I remember watching a very ...

Question: I remember watching a very short-lived show (it might even have been only a two-hour pilot) about a planet that had one half permanently in the dark and one have permanently in the light. Do you know the name of this show? Thanks.

Answer: You're thinking of Fox's White Dwarf, a two-hour pilot produced by Bruce Wagner (Wild Palms) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now Redux, etc.) which originally aired May 1995 and never made it to series.

In what The Los Angeles Times termed "a sort of Willow meets ER set in the time of Star Wars, Neal McDonough starred as a young doctor from Earth who traveled to the planet Rusta in the year 3040 to study the ways of a mystical healer (Sounder's Paul Winfield). As you say, Rusta was split into daytime and nighttime halves because the planet didn't spin, and the two sides were locked in a centuries-old civil war. Among the other Rustic inhabitants the doctor met were the healer's nurse (CCH Pounder), a shape-shifting boy (Joey Andrews), a fish-headed monk (Chip Heller) and a dark-side princess (Ele Keats).

Fans of the sci-fi/fantasy genre had high hopes for White Dwarf, but unfortunately critics thought it added up to all flash and little substance. TV Guide critic Paul Droesch wrote: "A muddy sci-fi parable of who-knows-what... it is visually arresting with its mix and match of historical eras (the Middle Ages to the '40s), but it doesn't have a point to make." (For a more in-depth review, see our movie database.)