The Tomorrow People is a show about humans with psionic powers – teleportation, telepathy and telekinesis are the main three, but there are others which crop up – who are sometimes considered to be the next stage of human evolution. These, more advanced, humans are born to normal human parents and are usually unable to kill. These powers would ‘break out’ in a child between childhood and late adolescence. There have been, to date, three different series of The Tomorrow People.
The original and, so far, most successful incarnation of the franchise was the British children’s programme that ran from 1973-9. In this series, the Tomorrow People were in contact with a Galactic Federation, of which the majority of Earth’s population were ignorant, and were part of a larger whole. The Galactic Federation used psionic powers too, and some cast members would leave the planet to represent Earth in the Federation. The Tomorrow People operated from a hidden base called The Lab.
There was a reboot, a British/American series with a much more globally diverse cast, featuring actors from more countries, that was produced by Roger Price, the same person who created the series. This reboot ran from 1992-5, including on Nickelodeon, but was cancelled after the third season. These Tomorrow People operated out of an alien space ship in the South Pacific.
After the 1990s series finished, and before the next reboot attempt, Big Finish Productions also did a number of audio plays from 2001 to 2007 which featured a number of the original actors.
The second attempt to reboot the show came in 2013, with a purely American show. This series was generally rather more mature in its concept and had a much greater degree of violence than the original (although the original series did occasionally delve into more mature themes). This gave the impression that is was catering to the dystopian future young adult market, which was proving popular in books, films and television shows such as The Hunger Games, Divergent and The 100. The Tomorrow People in this reboot were, by and large, portrayed as being older teenagers, unlike in earlier series where the cast was often much younger.
This last series was purely terrestrial in nature, with none of the aliens seen in the first two series. The Tomorrow People had a hidden base, called The Lair, beneath Manhattan.
Of the three versions, this last has been the least successful so far, with only a single season being filmed before the show was cancelled. However, the episodes were longer than in the prior two – around 43 minutes compared to 30 – and the episode count was only slightly lower than the 90s reboot, so the total show time was greater than that of the latter.
There are some similarities between the series, but these are mostly the names of various characters and the three main powers of the Tomorrow People. Otherwise, they tend to be substantially different. Notably, as technology improved, so did the effects in the television series, although the original Tomorrow People had far more gadgets than did those in either of the reboots.
The Tomorrow People
The Tomorrow People (1990s)