The conventional wisdom is that you can't plan a cult hit, but on some level, that is what the science fiction show Lexx was always meant to be. As series creator Paul Donovan told me when I interviewed him last March, ten years after the show first aired, "I never intended to make something mainstream—with a moderate appeal for a wide audience—I wanted to make something that had a deep appeal for the sick-minded people like me."
All facetiousness about just who the show was intended for aside, the simple fact was that he "liked some science fiction a lot and hated most" of the rest. In particular, he'd more than had his fill of "do-gooders trying to save the universe in highly derivative plots."
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Instead Donovan "wanted to make a show that had the elements [he] liked: satire and a free flow of the imagination." He had "always liked the idea of losers in space—this was the core of
Alien as well as
Dark Star, which were both influential pictures for [him]." He also had a fondness for "black humor, whether [the films of]
Luis Buñuel . . . or the
Ichikawa Japanese WWII film
Fires on the Plain" or the work of Monty Python—particularly their film
Life of Brian. "With Lexx, we were trying to make a Sci-Fi show with that sort of black humor."
