In space, no one can see you conceive. That appears to be the weird but intriguing premise of CBS's high-profile summer fantasy drama Extant, a show put into play after last year's successful summer run of the network's increasingly absurd Under the Dome. While Wednesday's pilot episode (9/8c) of Extant (all that was available for review) lacks the sort of unforgettable "wow" moment provided by the severed cow in Dome's opener, the new series also seems less likely to lapse irrevocably into silly hysteria.
read moreIn the not-so-distant future, an astronaut returns from space to shockingly discover that she's pregnant — which wouldn't seem so weird if she hadn't been gone for 13 months on a solo mission. The question of what's inside of her and how it got there is the mystery at the center of CBS' new drama Extant.
Hailing from newcomer Mickey Fisher and Steven Spielberg's Amblin TV, the drama finds infertile astronaut Molly Woods (Halle Berry) beyond surprised and rightfully frightened upon the discovery that she's an incubator for...read more
It's been a long time since Halle Berry was on the small screen, but as soon as she read the script for Extant, she knew it was definitely time for her return.
"I had been reading television and film [scripts] and this was so well written I thought, 'Wow, I have to do this,'" Berry tells TVGuide.com.
Another huge factor? Executive producer Steven Spielberg. "He is the king!" she adds. "I desperately wanted to work with him."
Premiering on Wednesday (9/8c, CBS), Extant is about an astronaut (Berry) who comes home from a 13-month solo mission and learns that she is pregnant. And that's only the beginning of the show's bizarre mysteries that include strange occurrences while in space and her young son's theory of impending extinction.
"What happened? How did it happen? Is it my egg? Is it an offspring? There are all these questions we have to answer," she says.
Watch Berry talk about the series:
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