RESIDENT ALIEN – Season 4 Key Art | ©2025 Syfy

In Season 4 of RESIDENT ALIEN, on USA and Syfy Friday nights and streaming on Peacock (with the other seasons thereafter), extraterrestrial Harry Vanderspiegle (Alan Tudyk) has had to deal with being stuck full-time in his human body. His human best friend Asta (Sara Tomko) and her best friend D’Arcy (Alice Wetterlund) have had to deal with dilemmas posed by Harry’s condition, trying to hide a baby from the kidnapping Grey aliens, and not knowing what to do about the baby’s frantically searching parents, Kate (Meredith Garretson) and Ben (Levi Fiehler). Deputy Liv (Elizabeth Bowen) is delighted to have her belief in aliens confirmed, while Sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) has to admit that Liv was right all along, and conceding he’s made a mistake is tough for him.

Chris Sheridan, who adapted RESIDENT ALIEN from the Dark Horse graphic novels by Peter Hogan & Steven Parkhouse and serves as executive producer and showrunner, first gets on a Zoom call and a few days later speaks on the black carpet for the Season 4 premiere to discuss what’s going on this year with Harry and Company.

For starters, RESIDENT ALIEN’s first three seasons aired on Syfy Channel, and were also available on sister network USA. Then Syfy evidently dropped RESIDENT ALIEN, but USA picked it up, and Season 4 is, like its predecessors, running on both networks.

Can Sheridan shed any light on all this?

“To be honest, when I originally sold [RESIDENT ALIEN], I sold it to USA, and then they shifted it to Syfy, and then it went back to USA. It’s produced by UCP, which is Universal Content Productions, which is the cable arm of Universal, as Universal Television and UCP, which are their studios.

“So, our studio is UCP, and the network that airs it is now USA, was Syfy. They were all part of the same company until recently. More recently now, USA and Syfy have left the Comcast universe into their own company, called Versant. It gets very confusing. But the most important thing is that, creatively, nothing, I think, has changed. It’s still on Syfy, which wasn’t something that we expected. It’s a USA Original now, but it now also airs on Syfy. Last year, it was a Syfy Original.

Sheridan has heard from concerned fans. “I think the audience has a bit of a fear, now that we’ve switched from Syfy to USA, that it’s going to be a different show. But the great thing about it is that all the executives at Syfy that I’ve been working with for seven years, since the pilot, are the same executives who work at USA. They do USA and Syfy. So, it’s all the same people. Nothing has changed creatively. I don’t know if the audience really knows that, it would be my fear, too, if I had a show that I loved and it switched networks, and you feel like, ‘Oh, it’s going to have a different direction.’”

RESIDENT ALIEN – Season 3 key art | ©2024 Syfy

There is reassurance to be had. “First of all, [the executives have] always been so supportive of my vision of the show. I’m very collaborative, they have ideas, they have notes, and we talk through it. They don’t make me do anything that I don’t feel is right. They’ve been so incredibly helpful since the beginning that I’m lucky to be able to work with these people, and lucky that these same people are the ones working at USA. So, it’s been a great journey creatively with the show.”

Sheridan has high praise for leading man Tudyk. Can the showrunner pinpoint what Tudyk does that is so unique?

“Yeah. Alan Tudyk as an actor has such control over what he’s doing, it’s to an extent that I’ve never seen any other actor do. And in this season, coming in and having lost, at least for a time, his alien energy and being forced to live in the body that is purely human, he’s able to adjust his humanity so slightly that you know he’s affected by it, but you also know there’s a struggle in there. And there are so few actors who can pull off the subtlety in performance that he does at all times, but this season especially.”

Harry is always going through something new but so are all the other main characters. Do Sheridan and the writers start each season by charting out what will happen to each of their people?

“Yes. We always start with Harry, try to figure out what’s Harry’s journey in this season. And that will give a sense of theme for the season, and then when we talk about the other characters, we try to see along the spine of that theme what we can do with them. So, we go through every single one of the characters one by one after Harry, and just talk about, what’s their journey, what are they feeling coming off the last season?

“Like Asta. [In Season 3], she had this experience on the moon, which was huge, and so what we wanted to play with Asta coming back, for a lot of this season, Asta’s got to deal with some of these emotions she has. She’s seen the size of the universe from being in space, she comes back, and she’s feeling small, and it takes her, some of her friends and her cousin Kayla [Sarah Podemsky] to try to remind her that we’re part of everything, you’re not small, and you can do anything with your life. So, Asta has to figure out this season what she wants her life to be.

