PASADENA, Calif. — The Sci Fi Channel gets funny — or, at least, attempts to get funny — in its latest series, "The Chronicle."
The cable network is calling the show, which premieres with back-to-back episodes Saturday at 7 and 8 p.m., a "drama with a comic sensibility," but it often strays into the realm of the downright goofy.
"It's definitely a science-fiction series," said creator/executive producer Silvio Horta (who wrote the movie "Urban Legend"). "It definitely has a lot of comic sensibility, but we definitely want to not go overly campy."
Judging by the pilot episode, however, Horta and Co. are having some trouble not getting overly campy. "The Chronicle" is more a goof than a scare.
The premise is clever, if not completely original. Tucker Burns (Chad Willett), a young, earnest reporter with a checkered past, can't get a job with a legitimate news organization so he's forced to go to work for the supermarket tabloid the Chronicle, which trades in UFOs, aliens, monsters and freaks.
Horta said the inspiration for the show was the real supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News.
"In the dark days before the Internet, I would look forward every week to getting these newspapers," he said. "I knew it wasn't true, but I would think — what if? What if Bat Boy was really around? I want to meet him. I want to hang out with him. So that was really the inspiration."
So it's no coincidence that the Chronicle employs Pig Boy (Curtis Armstrong), who really is a pig boy. And reporter Grace Hall (Rena Sofer) works for the tabloid. She has so often graced its cover because she has been abducted by aliens half a dozen times that she can't get a job anywhere else.
The cast also includes Reno Wilson, who plays photographer Wes Freewald, and Jon Polito ("Homicide: Life On the Street"), who plays crusty editor Donald Stern.
"I love genre stuff," Horta said. "I love horror movies, science fiction. And I really wanted to do something that was different than what was out there.
"I think that sort of dark, dour 'X-Files' terrain has been covered many times over, and we sort of wanted to go a different route — do the anti-'X-Files.' We already know the truth is out there, so let's move on and have some fun with it and do things we haven't seen before."
But "The Chronicle" doesn't seem that original. Nor is the pilot as scary as Horta intended, despite the presence of a monster dubbed the Brooklyn Bloodsucker and the producer's insistence that, "We want to make sure these characters are in true danger and peril — even if the circumstances are outrageous, we feel like they are truly in danger."
"The Chronicle" looks less like "X-Files" than it does "Men in Black." At times, the similarities seem more than coincidental.
"We like to say it's 'Mod Squad' meets 'Men in Black,' " Sofer said.
"It's the story within 'Men in Black,' I would say, because our type of publication is where the 'Men in Black' get all their information from," Wilson said.
Actually, that seems pretty much true.
The Sci Fi Channel has ordered 13 episodes of the show, which was originally developed for NBC. Whether the premise will develop into something that holds up week after week remains to be seen.
"We're going to be covering every aspect of the supernatural," Horta said. "The terrain is sort of familiar . . . but we're going to do it in a way you haven't seen before.
"If it's a haunted house, you better believe it's not going to be on top an an ancient burial ground. We're not going to do it that way. It is going to be something you have not seen before. It's going to be a great ride. It's going to be fun."
Well, it certainly looks like it's going to be goofy.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com