained that this decision helped them make the show more serialized and rewarding to people who watch multiple episodes in a compressed time period, as opposed to waiting week-to-week.
“We’re going to be dropping all the episodes at once, and we knew it when we were writing it. It has a different feel when you’re watching it. It was a blast to write,” McMahan said.
By the nature of each show’s respective corporate structures, a “Solar Opposites”/”Rick and Morty” crossover probably isn’t going to be happening any time soon. But based on the clip shown at the panel, this new show’s sense of humor will be something of a cousin to the uber-popular Adult Swim series.
For anyone concerned about the amount of both show’s respective outputs, McMahan was sure to calm any potential fan fears.
“We write and make this show at the same building as ‘Rick and Morty’ but we don’t utilize anybody who’s making ‘Rick and Morty’ at that time. They go at their own different speeds,” McMahan said. “We have 8-episode seasons of this, and we’re already starting to write the next season already. I expect this to be moving smoothly.”
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