ALF: Melmac, Gordon Shumway and the Alien Who Ate Cats in the Suburbs

ALF arrived on NBC on September 22, 1986, and the premise fit in a sentence: an alien crashes into a suburban garage and the family hides him. The alien was Gordon Shumway, a three-foot, furry, snouted creature with a corrugated face and a New York wise guy's delivery, who had been flying for his planet's Orbit Guard when Melmac was destroyed and who had followed the amateur radio signal of Willie Tanner, a social worker in the San Fernando Valley, all the way to Willie's garage roof. Willie (Max Wright), his wife Kate (Anne Schedeen) and their children Lynn and Brian took him in, named him for what he was, an Alien Life Form, and spent four seasons keeping him from the neighbours, the Ochmoneks, and from the Alien Task Force, a fictional military unit that wanted him in a laboratory.

The character was the creation of Paul Fusco, who built the puppet, operated it and supplied the voice, and Tom Patchett, who ran the series. Fusco gave ALF a biography that the writers kept adding to: born on Melmac on October 28, 1756, which made him 229 at the start of the show; a graduate of Melmac High; a former Orbit Guard pilot; a creature with eight stomachs, a taste for cats and a habit of quoting Melmacian proverbs that made no sense on Earth. Melmac itself had a green sky, blue grass and a purple sun, and its destruction, a nuclear accident of some kind that ALF describes without much grief, is the show's one dark fact, mentioned and then buried under the next joke.

ALF was a hand-and-rod puppet for almost every shot, and the mechanics ran the production. The Tanner house set was built on a raised platform with trapdoors and a trench cut through the floor, so that Fusco, crouched below, could bring the puppet up through the counter, the couch or the kitchen table; every scene had to be blocked around the holes, every take waited on a puppet that could not be rushed, and a half-hour episode took the better part of a working week to shoot. For the few shots that needed ALF to walk across a room, Michu Meszaros, a Hungarian performer under three feet tall, wore a full-body suit. The cast came to loathe the process. Max Wright said as much for years afterwards, and Anne Schedeen described the set as a place with no joy in it, which is a strange thing to learn about a show that was, on screen, all warmth.

The series ended on March 24, 1990 with a cliffhanger nobody had planned to leave unresolved: ALF, on his way to a rendezvous with the surviving Melmacians, is captured by the Alien Task Force on a Nevada airfield. NBC cancelled the show before a fifth season could free him, and the ending stood for six years, until Project: ALF (1996), a TV film in which he escapes a military base without a single Tanner in sight. Two animated series had run alongside the sitcom, ALF: The Animated Series and ALF Tales, set on Melmac before it blew up, and the character kept returning as a talk-show host, a commercial pitchman and a nostalgia act well into the 2020s.

The show treated Melmacian biology as a source of gags and, over a hundred episodes, accumulated a surprising amount of it. Melmacians live for centuries; ALF at 229 is a young adult. They have eight stomachs, hearts that the writers relocated whenever a joke required it, and a digestive tolerance for almost anything, cats being the delicacy. They cannot get drunk on alcohol but are affected by other foods, and they have the shed fur and the hairball problems of the animal ALF most resembles. Melmac's society, as ALF describes it, was a bureaucratic, sports-mad, faintly ridiculous mirror of the 1980s United States, with a legal system that seems to have consisted mostly of fines and a national pastime, Bouillabaseball, played with fish.

What made the creature work was that it was never mysterious. E.T. four years earlier had been silent, luminous and sad; ALF talked constantly, mostly about himself, and the family's problem was not concealing a wonder but housing a lodger who ate everything and broke the television. The show's subject, under the fur, was a family absorbing a difficult relative, and it played the alien as an in-law. That was new in 1986, and it is why the character outlived the series: an alien you could be irritated by was an alien you could love.

The Alien Task Force was a joke with a real referent. ALF debuted in the decade when the Roswell incident came back to life: Charles Berlitz and William Moore's 1980 book had revived the 1947 crash, the Majestic 12 documents surfaced in 1984 and were published in 1987, and the idea that the U.S. military had recovered a craft and its occupants and was hiding both had moved from the fringe into paperback nonfiction. A sitcom about a crashed alien living in a garage, hunted by a military unit that wanted to dissect him, was drawing on that story without ever naming it, and the 1990 finale, with its Nevada airfield and its hangar, was the closest network comedy came to Area 51 before The X-Files.

The other borrowing is the shape of the story: the hidden alien in a suburban house, kept from the authorities by children. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) had set that pattern, and the E.T. article traces its roots to the benevolent visitors of the contactee era; ALF is the same story played for laughs, and it was followed within a decade by 3rd Rock from the Sun and, in the 2000s, by Roger of American Dad!, who is ALF's direct descendant, an alien lodger in the attic with the Roswell backstory made explicit. The aliens on TV article follows the sitcom alien from My Favorite Martian onward, and the glossary covers the crash-retrieval claims the Task Force was parodying.