CHILDHOOD'S END
Syfy, 8:00 p.m. ET
MINISERIES PREMIERE: Part 1 of 3. This three-part Syfy miniseries is based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke – which, like Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land, is one of the most admired science fiction novels of the era never to be adapted for the screen. (Okay, add Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle to that list as well.) Clarke, after all, is the guy whose short story inspired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, so this new dramatization of his 1953 Childhood’s End classic should be worth the wait. Right? Only partly. One problem is, so many subsequent alien-invasion dramas have borrowed from Clarke’s playbook, from TV’s V to the movies Independence Day and War of the Worlds, that this story seems overly familiar, at least in its opening installments. And the characters and actors don’t pull you into the drama effectively, which is a problem that has nothing to do with the age of the story. Continues tomorrow and Wednesday.