I missed this show when it was in its first run but now am able to watch episodes streaming on NBC's Peacock service. This show is comedy gold, precisely because of Alan Tudyk in the role of the alien. He is sent to Earth on a mission, he crashes, and by luck takes on the form of a local town man who owns a cabin by the frozen lake. Then the town doctor is found dead and he is pressed into acting as town doctor even though he doesn't know anything about being a doctor. His nemesis becomes the young boy in town who actually sees him as the alien he is.
Filmed in the beautiful Canada mountains, it is set in the fictional town of Patience, Colorado. The alien says he is from a planet around a star 46 light years away. For anyone not familiar with the size of our Milky Way galaxy, it is roughly 110,000 light years across so there are many stars within the 45 to 50 light year range.
In addition to Tudyk's performance what makes this such a good and interesting series is the writing. It is very inventive and very funny, especially the way Tudyk plays his character, a very direct person with no intended humor at all, which turns out to be very humorous. There are also some good human drama issues among the normal human characters.
I gathered from some reviews that season #2 isn't as good. I don't share that opinion. Where season 1 focused on the alien getting used to Earthling ways, season 2 focuses on him starting to become more human-like as more and more around him discover his true identity. The writing remains excellent and just when you think there are no more surprises, you get more surprises. To me one of the better series in recent years, highly interesting and entertaining. Even though most actors, other than Tudyk, are not well-known each creates an interesting character.
