New TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY Trailer

Greetings, GMMRers! I’m Allie and I’ll be covering all things TORCHWOOD from now through “Miracle Day,” premiering July 8th on Starz.

Starz is slowly leaking out teaser videos for next month’s premiere of TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY, and it looks amazing. Action-packed, suspenseful as all giddy-up, and with a parade of stars from both sides of the Atlantic, every subsequent piece of video makes it look better and better. (John Barrowman has a more colorful description in the video below.)

For those unfamiliar with the show, TORCHWOOD is a science fiction series that aired three seasons in the U.K., the last in 2009. It’s about an immortal, time-traveling secret agent and his team of renegade crimefighters, who work off the grid to handle Britain’s greatest problems (think aliens). The show’s producers made a deal to continue the series as a co-production between the BBC and new partner network Starz, bringing the show to America and providing it with a significantly raised budget.

It’s quite thrilling to see these two wonderfully disparate worlds (big, shiny Hollywood television and character-driven, guy-in-an-alien-costume British television) collide. Here, the Brits appear genuinely excited to be filming a better-financed series. “TORCHWOOD on Starz is gonna be massive!” enthuses Barrowman, who plays team leader Captain Jack Harkness. “We’ve got helicopters! We’ve got explosions! We’ve got car crashes! We’ve got poisonings!”

What’s even more fun, though, is trusting that it’s still going to have the same heart and drive that Russell T Davies has infused into the DOCTOR WHO universe since 2005. (TORCHWOOD spun off from — and is an anagram of — DOCTOR WHO.) Keeping series creator Russell T Davies and fellow producer Julie Gardner on board ensures that the writing is the highest priority and that the already-loved characters will be well taken care of in America, but getting more Americans involved — as both viewers and characters — brings heightened stakes for the previously low-profile drama. Bill Pullman, who plays the season’s villain, Oswald Jones, says about the story, “Before you know it, you’re taking the bait, drank the Kool-Aid, and you can’t believe that you’re going on this ride.” You get the idea that Pullman and his American peers (which also includes ER’s Mekhi Phifer and SIX FEET UNDER’s Lauren Ambrose) were surprised themselves to find out that TORCHWOOD is such a huge, serious establishment.

Which is exactly what it is after 2009’s superb “Children of Earth.” TORCHWOOD’s last outing, a five-episode masterpiece of storytelling, is surely some of the most fearless television ever written. (It’s also available on Netflix Instant Watch if you want an introduction to the series before “Miracle Day” picks up.) Even though it took two years, this intense, grandiose production feels like the logical next step for the series, and one can only hope that the execution pays off.

One interesting note: in this video, Davies says, “Torchwood is a team of people whose job is to investigate the unusual, the strange.” Historically — dating all the way back to Queen Victoria! — Torchwood’s job has been to investigate extraterrestrial threats. Although the first and second seasons contain episodes that do not involve alien invasions, the show has used UFO stories extensively and as a tentpole of storytelling, particularly in “Children of Earth.” I had assumed that “Miracle Day” would turn out to be the work of an Earth-hating race of aliens, but Davies’s turn of phrase has me thinking that we might be looking at a human catalyst. It makes me wonder if TORCHWOOD’s alien leanings will be downplayed stateside. Do producers think Americans aren’t ready for this show’s casual and oft-cavalier interactions with extraterrestrials? Or did the writers merely choose to focus the lens exclusively on this planet for a change?

Finally, I just can’t get enough of Eve Myles’s Gwen Cooper as a mom. In this video, we see her shooting rounds while protecting her little furry-pink-blanketed daughter. It’s a move even Sydney Bristow never got to employ, and it’s impressive.

Check it out…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJdcW4o8EY[/youtube]

Sound off on your expectations for TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY in the comments!

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