Chris Sheridan, Showrunner / Executive Producer and Alan Tudyk at The London West Hollywood on June 5, 2025 for the Season 4 premiere of RESIDENT ALIEN | ©2025 Syfy | Todd Williamson

D’Arcy [is] struggling. At the end of last season, she had a bit of a victory – she was able to save Kate’s baby and felt good about herself. It was a very unselfish move, but D’Arcy has bigger issues that she has to deal with, and she hasn’t been dealing with. So, coming into this season, D’Arcy is struggling in trying to find her own happiness. But she’s not going to get there until she realizes what her biggest problem is, and she’s got to tackle that.

“Because the Mantid is on Earth, we knew there would probably be some dead bodies stacking up, so Mike and Liv have to deal with some murders, which is nice – it kind of harkens back to Season 1 a little bit, that they’re on the investigative trail of what’s going on and how these people are dying.

“And Ben and Kate – it seemed like at the end of Season 3 that Kate was about to get her baby back, but it didn’t quite work out the way people thought it would, and Ben and Kate find themselves at a loss. Kate has memories from the hypnosis from Harry about having that connection with her baby and is willing to do anything to get [the baby] back. So, Ben and Kate are on a mission this season, struggling with keeping their family together and trying to find this baby.

“So, [the characters] all have big emotional drives this season and hurdles they have to overcome in order to  put themselves back together in a whole way, where they will feel, hopefully, by the end of this season, like a more three-dimensional human being and happier with  their place in the world, and get to a level of happiness we haven’t seen yet this season for any of them.”

Regarding the Mantid, prolific actor Clancy Brown voiced the dangerous Mantid alien in Seasons 3 and 4, but when he takes human form, he first appears as Harry (as played by Tudyk) but then is played by performers other than Brown. Why is this?

“It just didn’t make sense from a storytelling standpoint,” Sheridan explains.

Was there a question of whether Brown should continue to voice the Mantid when he’s in other human bodies, or just voice the Mantid’s unspoken thoughts, or have whoever is playing the body also voice the thoughts?

“Yeah, we had a long conversation in the writers’ room about how to handle that. What made sense was, when Mantid Harry, in the body of Alan Tudyk, spoke, it should sound like Alan Tudyk, because that’s what Harry sounds like, and he’s trying to be Harry. It’ll be Alan’s face and Alan’s voice. But his inner monologue, we thought it would be very helpful to have that inner voice be Clancy Brown, to help remind the audience that there’s another being inside this body.”

Back in Season 1, Harry himself was a dangerous alien, on a mission from his people to destroy the Earth. In Season 4, the Gray aliens offer Harry his extraterrestrial nature back if he will destroy his own people, but D’Arcy and Asta talk him out of it. “I think they can see the big picture. Being a human allows you to see the big picture. Just because [Harry’s people] were coming after us doesn’t mean that you should counter hate with hate. Sometimes, when you counteract hate with love, it can change the world.

“I think thematically that’s what we’re trying to go for, that they have an openness and understanding about the greater picture, because they’re humans, about trying to do the right thing, and trying to do right by Harry. D’Arcy knows that, that Harry can’t kill his people because it would be a loss for him in that. And she knows him well enough to know that it’s not right for him to do that. And it’s being a friend when they don’t have the ability to know what right or wrong is. Sometimes you need a friend to help guide you.”

Is there a theme for RESIDENT ALIEN Season 4?

“We’ve talked a lot about, in the show, since the pilot, about the theme of connection and how humans are stronger when they’re connected, when they help each other. This year, it’s part of that, but it is individually, what does it take for an individual to find happiness and to feel fulfilled in their own life, so when they do connect with a community, that they can bring their best version of themselves, so that what they’re bringing to the group is positive and not negative. So, each of the characters this season are doing their work to figure out what their happiness is – what do they need to do in their lives to find that peace and happiness within so that they bring their best selves to the community. We talk a lot about human connection and how people are stronger when they work together, but what’s important in that is people being positive and happy when they go into the group.

“So, what I want people to take away is, maybe [viewers are] more aware of their own happiness, and feel like, if they’re not happy, maybe if they can find their own happiness, it’s not just for them, it’s for everybody. If they can find it, then they can make a better person of themselves out there, and maybe the smallest kind gesture that they are able to give someone else will create an effect of its own on other people, where then maybe they might be a little happier and it spreads a little bit and brings more happiness to the community.”

Related: Exclusive Interview with RESIDENT ALIEN adapter, executive producer and showrunner Chris Sheridan on the fourth and final season

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Article: Exclusive Interview with RESIDENT ALIEN adapter, executive producer and showrunner Chris Sheridan on the fourth and final season

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