The Solomons of 3rd Rock from the Sun: The Home Planet, the Big Giant Head and the Mission

3rd Rock from the Sun premiered on NBC on January 9, 1996, and its premise was the sitcom alien multiplied by four. A survey team from an unnamed planet has taken human form and settled in Rutherford, Ohio, as a family: Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), the High Commander, who has become a physics professor at a small university and is the mission's leader and its most excitable member; Sally (Kristen Johnston), the security officer, a decorated male soldier assigned the female body; Harry (French Stewart), the communicator, whose function is to receive transmissions from home in seizures; and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the information officer, the oldest and wisest of the four, placed in the body of a teenager and obliged to attend high school. Their assignment is to study the humans and report, and their handicap is that they have never had bodies before.

The show was created by Bonnie and Terry Turner, who had written the Coneheads film three years earlier, and it took the Coneheads' central joke, aliens who pass for human despite everything, and gave it a family to live in and a straight woman to play against: Dr. Mary Albright, Dick's colleague and love interest, played by Jane Curtin, who had been Prymaat Conehead on Saturday Night Live and knew the part. It ran six seasons and 139 episodes, ending on May 22, 2001, and won eight Emmys, three of them Lithgow's.

The Solomons' species is almost undescribed, on purpose. They come from a world of pure intellect where beings have no bodies, no families, no gender and no weather, where reproduction is a matter of assignment and where the Big Giant Head rules everything; the show's flashbacks and dreams show their true form as purple tubes, or as a gas, or as nothing at all, and the point is that the human body is the first thing that has ever happened to them. Every plot is a body plot. Dick discovers love, jealousy, the common cold and the dentist; Sally discovers being looked at; Harry discovers television and, later, that the transmissions he receives may be doing him harm; Tommy discovers puberty from the inside of a body that is younger than his mind. Their reports home, dictated at the end of episodes from the roof of their house, are the show's moral, a family of geniuses concluding that humans are ridiculous and that they would like to be more like them.

Their mission has a chain of command that the later seasons made physical. The Big Giant Head sends orders, replacements and, eventually, himself; a second team of aliens turns up in the fourth season, led by Dick's superior officer and doppelgänger; and the finale, "The Thing That Wouldn't Die," recalls the team to the home planet. Dick erases Mary's memory of him rather than take her along, and the four leave in a beam of light from the roof, which is the only time the show showed its aliens travelling as anything but a family in a Rambler.

The show worked because Lithgow played the alien as a man who had just been born at fifty. Dick Solomon is loud, tactless, vain, brilliant and utterly at sea, and his failures to understand human custom are the failures of someone who has read everything and experienced nothing; the writers gave him a physicist's vocabulary and a toddler's impulse control and let Lithgow, a stage actor with a taste for size, play both at once. The alien-as-outsider had been done by Mork, by Alf and by Uncle Martin; 3rd Rock did it as a family sitcom in which every member of the family is the outsider, so that the only human in the house is the audience.

It was also, quietly, the last of its kind. The 1990s alien in American television was mostly the X-Files Grey, conspiratorial and silent, and 3rd Rock ran through the whole of that show's peak as its comic inverse, a group of visitors who are not here to abduct anyone and cannot keep a secret for a week. The sitcom alien after 2001 moved into animation, to Roger and to Kang and Kodos, and no live-action network comedy has since asked an audience to accept a family of aliens in a small Ohio town for six years. The aliens on TV article puts the show in the line from My Favorite Martian to the streaming era.

Aliens who pass as human because they look human are the oldest visitors in the lore. The contactees of the 1950s described tall, fair, human beings from Venus and the Pleiades who could walk through a city unnoticed, and George Adamski's Orthon, met in the California desert in 1952, wore what looked like a ski suit; the Nordic aliens article covers those accounts and the belief, still current in the channelling literature, that such beings live among us on assignment. The Solomons are that belief as a sitcom: a survey team in human form, reporting to a superior, studying our customs, and finding that the bodies come with feelings the mission did not plan for. The show's home planet, all intellect and no bodies, is the ascended-being cosmology of the contactees with the reverence removed.

Ohio was a good choice of posting. The state's record includes the Portage County chase of April 1966, in which sheriff's deputies followed a bright object for thirty miles into Pennsylvania, and the Coyne helicopter incident of October 1973, in which an Army Reserve crew over Mansfield reported a grey, cigar-shaped object that stopped their descent and pulled them upward; the history of UFOs covers both. The Solomons' relatives in fiction are the Coneheads, written by the same team, and Mork, the first observer sent to report on us and the first to go native; the glossary's entry on the Space Brothers is the origin of the whole idea.